The Bus Will Come, Please God: Looking Back with Vincent Buckley

I graduated from Trinity and left Ireland for good in the summer of 1984, at the height of the GUBU era—that acronym for "grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre, and unprecedented" that was Conor Cruise O'Brien's brilliant synopsis of the Haughey government. The time of my leaving has more than a little to do with the fact that I feel no desire whatsoever to return, except as a Visiting Yank. Before reading Vincent Buckley's honest, evocative account of those times in Memory Ireland, I would have said that the Ireland of my college years would seem as foreign to those half my age as, say, Minsk. Now, after traveling back in his company, I am less sure that it is entirely alien.

The cover page of a recent Irish Times Magazine devoted to revisiting the 1980s sums up the period thus: "EMIGRATION. RECESSION. MOVING STATUES. GUBU. DERELICTION. UNEMPLOYMENT." Fintan O'Toole takes up the story inside with his usual panache, defining "the decade that sense forgot, when turbulent politics, moving statues . . . and even JR Ewing distracted us from the economic misery, social divisions, emigration, and Troubles in the North. "To his mind, "In 1980s Ireland, 'Father Ted' would have been social realism."¹ I remember those as dirty, dismal, tricky years. We felt stuck in, and to, our present. Buckley picks up on our sense of entrapment, drawing a parallel between 1982 and the atrophied world of Joyce's Dubliners (MI 88).² Looking back now from a comfortable life in New England, I can see that there was some quiet progress afoot a quarter-century ago, or I probably would not be where I am now; yet it was hard to discern at the time.

Two representative memories of the times stand out for me. The first is of a blazing hot early summer day in 1983, wilting in a queue that stretched all the way down Grafton Street, having answered the call to be interviewed for a couple of menial positions that had opened up in McDonald's. I do not know how many people were turned away that day, but we numbered well into the hundreds, and clearly most of them were far more desperate than I. My second memory centers upon a wonderful American Literature Sophister Option I took with Peggy O'Brien in my senior soph year. She did her level best to fan us with her fresh air, to shake us out of our learned passivity. She would heckle us with affectionate exasperation; why did we girls persist in dressing exactly alike (tight jeans, leg warmers, and ankle boots)? Why did we stubbornly refuse to engage in a meaningful class discussion? How could we explain—because we could not have done so even to ourselves—that we were bound by the leveling effects of the times, especially upon young women?

Buckley, like O'Brien, comes at us from the outside, and like her, he diagnoses our flaws. Memory Ireland validates and reawakens my memories, good and (mostly) bad. This book both delights me and makes me feel distinctly queasy. The delight comes through the shock of precise memory. Yet his account, his honest and unsparing peeling back of the layers of laissez-faire acceptance, is so right on the money, it brings shivers. Like all great teachers, Buckley instructs by example, and we follow him as he moves from house to house, landlord to landlord, Dublin to Kildare. What strikes him most on a daily basis is a paralyzing set of national characteristics, which he sees as operating together to bring the Irish psyche to a virtual standstill: anomie, fatalism, inertia, inhibition, self-interest, apathy, despondency, and aimlessness. The "communal mood" (MI 79) was not to enquire or learn about, or to attempt to address, any given situation—the non-arrival of a bus, say (MI 41), or the dreadful icy conditions caused by the memorable "Big Snow" of January 1982. Instead, he finds the Irish agreeing to "endure together, not to act together " (MI 79).

He does distinguish between the most extreme...