A Darkening Green

By Paul Gray

THE IRISH by THOAS J. O'HANLON 316 pages. Illustrated. Harper & Row. $12.50.

Nearly everyone has agreed that it is almost impossible to say anything new about the Irish. That may be why so many writers, most of them Irish, keep on trying. English oppression long ago turned the Irish into sophisticated connoisseurs of futility. Trained to revere heroic martyrs, it is hard for them to resist certain vainglorious failure: another fling at explaining their inexplicable countrymen.

Irish-born Thomas J. O'Hanlon, 41, has an additional excuse. He left home in 1957 for the U.S. and is now an American citizen and journalist. (Nearly 10 years ago he became an editor of FORTUNE.) The outbreak of violence in Northern Ireland in 1969 and frequent trips back to his splintered country convinced O'Hanlon "that the Irish had become the most interesting subjects for anyone who wanted to understand and write about the flabby human condition in the last part of the century of industrial man." In 1972-73, he set up temporary residence in "dear, dirty Dublin," listening, looking and trying to remember why he left home in the first place.

Priest and Peasant. He is not indulgent. The book remorselessly records a people drowning in paradox and blarney. Smothering religious piety coexists with savage sectarian hatreds. The calamitous failure of subsistence farming in the 19th century has ensured the preservation of exactly the same kind of subsistence farming in the present. Blessed with a shore line that attracts international trawlers, Ireland has never launched a fishing industry. "Socialism," O'Hanlon writes, "is a nasty word in Ireland, yet it is difficult to think of a non-socialist economic structure where the government's presence is so pervasive." The government encourages undisciplined stock and real estate speculation. No law prevents politicians from voting on measures that might enrich them. The price of land skyrocketed 2,700% between 1960 and 1973, while the population remained static.

The Irish carefully collects statistics that many other books on the country ignore. Taken together, they only underscore the obvious: Ireland is a marvelously consistent affront to rationality. O'Hanlon knows this. What is more, he does not mind giving the things he deplores their due. In an exasperated chapter on the Catholic Church and its dominion over the republic, he cites Tocqueville's brilliant insight of more than 100 years ago: priest and peasant stood together against the common Protestant landowning enemy. Nothing that has happened since, including England's 1922 exit from the 26 Southern coun ties, has threatened that historic union.

Few church baiters are as fair to the op position as O'Hanlon. Yet he cannot help asking: "Is the quality of life affected favorably or adversely by the power of the church?" His predictable answer is that Ireland would be a better place without church-inspired censorship and brimstone bans on divorce and birth control.

Curiously, O'Hanlon's distaste for the old ways is matched by his distrust of the new. Ireland's energetic attempts to attract industry (and keep some of the natives at home) is described as "the selling of Ireland to foreign investors."

He says that he left Dublin because it was a sleepy, provincial town. But the city's recent building boom and accelerated pace please him even less. When such contradictions occur, the reader may feel like an unwilling spectator at a family squabble.

Intoxicating Malice. O'Hanlon's most controversial, heart-rending chap ter is one in which he blames the Ul ster savagery on the frustrations of Irish family life. In the Catholic Republic and the outposts in Londonderry and Bel fast, he argues, swarms of unwanted children bedevil hopeless parents: "Any body who lives in Ireland can testify to the absence of love in the average home." Fathers drink too much, then beat their wives and children with heavy, indiscriminate hands. Violence learned at the hearth is later re-enacted in the Irish Republican Army. O'Han lon cites his own unhappy home life ("a cockpit of hatred") as evidence for this generalized calumny on the Irish family. Insiders and outsiders alike may find his findings too terrible -- and a bit too pat -- to be true.

Author O'Hanlon fulminates be cause he clearly loves his former coun trymen and women. He is too much the Irishman himself not to revel in the ver bal excitement of Dublin life and its "maddening, entertaining stew of provincial chauvinism." Inevitably, his book is crammed with old-chestnut anecdotes, pub gossip "laced with the in toxicating ingredient of malice," and sharp observations. Most of these, also inevitably, take a dying fall: the slipshod car-assembly center in Cork that turns out "lemons (or limes)"; those ash trays proudly bearing the Gaelic legend, Deanta sa tSeapain (Made in Japan).

Unlike any number of Ireland watchers, O'Hanlon offers no neat chapter full of progressive suggestions about future pol icy. His attitude is finally a supreme, Celtic compliment to Irish intransi gence: the admission that nothing can be done about it.

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