GIAF First Thought Talks: A New and Frightening Home? with Fintan O'Toole

Galway International Arts Festival presented its winter First Thought Talks series on 30 November and 1 December 2018. In this talk, The Irish Times journalist Fintan O'Toole discusses his new book, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain, a ruthless dissection of the psychology and politics of Brexit. Fintan O’Toole is probably Ireland’s best-known journalist, with many books to his name and a widely read column in The Irish Times. Watch this video to find out trivial journalistic lies became far from trivial national obsessions; how the pose of camp indifference to truth and historical fact has come to define the style of an entire political elite; the redefinition of a country that once had colonies as an oppressed nation requiring liberation; the strange gastronomic and political significance of prawn-flavoured crisps and their role in the rise of Boris Johnson; the dreams of revolutionary deregulation and privatisation that drive Arron Banks, Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg; and the silent rise of English nationalism, the force that dare not speak its name. It also looks at the fatal attraction of heroic failure, once a self-deprecating cult in a hugely successful empire that could well afford the occasional disaster: the Charge of the Light Brigade, Franklin lost in the Arctic, Captain Scott so near yet so far from the South Pole. Fintan is introduced by Catriona Crowe, Curator of Galway International Arts Festival's First Thoughts Talks discussion series. Fintan's work has also appeared in The Guardian and The New York Times.