I have been reading a lot about economics recently. In an effort to understand, I suppose, how exactly the financial crisis (ongoing) came about, and what it means for the way we do things, and whether the way we do things might conceivably change, be changed, fundamentally, for the better. I imagine this is pretty common thinking at the moment. As is the realisation (new for many) that the way we do things is actually the way things are done to us. Your wages, your rent or the cost of your mortgage, your savings or your debt, the food you can afford to put on the table, the education of your children and the welfare of your elderly, the quality of your surroundings and your life, the chance of you getting a job, what you live on while unemployed, where you live, the portion of your taxes spent on killing people or on allowing others to get away without paying tax, the treatment you can expect if you become ill, the assumptions made in your name about what it is you value, the bonuses, the pay offs, the deals, the theft – the killing and the theft – all of these things are done to you by other people. They are not natural inevitable forces beyond anyone’s control. Behind each and every one of them lies a series of decisions, ideologically based, taken by a tiny group of people whose interest lies in obscuring the fact of their own power, and who spend a lot of energy getting you and I to look elsewhere in anger – at each other for example. The great opportunity that the financial crisis offers us is that of training our gaze on the man behind the curtain. That little shit. Look at him. Let’s kill him. Let’s kick his fucking head in.
This is why I am a novelist and not a journalist. I have anger issues.
Anyway. One of Ireland’s most famous journalists, Fintan O’Toole, has spent a couple of decades writing eloquently about the nonsensical and deeply corrupted way in which the state of Ireland is organised and run. In recent years, mainly through his pieces in the Irish Times, he has precisely and with passion detailed the catastrophic behaviour of the banks and their property developer clients who have run Ireland for their own benefit, and the craven stupidity of a whole generation of politicians whose self regard and incompetence has facilitated them. The economic crisis (ongoing) in Ireland is bigger, more profound, more terrifying, more absolute and more revealing of the perpetrators than it is in most other places. Ireland’s ‘elite’ has left the country bankrupt and shattered, and probably – for many of its current school and university leavers – uninhabitable.
In the last couple of years O’Toole has written two really quite remarkable books – Ship Of Fools and Enough Is Enough . Ship Of Fools documents, in all its astonishing and depressing absurdity, the apparent boom and definite bust of the Irish economy. While it took place against the background of the world financial crisis, the Irish disaster was really its own sort of thing altogether. What happened worldwide with the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the near collapse of the rest of the financial apparatus, and the subsequent massive rescue of this apparatus by governments, was a complicated, fine grained sort of fuck up. Technically labyrinthine. You can get a headache reading the details of how it happened. The Irish one was simpler. It was so stupid it could make you cry.
O’Toole opens Ship Of Fools with a juxtaposition. February 2009 – former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern addressed the members of the Honduran National Business Council on “The Celtic Tiger: The Irish Model Of Development”. Ahern explained how as Finance Minister and Taoiseach he had led Ireland to the remarkable position of being amongst the wealthiest nations on the planet. It was a regular gig – Ahern travelled the world doing this speech, at a reported fee of €30,000 a go. But he was running out of audiences. By February 2009 the Irish collapse was well under way. The day after he spoke in Honduras, it was revealed that the Anglo Irish Bank (a commercial bank hugely invested in the grotesquely over-inflated property market which had begun to crash in 2008) “had over the previous few years given €225 million in loans to its own directors, chief among them its chairman, and Ahern’s good friend, Seán Fitzpatrick.” In the previous month Seán Fitzpatrick made a speech during which he addressed the rapidly developing crisis in Irish banking by saying that the government should cut its spending on what he called the “sacred cows” of Irish society – children, the elderly, and health care. In March 2010 Seán Fitzpatrick was arrested for fraud. In September, the government announced that the estimated cost of the Anglo Irish bailout would eventually be €29.3 billion. Why is the state bailing out a bank that has no positive social role whatsoever? Because the Fianna Fáil government, in what is widely believed to be the worst decision made in the history of our malformed state, undertook to guarantee all deposits and borrowings for the six Irish-owned banks, on behalf of the Irish taxpayer. The worldwide con-trick of private profit / public loss was repeated in Ireland. But in Ireland, the politicians looked very much like they were on the right side of the deal. One of the factors that led to the end of Brian Cowen’s political career was the revelation that as Taoiseach he had played a round of golf and had dinner with Seán Fitzpatrick and other Anglo Irish directors not long before the bank guarantee was signed off.
What Ship Of Fools does brilliantly is expose the culture of political and financial corruption and elitism in Ireland that has been (a tolerated, accepted, even celebrated) part of the fabric of the state for the entire history of the state. And it traces the inexorable path that winds from localism and clientelism to the property insanity that distorted Ireland’s notion of itself and its wealth. The truth is, there never was a Celtic Tiger. Ireland borrowed a lot of money and Irish people passed it around amongst themselves like idiots playing three card tricks on each other. It’s true that the country went from being backward, poor and miserable to being a reasonably civilised and prosperous place over the course of a few good years in the 1990s. But then it simply went berserk. Ships Of Fools is – by a long way – the best account I’ve read of it.
In Enough Is Enough , O’Toole steps up to the challenge of plotting the path forward. (It’s typical of the Irish public discourse that intelligent criticism is always attacked with angry shouts of well-what-would-you-have-done-you-smart-arse? O’Toole takes that at face value and tells us.) The book goes over some of the ground covered in Ship Of Fools , but it’s calmer, more systematic. His basic contention is that we have never, for all our blather, created a Republic in the true sense. We have cobbled together an almost feudal state, disinterested in the well-being of the many when it interferes with the interests of the powerful few; a state hopelessly compromised in its relationship with its own “citizens” by its relationship with the Catholic Church. Above all he identifies the lack of any shared notion of what it is we are about, and what it is we want to do for ourselves and for each other. It’s a fragile trick of self deception that allows us to call ourselves a Republic at all. And that is most evident in what we have recently been through :
If we hold in our heads the ideal of the boom years as a period of stunning prosperity, we will not understand why the boom failed. More fatally, we will be trying to ‘return’ to a place we never really were.
The book is structured almost, you’d think, like a manifesto. O’Toole identifies five broad myths about Ireland. The Republic, Representation, Parliamentary Democracy, Charity and Wealth. And they are myths. Which means that they do not, in any sense that matters, exist. And he names five ‘decencies’ upon which a real Republic might be built : Security (by which he means housing), Health, Education, Equality and Citizenship. And in straightforward, clear language he lays out real concrete steps that could be taken, immediately, to move Ireland away from the despair and anger which currently paralyses it, towards a society of which we might begin to be proud.
And pride is not a minor variable in the Irish equation. There is a terrible hobbling concern in most Irish people about what others think. It was very noticeable over the ECB/IMF bailout. There was a sense of shame. A sense that Ireland had failed. Ireland has failed. But it’s failed for very specific reasons, and been failed by specific people – politicians for the most part. At the end of Enough Is Enough , just in case anybody might still need something more direct, O’Toole lists “Fifty Ideas For Action”. Most of them are, I would have thought by now, completely uncontroversial and should be undertaken immediately by the new government. Others are more nebulous. A few of them I’d take issue with. But these are 50 ideas I’d vote for. Number 50 is “Declare a republic.” There is something very stirring about that – a hopefulness, and an aspiration towards pride that any decent Irish woman or man will identify with. We have a spent 90 years being timid, diffident, half-arsed and stupid. Now we have a chance to start again. It would be a tragedy not to take it.
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Having been attacked and derided and ridiculed by the political, business and media gobshites who were the fluffers of the bogus boom, you’d think O’Toole would be in a fairly good position now to have an eager audience not only for his diagnosis of the problems of the failed state but for his suggested remedies as well. And you’d be right – he does have an audience, and a lot of (late but deserved) respect. But the audience remains largely passive, placid, afraid, and there has been little sign in the recent election or in the discourse since (that I’ve been able to hear from here) that anyone has really heard much that he’s said. O’Toole, sensibly and calmly, wants a new Republic. A new state. As the wonderful Michael D Higgins put it in his valedictory speech in the Dáil in January “The model that is broken should not be repaired.” In February, Ireland elected a new government, dominated by the repairmen of Fine Gael.
Which may be, in part at least, Fintan O’Toole’s fault.
Towards the end of last year, when Enough Is Enough was published and a general election was certain to be called within a few short months, people began to wonder whether O’Toole might himself run for the Dáil. As the Fianna Fáil government collapsed in farce and ignominy in February, he was silent. It seemed certain that he was going to run. And then, an announcement in the Irish Times, summed up on his Twitter account on January 30th – “Apologies to everyone who was hoping for an electoral initiative. I’ve never worked harder or been more disappointed. Nearly worked too.”
What nearly worked, it turned out, when O’Toole appeared on a late night RTÉ politics show the next night, was a sort of loose alliance of what might be called “prominent” people from various walks of life, to be called Democracy Now. (We’ve learned since then that they would have included economist de-jour David McWilliams, sportsmen Liam Griffin and Dónal Óg Cusack, and Shane Ross, a right wing ex-Fine Gael senator and former stock broker, who did in the end run as an independent, topping the poll with a huge vote in Dublin South. His views, diametrically opposed to O’Toole’s in many ways, were apparently to be accommodated in the new group with a voting-on-conscience arrangement, with the only pre-agreed policy being to call for a referendum on the terms of the ECB/IMF bank bailout.) Unfortunately with O’Toole on RTÉ that night was Eamon Dunphy, the ex-footballer and football pundit, ghost writer for Roy Keane and U2, radio celebrity, banal provocateur and general all round gobshite. And another one of those who would have been a candidate in the aborted attempt on the Dáil. The show turned to farce when another panelist, the political academic Elaine Byrne, made the not unreasonable observation that O’Toole and Dunphy looked liked “more middle-aged angry men, who are telling us what the world should look like and then … they talk the talk and don’t walk the walk.” Dunphy railed, accusing her of sexism, ageism, and various crimes against his dignity, and looking generally like he’d never been so gravely wounded in his life. O’Toole just sat there looking bloody miserable.
The reason for not running was, in the end, so undramatically prosaic and dull that no one I’ve talked to believes a word of it, and yet can’t quite rouse themselves into thinking up a reasonable conspiracy theory either. It’s just too boring. According to O’Toole there was simply not enough time. The election had come too soon. They couldn’t get organised to “do it properly”. Never mind that independents all over the country seemed to be able to manage it. The O’Toole people had jobs, families, these things are difficult, the upheaval …. and it petered out into a sort of mumble of the-dog-ate-my-homework-sir . It looked and sounded pathetic.
And so there was (with the honourable exception of the United Left Alliance, who did very well, despite predictable marginalisation in the mainstream media and – perhaps not unrelated – a fairly low key campaign) no obvious vehicle for the anger and resentment of an electorate finally waking up to their own terrible electoral mistakes. Labour damaged themselves with what looked very like a slavering interest in a turn at government above all else, with polices that drifted all over the place like kites put up in a storm. The Greens had facilitated the Fianna Fáil disaster for the previous five years and were simply unthinkable. Sinn Féin looked like a terrible mixed bag – opportunistic on the one hand, and, well, inopportune on the other. Fine Gael looked like they knew what they were talking about (repetition will often do that for you) and promised above all to be Not-Fianna-Fáil. As for the independents – and there were many – what was the point of voting for a candidate who would, if elected, be almost entirely powerless and unable to influence the national debate? A lot of people voted for them anyway.
So, the Greens lost all their seats; Sinn Féin did well but not well enough to overtake Fianna Fáil, who were reduced to what is probably the optimum size for a party that needs a good ten year conversation with itself before making a comeback; Labour did well enough to get them their prize, which was government with Fine Gael, who did well too, but who, in the circumstances, and a little like the Conservatives in the UK last year, should really have done a lot better. Perhaps the reason they didn’t is that people could see the plain truth – that Fine Gael policy is Fianna Fáil policy with the barefaced cheek taken out. The electorate has put its energy into punishing Fianna Fáil largely because it didn’t have any other strategy to put its energy into. It would be ludicrous to suggest that had Democracy Now got its arse in gear it would have ushered in a new dawn in Irish politics. But it could have dramatically altered the terms of the debate during the course of the campaign. And it’s not entirely unreasonable to suggest that it might have affected the outcome – probably to the detriment of Labour and the ULA – and could have resulted in Fintan O’Toole holding the balance of power.
I would have liked that. I would have liked it a lot.
Though reading Ship Of Fools and Enough Is Enough made me quite glad that Democracy Now was deferred, or at least that O’Toole himself remains out of electoral politics. While the Dáil remains dysfunctional, leaving the non-government benches – as O’Toole points out – effectively without any powers over government legislation or any ability to initiate any legislation itself, his presence there would be pretty much useless. And getting him onto the government benches would have been a long shot, and would inevitably have involved an ugly series of compromises. A seat in the Dáil would presumably have limited his ability to continue as a working journalist as well. And it is as a working journalist that O’Toole is most needed. The clarity of his thinking and analysis, and the calm head he brings to a catastrophic mess that prompts panic or despair in most of us, is invaluable.
And anyway, Eamon Dunphy might have held the balance of power.
If you’re interested in Ireland, if you’re interested in what’s wrong with it, and what might be done to fix it, then these books are essential reading. I’d like to think that in generations to come they will be familiar to Irish citizens as a part of what became the foundations of a new Republic. For them to end up as footnotes in a history of a state folding in on itself and failing utterly would be tragic. And bloody typical.
