Income levels have taken a hit. Taxes have increased. Crucial investment in infrastructure has been put on hold. Unemployment and emigration rates are high and rising. Students are paying more and getting less in their education. Cuts have been made to pensions, the minimum wage and social welfare. The rate of absolute and relative poverty is on the rise. Homelessness, which it was once hoped could be nearly eradicated in Ireland, is on the steep increase again. NGOs and charities are struggling; either desperate for funding, putting in place plans for amalgamation, or facing closure. The deflationary effects of ripping the financial heart from the economy will be matched only by the crippling legacy of another generation of under-investment, brain-drain and diminished self-confidence. But, this time, will it be enough to change us?
Despite Freud’s statement about the Irish being impervious to “psychoanalysis”, the reality is that professionals have long had a good picture of our character. The sunny-side-up public image is the fun-loving comic, whose light-hearted attitude to life and sharp wit swim in a culture of craic agus ceol. But the full picture is something much more complex, heavily laced with the influence of our colonial past. Generations of suffering, violence and neglect produced humour, mournful music and alcohol as crutches. It bred a contempt for authority that has lived with us today in a postcolonial Ireland, not as a desire to subvert the state but as a disrespect for its institutions. It made cute-hoorism an accepted occupation and the slibhín a cult hero.
It was this last part that most greatly affected our fall from grace. The Celtic Tiger was not so much murdered by dark forces or hate-figures we want to point our finger at, as killed by Setanta’s sliotar. The disrespect for the institutions we need to function as a society and the lack of responsibility shown by our leaders was mixed with the greed, recklessness and dishonesty of a nation drunk on its first taste of wealth and affluence.
We have a deep and significant cultural deficiency in this country. If our apathy about responsibility coloured the Celtic Tiger years, then our seemingly endless capacity for denial has been the theme of our latest era. The Fianna Fáil party were not planted in Ireland from afar. They did not make corruption, fraud and tax evasion our most popular national sports. The Irish people knew that this was happening, had happened and would continue to happen in our country. And we let it go. We made it acceptable practice for large numbers of our elected officials, business leaders and public figures. The brown envelopes, the private islands, the offshore bank accounts, the dodgy planning deals, the tribunals; the book of Irish corruption would run into many volumes. And in the Celtic Tiger years we simply adapted this to a new set of institutions, making ourselves the Wild West of European finance and bringing the slibhín into the 21st Century with a three-piece suit, a briefcase and a tie clip.
But the apathy, connivance and collusion that framed our political ideology particularly in the good times – when lone voices of dissent were cast off as begrudgers – is now playing a very different role. If the pronouncements of mortgage defaults, currency collapse and bankruptcy are giving us economic nightmares, then the most frightening political consequence of the collapse is the unveiling of naked ignorance. Very few can claim a comprehensive knowledge but the lack of even a basic understanding of the factors and events that directly contributed to our failure is tangible. The hatred directed towards the fraudulent bankers, the fears about our bonds, vague discussions about regulation and the criticism of politicians have swirled around the less-than-vigorous national debate without anyone believing that the nation as a whole has a good grasp of what is happening.
In the good times our apathy allowed us to accept a media that fed us the tranquilising drugs of superficiality and reassurance. Now society finds itself unable to articulate how we came to financial ruin at the end of a period where we were more qualified, more experienced, and worked longer and harder than any period before in our history.
This lack of understanding is mixed with palpable anger. People feel that they did not deserve this, that there is no justice or fairness in these measures. The mix of fear and anger with a lack of understanding is of great concern. It creates fertile ground for the peddlers of hate and division.
What has happened in Ireland is deeply unfair to those who engaged in hard, honest work during the last ten years while keeping their heads down. But it must serve as a lesson to us about our politics and culture: we cannot keep our heads down. There is a desperate need for a radical movement to reform our social and political institutions. We need a period of civic action and national debate of the kind we haven’t seen in generations. But it can’t begin until we acknowledge a harsh truth; we didn’t directly defraud the country through recklessness, greed and dishonesty, but our apathy was an indirect action which allowed that to happen.
“Apathy is the glove into which evil slips its hand.” (Bodie Thoene) The collapse of the Irish economy, and to a degree the Irish state, was facilitated by our apathy. This came to the surface not just as a lack of caring about outcomes, but as an apathy about civic duty, public service and the institutions of the state. All of this placed the Irish public firmly in the role of collaborators with the culture of corruption. There have been and will be many victims of this disaster. Let’s hope that apathy is one of them.
Moazzam Begg’s book “Enemy Combatant: A British Muslim’s Journey to Guantánamo and Back” is available from Amazon atwww.amazon.co.uk for £15 (€18). He is Director of the human rights organisation CagePrisoners, who can be found atwww.cageprisoners.com.
