The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (48 page)

Added to this trend of decline in public life was the loss of moral authority by the Catholic Church, a process that gathered pace markedly in the 1990s. Details began to emerge of systemic sexual, physical and psychological abuse inflicted on minors by priests, nuns and members of the religious orders: gradually, more and more victims came forward with stories of regimes of abuse in residential homes and industrial schools and on the part of priests who were shifted from parish to parish, abusing as they went in the full knowledge of their superiors – all part of a complex pattern enacted and repeated over decades. Neither the state, guided as it was by a culture of deference towards the clerical authorities, nor the Church itself was willing to investigate these matters. As a result, the facts were wrung out with excruciating slowness: the Ryan Report, which set out in extensive detail the sexual, physical and emotional abuse endured by generations of children in government-funded and Church-administered institutions, was regarded as a definitive account – yet it emerged only in 2009, decades after the first allegations began to circulate. The Catholic Church had been at the very centre of Irish cultural life for centuries: it had formed a central plank in the country’s sense of identity, and for many people its moral and spiritual authority had been unquestionable. Accordingly, its fall from grace was profoundly shocking.

These stories of corruption, criminal behaviour and moral decline ran as a kind of gruesome counterpoint to the dominant theme of life in Ireland at the turn of the new century. The economic reforms of the late 1980s and the billions invested in the country by the European Union together provided the basis for the consistent economic growth witnessed from the mid-1990s onward. The presence of a Celtic Tiger padding through Ireland’s economic landscape was first detected in 1994: this beast remained much in evidence in the ensuing decade, bringing years of virtually full employment, economic growth rates of close to 10 per cent a year, overflowing state coffers and levels of investment in the infrastructure of the state that were undreamed of in previous decades.

Widespread immigration into Ireland replaced the systematic emigration of previous decades: young Irish citizens could now anticipate having a job in Ireland if they wanted one, with emigration now a choice rather than an obligation. Years of steady state investment in education began to pay rich dividends in the form of multinational companies rushing to locate in a country that boasted well-qualified, English-speaking graduates and good communication links to Europe and North America – not to mention extremely low levels of corporation tax. But there was a price to pay too: for example, poorly regulated development across great swathes of the Irish countryside and the startling growth of a culture of materialism.

The end of these good times was no less sudden than it was shocking. Although its onset was partly the result of the global financial crisis that struck in 2007, the subsequent turmoil witnessed by the Irish economy was largely due to home-grown factors. A real estate bubble had been permitted to expand unchecked throughout the boom years until property in certain districts in Dublin was, absurdly, among the most expensive in the world. In addition, the banks had engaged in an extravaganza of unregulated and unwise lending. The result of such activity was seen in September 2008, when a near-collapse of Ireland’s banking system was only averted by a government promise to guarantee all deposits and bonds and by sharp reductions in state spending: these measures appeared in the short term to have headed off national financial disaster, and Ireland, indeed, briefly became a model for austere financial probity.

Yet the bank guarantee scheme was itself unsound: the state was not, for one thing, in a position to offer such an open-ended financial guarantee – and the markets knew it. More urgently, it became evident that the weakest link in this financial chain – Anglo-Irish Bank, which unlike the main banking institutions had little or no branch presence in Ireland’s towns and cities but specialized as a property developers’ agency – had been concealing a black hole at the centre of its finances. The bank was nationalized and the state moved to establish a new agency tasked with buying up and ring-fencing the toxic debts accumulated by the banking sector, in order to release a renewed flow of funds and credit. The taxpayer now owned the toxic debts; and while the authorities claimed that they could be paid off in the fullness of time, it was evident that nobody knew when this time might come – or, indeed, if it would ever come at all. The scale of the country’s indebtedness was formidable, with the cost of bailing out Anglo–Irish alone amounting to some  30 billion, with the government as a result running a budget deficit equivalent to over 30 per cent of GDP.

There are certain specific cultural reasons why such a situation evolved. The history of Ireland had propagated a sense of failure and of inferiority, encapsulated in the forced emigration of generation after generation of young people in search of opportunities that their homeland simply could not provide. The economic boom seemed to put this traumatic history firmly in the past: it belonged in another era – virtually in another country. The ongoing moves towards resolving what had seemed an intractable conflict in Northern Ireland, moreover, served to copper-fasten this sensation that Ireland had indeed left its scarred past behind. The result was exuberance and genuine optimism on a widespread scale.

Ironically, however, the political and administrative structures of the country remained rooted firmly in this ostensibly banished past. The state continued to run along lines that were comfortable, reassuring, tried and tested: in particular, the power of patronage and of local connections ruled supreme; and a small political and economic elite, with guaranteed access to bank officials and ministers, ran the country in its own interests. There were other disturbing aspects to this situation: the long-standing Irish emphasis upon the ownership of property and the acquisition of more of it wherever possible, for example, ensured that – although the collapse of the property bubble was certainly foretold by many – enforced regulation of the market seemed unthinkable. And the emphasis traditionally placed in Ireland upon the importance of community was increasingly undermined by the understanding that this apparent boom had certainly not led to a more equal or just society: rather, as the elite became wealthier, so a growing number of people were living in poverty.

These economic difficulties led ultimately to the humiliating spectacle of international intervention, in the form of a massive financial bailout – approaching €100 billion – from the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Deep cuts to government spending have been immediately felt in the health and education sectors; and large-scale emigration has again become a central plank of Irish life. As the crisis continues, so it has become very clear that the structures of the state have responded ineffectively to these ongoing social and economic challenges. That the Republic requires thorough renewal is now manifest: the present crisis has underscored the need to create a sturdier civic culture, a stronger sense of social solidarity and a more accountable and responsive state; and it is evident that the country’s long-standing culture of short-term, patronage-based and clientist politics has demonstrably failed its people. In the years of austerity that lie ahead, it may be that this painful lesson will indeed be learned, and that a new public mood will bring about the kind of radical political and structural change that Ireland urgently requires.

Ireland has always been open to the world, its population from the very beginning bolstered, its towns shaped and its gene pool widened by newcomers. It has been a target of invaders and the pawn of foreign policy-makers; its harbours have been seized and fortified and its fields planted by new hands. The results of such actions have very often been traumatic – as the briefest glimpse into Irish history makes clear – yet they have also been instrumental in weaving the country’s complex identity. Ireland has donned the garb of many cultures over the years: its Gaelic kingdoms cheek by jowl with Norse city states and later with an English colony slowly taking root in the land; its post-Cromwellian Ascendancy estates living with a growing Catholic middle class. And for almost a century, two states in Ireland have been divided by a border that was once heavily policed but has now essentially vanished. Ireland has always been ‘incorrigibly plural’ – and, as part of a wider European culture, it remains so today.
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The consequences of such a history naturally take years – perhaps generations – to be fully explored. In Northern Ireland, for example, the ‘great sea change on the far side of revenge’ has not – or not yet – come to be: yet it is possible now to anticipate the development of the sort of pluralist society that has been so glaringly absent in the past.
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Across Ireland, indeed, the old pieties, myths and habits of deference are dissolving; so too are the certainties that have underpinned the past. As for what will grow to replace them, these decisions are in the hands of the people themselves.

Afterword

On 1 February 2011, the Irish parliament was dissolved and an early general election called. This development was not at all surprising, for in the preceding months taoiseach Brian Cowen’s coalition government had lurched from one crisis to another. It held only the most slender of majorities in the Dáil, with horse-trading an essential element in the transaction of parliamentary business; the relationship between the two government parties – Fianna Fáil and the Greens – had become increasingly fractious.

Ireland’s cycle of economic calamity was spinning remorselessly. It seemed evident that the humiliating intervention of the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank into the country’s economic affairs, at punitive rates of interest, had sealed the fate of the Cowen administration – particularly as the bail-out failed to improve the situation in any significant way. The real cost to the taxpayer of the state’s open-ended bank guarantee scheme continued to spiral upward; and spending cuts were felt ever more keenly in the areas of health, education and social welfare. Public anger rose against those bankers, ineffectual state regulators and politicians who had helped to spawn the country’s economic crisis.

Several massive street demonstrations had taken place in the aftermath of the IMF/ECB intervention; but there appeared to be – in sharp contrast to the situation in Greece, Portugal and elsewhere – little appetite for public disorder. It seemed that voters were prepared to stomach the prescribed diet of economic austerity: the results of the 25 February election indicated that they had opted instead to express their unhappiness by taking revenge on Fianna Fáil and on the cronyism, corruption and economic mismanagement it had come to represent. The party was swept from office, a once dominant Irish political movement reduced to a rump. The Greens lost all of their seats in the Dáil; and the incoming government – a Fine Gael–Labour coalition – held a super-majority in the new parliament. For Fine Gael leader and new taoiseach Enda Kenny – who had faced a challenge to his leadership only a few months before, and whose party had faced political extinction less than a decade previously – it was a sweet moment.

Such startling swings in electoral fortune, however, could not hide the fact that the choices offered to the Irish people in the course of the general election campaign had been distinctly limited. After all, one centre-right government had simply been replaced by another centre-right government – and by one, moreover, that had little room for economic and social manoeuvre. The new administration, aware of this unpromising situation, quickly implemented a series of essentially symbolic but important changes: these included (modest) reductions in ministerial salaries and the removal (for the most part) of the fleets of chauffeur-driven black ministerial cars and other perks that stood out shamelessly against a prevailing backdrop of economic gloom.

The new administration has in one specific way already set itself apart from the actions of all previous Irish governments. June 2011 saw the publication of a report into how allegations of child abuse in the Roman Catholic diocese of Cloyne had been handled by Church and state authorities. It might have been imagined that such documents no longer possessed an ability to shock: after all, investigation had followed investigation in recent years, each one uncovering multiple instances of the physical, sexual and psychological abuse of children. The Cloyne Report, however, detailed child abuse that had taken place as recently as 2009 – and concluded, moreover, that both the local bishop and the Vatican itself had by their actions enabled certain priests to disregard child protection rules.

The response of the Irish government was unprecedented: the actions of the Holy See were condemned repeatedly by senior ministers and by the taoiseach himself, who referred in the Dáil to the ‘disconnected, dysfunctional, elitist and narcissistic’ nature of Vatican culture. In response, the Vatican publicly recalled its representative in Ireland: ostensibly for ‘consultations’, but also to signal its displeasure at an ‘excessive’ response by the Irish state. Viewed in an historical context – the records, after all, are thronged with images of Irish government ministers kneeling before bishops and cardinals and declaring that their nationality at all times came second to their Catholicism – this very public divergence of opinion was truly startling.

There were other indicators too of a changing culture and society. In particular, the four-day state visit of Queen Elizabeth II in May 2011 was charged with significance. The event had been envisaged for years: with the signing of the Belfast (or Good Friday) Agreement in 1997, it had entered the realm of the possible; and with the conclusions of the Saville Report into the events of Bloody Sunday accepted in full by the British government, it became inevitable. Nor was anything left to chance, least of all the monarch’s security: from the moment she landed in Ireland and stepped, emerald-clad, from the plane, Dublin was in virtual lockdown, with the capital’s roads and bridges closed, its skies patrolled by plane and helicopter; television viewers looked upon a capital city that seemed to have been deserted by its inhabitants.