Live Fast Die Young Part 2: With the fear of authority gone and plenty of cash around, we're living like there's no tomorrow, writes Fintan O'Toole
As a case study of Irish behaviour, the ban on smoking in pubs and restaurants is deeply revealing. It generated a powerful blast of anger from publicans and smokers. It caused a rash of complaints about that odd couple who haunt our anarchic nightmares, Big Brother and the Nanny State. It spawned a mass of resentful rhetoric in which portents of doom were mixed with threats of defiance to the death. And it worked like a dream.
The vast majority of smokers have obeyed the law. The vast majority of publicans have shut up and adjusted to the new reality. Cigarette sales are down. A huge change for the betterment of the nation's health is underway.
Something even more revealing, though, has happened with another Irish killer: speed. Driving too fast is regarded by the vast majority of Irish motorists as a natural right. In a survey for the National Safety Council, 75 per cent of drivers said it was okay to break the speed limit on highways and motorways.
When the penalty points system was first introduced, however, behaviour changed, and drivers slowed down. Then, as it became clear that enforcement of the system was in fact rather lax, behaviour began to revert to type. The smoking ban worked because we believed it would work. The penalty points system has not worked because we didn't believe it would.
What both of these recent examples seem to indicate is a strangely ambivalent attitude to authority. We hate Big Brother but we want someone to make and enforce the rules. We despise authority, yet we crave it. We take risks we know we shouldn't take, and we're really quite glad if someone makes us do what's good for us. We sneer at Nanny State behind her back, but we long for her to come along and save us from ourselves.
A very good summary of this Irish ambiguity was provided in an official survey of attitudes to the environment in 2000. It found that the vast majority of us would love to live in a clean, healthy place, but that this strong desire has almost no effect on the way we actually live.
"Irish people claim to be concerned about protection of the environment and the problem of pollution, with the majority seeing it as an urgent and immediate problem. However, there is a public and private morality when it comes to the environment, with people saying one thing and doing another While litter and rubbish are among the biggest concerns at both national and local level, essentially Irish people are thinking one way and behaving another, with almost one in every two people interviewed in this survey admitting to having thrown litter. Not only do a significant number admit to having littered, many never complain to others about littering or help local groups to clear litter or remove waste."
The Irish problem with authority is rooted in the way in which authority was exercised for so long - through a strange and confusing mix of over-zealous authoritarianism and fantastic indifference. On the one hand, we had an obsessive concern with some aspects of morality, especially with sex. On the other, we practised an airy denial of real problems. Consumed with the hunt for illusory demons, our society was unable to acknowledge the monkeys on its back.
The great example of denial is our inherited attitude to alcohol. It is blindingly obvious that the Irish have had a problem with drink for a very long time. Why then, have we failed to develop collective mechanisms for coping with the problem? Partly because the problem was a national embarrassment, seized on time and again as an excuse for anti-Irish prejudice. Partly, too, because acknowledging the truth creates a demand for a collective response that involves an honesty and an energy that have generally been beyond us.
In his illuminating new book, The Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000, historian Diarmaid Ferriter points out that there were good reasons why Alcoholics Anonymous opened its first European branch in Dublin in 1946. Yet he also cites, as an illustration of the official determination not to recognise this obvious reality, a reply from the Department of Health to a query from the Department of Justice about the level of alcoholism in Ireland in 1957: "It is not a problem in this country ... fewer than 400 persons are received into institutions (public or private) for treatment in any year."
An official response in which the absence of treatment for a problem becomes proof of the absence of the problem itself is part of the mentality that contemporary Ireland has inherited.
The other side of this culture of denial, though, was a hysterical climate of moral righteousness fostered by the Catholic Church. The two tendencies were not as contradictory as they might seem. The denial of human realities - we had no drink problem, no sex outside marriage, suicides were recorded as misadventures - created an official version of ourselves. Anyone who contradicted that version - by, for example, conceiving a child out of wedlock - was horribly abnormal and could be repressed with astonishing cruelty. We developed a strange culture in which people were rigorously scrutinised and morally policed and yet huge aspects of their lives were officially invisible.
These social structures left little room for either personal responsibility or civic morality. Conformity was enforced through fear, and the idea of personal ethical choice was viewed with deep suspicion. The laws of Church and State could be faithfully obeyed or slyly evaded. Either way, they were something outside ourselves. What mattered was that we declared our allegiance to them. Being good was a matter of believing in the right things, not of doing the right things.
Voting against abortion was vastly more important than tackling the causes of unwanted pregnancies. Banning divorce was much more important than having decent marriages. Huge gaps opened up between what we believed and what we did, and we filled them with denial and hypocrisy. By the beginning of the 21st century, even these tried and trusted materials couldn't fill them anymore.
The bewildering disjunction between attitudes and behaviour is perhaps most obvious when it comes to sex. The most recent version of the European Values Study showed Ireland as the western European society least tolerant of both casual sex and underage sex.
And yet, at the same time as the surveys for that study were being done, a large-scale study of post-primary pupils in the Galway area was finding that 21 per cent of them were already sexually active and that the mean age for beginning their sex lives was 15. Most of them were completely unaware of the risk of AIDS. It is likely that prevailing social attitudes don't make them less inclined to have sex, but simply make it less likely that they will have sex responsibly.
The persistence of the notion that it is better to take spontaneous risks than to take responsibility for behaviour that is officially disapproved of is obvious in the recent Crisis Pregnancy Agency study. Nearly a quarter of participants (23 per cent) agreed that if a woman carries condoms while not in a relationship, it gives the message that she is looking for sex or is "easy". For many, it is still more moral to get drunk and have unplanned sex than it is to think about having sex in advance and protect yourself (and your partner) from the risks.
Even in simpler areas of life, we have the same disconnection between what we think and what we do. Most of us are now aware that a big field of risk in our lives is eating badly and taking too little exercise. At any one time, about a third of Irish people are on diets. In one major study, 62 per cent of Irish people said they make a conscious effort to eat a healthy diet and 81 per cent felt that taking a reasonable amount of exercise is a good thing. Yet, a large majority of the Irish population does not follow the standard recommendations for a healthy diet and the average amountof time we spend each week exercising is 1.3 hours, compared with an average of 18.7 hours slumped in front of the television. Forty per cent of us skip breakfast, 30 per cent skip lunch, and 20 per cent of those who do have a lunch confess that it consists of crisps, chocolate and a fizzy drink. Not surprisingly, 56 per cent of Irish males and 39 per cent of Irish females are overweight or obese, and we are storing up huge health problems for our collective futures.
The recklessness of Irish behaviour is to some extent, therefore, an inheritance from the past. We have long been addicted to escapism. Diarmaid Ferriter points to a study of expenditure in 1958 which found that the average Irish household spent eight per cent of its income on alcohol and the same amount on tobacco, meaning that almost half of what was spent on food was spent on stimulants. In the meantime, perhaps, the only great change is that the limits that existed in 1958 have been pushed back. The two big restraints - fear of authority and lack of disposable income - have been lifted.
What all the changes have not created is a general feeling that we are in control of our own lives. The process of change itself has been driven from the outside: foreign investment creating our industries, new technologies suddenly arriving to shape our destinies, the EU engineering our transition to modernity, the European Court forcing us to liberalise our laws. The internal process of moving from a religious moral framework to a secular one hasn't happened in any organic way. Change feels like something that has happened to us rather than something we have caused. And without a feeling of control, a sense that our destiny is in our own hands, it is very hard to generate a sense of responsibility.
The closing of the gap between our illusions and our realities has, meanwhile, left us utterly disillusioned about our leaders. We've gone, perhaps, from having a pathological relationship to authority to having almost none at all. We now trust almost nobody to set the rules. The 2004 version of the Diageo/Amárach Consulting study on quality of life in Ireland found a continuing collapse of trust in all the major institutions. The percentage that trusts the Church "a great deal" to be "honest and fair" has halved even in the last three years to a pitiful nine per cent. The figures for the Garda are only slightly better and those for the legal system, the health service, the media and the Government are even worse.
We may, as the smoking ban has shown, still want someone to make us do what's good for us, but if we don't trust the Church, the State or the professional experts, who is that someone going to be? It may well be that Irish people in general won't learn to be more socially and personally responsible until the institutions they used to trust start to show themselves worthy of respect.
If the supposed leaders of society put their own short-term interests ahead of that society's long-term interests, is it any wonder that so many citizens do the same? If self-gratification, whatever the consequences, is the governing ethic of so much of the elite, is it really surprising that most of us fail to remember that actions have consequences?
