AMERICA:All is not lost, according to David Lynch, author of 'When the Luck of the Irish Ran Out'
DAVID LYNCH, a senior writer for Bloomberg news agency, has composed his postmortem for the Celtic Tiger with affection and the detachment that comes from a distance of five generations.
By a twist of fortune or misfortune, Lynch's book, When the Luck of the Irish Ran Out: The World's Most Resilient Country and Its Struggle to Rise Again, was published here this week, as US newspapers reported extensively on sinking Irish bonds and the danger of recourse to an EU bailout. The mood was so gloomy that a participant at the Global Irish Network meeting in New York suggested privately there was nothing left to do but to send food parcels.
As the London bureau chief for USA Todayin the late 1990s, Lynch arrived after the bleak and stagnant Ireland of the 1980s which he wrote was "on a par with Ethiopia, on the brink of IMF intervention". He and his father traced the family's history to Ballinalacken, Ballyhaunis and Rathmore.
"The influence of the Catholic Church was pervasive. You couldn’t buy a condom. You couldn’t get divorced. There was this pretence that there were no unhappy marriages, no sex outside marriage and no gays,” Lynch recalled when presenting his book at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Lynch tells the story of Anne Lovett, a 15-year-old girl who in 1984 gave birth to a stillborn child in a field by a grotto in Granard, Co Longford, where she bled to death. Gay Byrne, who Lynch describes as “a cross between Larry King and Johnny Carson”, read letters from women who’d had similar experiences on the radio.
“It was a real marker – a sign that the society of pretence was beginning to rupture,” Lynch says.
The turning point was 1987, when Charlie Haughey, “a man with the charisma of a Caesar and the ethics of a mob boss”, became taoiseach. A fortuitous combination of circumstances – reordered public finances; the devaluation of the punt; European assistance; the arrival of US giants such as Intel seeking a gateway to Europe – gave birth to the Celtic Tiger.
For over a decade, “it was not a mirage. Ireland sold real products to real customers,” Lynch notes.
Ireland's economy, culture and politics advanced in tandem. The prestige of prosperity, Riverdanceand U2 strengthened the peace process in the North. But in 2001, "Ireland veered into a housing and credit bubble," Lynch says. In the US, the crisis was created by complex financial products that no one understood. In Ireland, "it was a plain vanilla banking crisis. They made dumb loans to people who couldn't pay them back."
Lynch attributes the bubble phenomenon to “the madness of crowds” – aggravated by the Irish obsession with owning land, “because of the history of dispossession and forced emigration” – and “cute hoorism”, which Lynch defines as: “You see somebody getting away with things and you respect them for it.”
During the Celtic Tiger years, delegations from Colombia, Croatia, Latvia and Slovenia journeyed to Dublin to learn the "secret recipe" of Ireland's success. Tom Friedman of the New York Timeswrote a column praising "The Way of the Leprechaun".
“Pundits are never held to account,” Lynch says.
“Americans had a sense of self-validation, which I was probably guilty of myself. It was natural to say, ‘Aha! They’re successful because they’re following the American playbook of weak trade unions and low taxation.’ That argument doesn’t look so compelling now.”
Lynch interviewed more than 70 Irish bankers and officials for his book. In September 2009, he held what he calls a “furtive” 2½-hour meeting with Seán FitzPatrick, the disgraced chairman of Anglo Irish Bank, in an empty condominium on the Liffey waterfront. FitzPatrick’s lawyer allowed few direct quotes to be used. “He remained proud of his role as an ‘architect’ of the Celtic Tiger,” Lynch writes, “believing he had helped create jobs and transform the country”.
As a writer, Lynch says, “it would be tempting to say that Ireland has come full circle, back to the 1980s”. There are similar symptoms: mass emigration, the EU’s recent donation of 53 tonnes of cheese, Marian apparitions . . .
Lynch is less than optimistic about the Government’s efforts.
“Saying you are going to do the impossible doesn’t give you credibility,” he says, quoting the economist Constantin Gurdgiev’s prediction that the Irish economy may not return to 2007 levels for another decade. But all is not lost.
“The changes in society are permanent,” says Lynch. “The peace in Northern Ireland is enduring. The economic gains are not as ephemeral as it seems at the moment.” When his book went to print, the number of Irish people working was still 70 per cent higher than in 1984.
Most of all, “the mentality of the Irish is different,” Lynch says. “If you’re an Irish 25-year-old today, the world is your oyster. You’ve got a university degree and speak a couple of languages. Nobody is embarrassed to be coming from Ireland.
“I don’t think the terrible environment can erode that self confidence.”
