We are in a different world in 2024. The political context has changed, but the bigger issue is that so has our culture. The riot in Dublin on November 23rd crystallised a reordering of the national agenda. It poured on to the streets what had been sporadic, subjugated or confined to social media. The string of events is well recited, but the underlying shift is less examined.
The concerns and prejudice boiling over in small towns and usually less prosperous suburbs over the arrival of asylum seekers marks the end of an era. Ireland’s narrative since the 1990s rhymed with western self-confidence after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The world seemed an open prairie for globalisation and liberal democracy. It turned out it wasn’t so in Russia, Afghanistan, or Iraq, but those realisations lay in the future and their consequences seemed far away from Ireland.
Politics, once an infinite game with endless horizons, is now increasingly a zero-sum contest seeking only tactical advantage, with little thought for ultimate objectives or a bigger picture. The coalition of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in Government is a failure of nerve and a realisation that their conflicting but substantially shared narrative of the State no longer contained real tension, and certainly not enough to allow them to continue to stand apart.
In the Belfast Agreement in 1998 we achieved, in a partnership of previously irreconcilable forces, a historic entente. It was emblematic of a country not only at peace but increasingly prosperous and outward-looking. Globalisation was good for Ireland. The end of emigration and the beginning of immigration was the biggest change in the Irish story since the Famine.
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In tandem the reputational collapse of the Catholic Church fed righteous self-belief in a society throwing out the old for the new. Partition insulated the Republic from responsibility for what happened in the North. Turning on the church, which had done our bidding as much as we ever did its, allowed the past to be instantly partitioned into another country to where we extradited responsibility. Free of history, which we had politically mastered and morally expunged, we arrived into a sunlit upland of peace, prosperity and secular piousness. The céad mile fáilte for others became a great welcome for ourselves.
Prosperity stuttered embarrassingly during the economic crash, but liberal values reached new heights in referendums on same-sex marriage and abortion. Now we have a politics that at times resembles vigilante justice. There is a tribalism, a culture of indignation and a waiting to be offended, all the better to push back. This neither began with nor is particular to the politics of protest besieging asylum seekers, but it is emblematic of what is happening, and illustrates a changed culture where life experience is narrowing to the like-minded.
The State was partly unfilled fantasy about the recreation of a Gaelic Ireland. In fact it was no revolution at all, but instead a programme of continuity in which the spoils went to the peasant proprietors who won the Land War. And, in the Parnell split mandated at the ballot box, the Catholic Church was the godly arbiter of its own newfound respectability.
When the language of colonisation and plantation is used outside accommodation centres for refugees and online, some hear evil. I see banality. Few would still have a foothold here if, over the generations, most of their own families had not emigrated to leave room for them. History is a story of migration, and of the insecurity of those left behind. There was genuine regret in most houses as the cycle of emigration continued over generations. There was also relief that the little left did not have to be shared any further. There was less regret and no remorse when miscreants, mainly women, were othered and institutionalised on an industrial scale.
We are good at this, and we know how to do it. This is a country that never replaced the church as a provider of social services and where those who shout loudest for more resources invariably refuse to pay more taxes. It is a post-colonial State, partially planted itself, but which did more than any other constituent part of the British empire, before and after independence, to colonise and convert the world.
The void, between a past we thought we had discarded and the new identity we swaggered in, is responsibility. We could, in a grand gesture, throw our doors open to white, Christian, Ukrainians. As it happened we had literally about a hundred thousand welcomes and then the open hand started to close. But in a politics in which the farthest horizon is the next news cycle, Ministers around the Cabinet table, and the Department of Housing specifically, refused to engage in responsibility for what should be a national project. Instead, the Department of Integration alone faced improbable odds in an impossible time frame.
This is a medium-sized infrastructure project at best, with administrative add-ons that mainly lead back to the Department of Justice. Instead it has become a poisoned pill for our politics. The toxicity is a culture where, the grease of new money notwithstanding, there is less confidence and tolerance after all. It is time for confidence now and effective delivery by an administratively cohesive government. We can expunge the ghosts of those we put out and put away and become who we said we are.