Who can forget the scenes in April 2019 of Notre Dame cathedral fully ablaze against the inky midnight Parisian sky? The next day newspapers across the world splashed the photos across their front pages. This was an unknowingly prescient metaphor for the crisis that would beset the West (and much of the rest of the world) in the first half of the 2020s, as the strictures of liberal democracy would be stress-tested by mounting populism in a slew of local and national elections; as Russia would press into Europe through its invasion of Ukraine; and as a pandemic would ravage the social contract and leave governments exposed.
As the last embers of the fire were being extinguished in 2019, Emmanuel Macron spoke: “The fire at Notre Dame reminds us that our history never stops and we will always have challenges to overcome” (does he predict lottery numbers, too?). “We will rebuild Notre Dame, more beautiful than before – and I want it done in the next five years. We can do it. After the time of testing comes a time of reflection and then of action,” he added. The building seemed to many beyond repair. And five years a laughably ambitious timescale, even before we knew that Covid-19 would bring the world to a screeching halt just one year on.
And yet, earlier this month – on Macron’s desired schedule – Notre Dame reopened “more beautiful than before”. The interior is bright and its colours saturated; the extent of care gone into preserving the building’s heritage, as described by the New York Times’s architecture correspondent Michael Kimmelman, will likely never go fully appreciated by the public. But one of the great symbols of western religion, civilisation and Europe’s long history stands again – proof, says Kimmelman, “that calamities are surmountable” and that people will work to save things that will long outlive themselves.
It is not just a reminder of the power of citizens working “in concert”, though. It is a lesson: effort is a powerful tool, and stasis entrenched by bureaucracy and committee is neither inevitable nor necessary. The project to save Notre Dame did not happen with such efficiency and care on its own. Instead, French parliament passed a law exempting the process from usual regulation that would have slowed completion down (and possibly even have grounded it to a halt). As the Irish tech entrepreneur Ciarán Lee put it on X: “It is almost always possible to build things quickly. People just choose not to.”
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I am sure, just like me, your mind has wandered to the feted new children’s hospital (an idea first proposed in 1993!). And while we’re here, what of any plans to build a train or tram to Dublin Airport? We know Ireland is beset by a perilously hostile housing market. Plans upon plans and committees upon committees say we have to do something about this. But I cannot help but think of Lee’s universal truth: it is possible to do these things quickly, and for some reason we are choosing not to.
Bureaucracy is a clever mechanism for everyone in the system to avoid accountability for inaction on big and ambitious projects. It is the fault of an unsigned letter, a difficult civil servant, an old regulation that cannot be subverted, a truculent local politician, a petition from residents. Unfortunately these things will exist so long as the world does. Fortunately Paris and Notre Dame prove to us that they all have far less power than we (for some reason) grant them. We have to stop mistaking a total dearth of ambition when it comes to planning and building for sensible caution and rule-following. It makes the entire Government look like snotty nerds.
[ Ireland needs its own Joe Rogan, someone to question liberal orthodoxiesOpens in new window ]
A column on St Stephen’s Day shouldn’t usually be so wonkish. And, it is unlike me, even at the best of times, to care so much about regulation and infrastructure (I am still just about in my 20s – I should be thinking about things like Charli XCX and Virginia Woolf). But I cannot help be swayed by Notre Dame. The spectre of one of the great symbols of western civilisation ablaze moved me then just as much as its beautiful restoration moves me now. It is possible to save things. And saying that something is hard, or complicated, or time-consuming, or too expensive is all well and good. Fixing it – I suspect – is a matter of noting all of those things to be true and trying anyway.
I could leave 2024 in a similar vein to how I leave a standard weekday: despairing at Government incompetence, furious that my train to take me home hasn’t arrived on time, wondering if anyone out there is planning how to fix the cosmic ineptitude that has embedded in the Civil Service. But I do not feel any of those things (I am neither a pessimist nor a miser). Notre Dame’s return to life has buoyed me and reminded us all that hard things are possible to accomplish once we aren’t afraid to be ambitious, and once we are not afraid to look like we care.