In a letter to The Irish Times a fortnight ago, prompted by a survey which showed that Irish holidaymakers abroad were regarded as among the most obnoxious, A. McShane described a visit to Egypt, writes Fintan O'Toole.
In a remote hotel, Irish tourists "engaged loudly in that Irish habit of 'slagging' by asking the lowly paid Egyptian waiters how much they earned and then laughing heartily at the reply. The fact that they were humiliating these men would never have occurred to them; it was just a bit of harmless 'craic'."
It is a deeply depressing image. It should, of course, be tempered by an acknowledgement that many Irish people are also polite and respectful when they travel. Irish aid workers, priests, nuns and ordinary expatriates often identify closely with the poor of the developing world. The old arrogance of missionaries who believed they were bringing civilisation to the ignorant has been largely superseded by a more modest attitude.
Yet the image of the Irish tourists laughing at the Egyptian waiters also rings true. You don't have to go abroad to experience it. Most Irish hotels and restaurants are now staffed to a great extent by people from outside the State. Some are students from EU countries, earning a few euro to support their studies or travels. Many are economic migrants from central Europe or southern Asia. And their treatment at the hands of some Irish people ranges from mild condescension to utter contempt.
When did we get like this? W.B. Yeats, in his last phase as a mad old reactionary, wrote of how "A beggar on horseback lashes a beggar on foot" and suggested that, after the Irish revolution, "The beggars have changed places but the lash goes on". It is hard to avoid the admission that Yeats's curmudgeonly view touches a truth of the new Ireland. In the wild generalisations of poetic imagery, we have gone from being beggars on foot to being beggars on horseback, dishing out the lashing rather taking it.
This is a profound shift in our culture. We don't talk about it. We may not even acknowledge it. But it has happened. Among all the dramatic changes that resulted from the 1990s economic boom, there has been a broad mental adjustment in the way we place Ireland in the world. Even if it is not explicit, it affects immediate political issues such as the response to immigration and the Nice Treaty referendum.
As recently as the late 1980s, it was common public discourse that Ireland was a Third World country. Declan Kiberd argued this position in his columns in this newspaper. Raymond Crotty, in his 1986 book Ireland in Crisis, wrote that "Ireland's failure to provide a livelihood for its people is best understood as part of a more widespread failure. It is to be seen as part of the Third World's failure to develop . . . Ireland, though geographically part of the West, alone of European countries shares the profound historical experience of having superimposed on its own indigenous, tribal pastoralism, an alien, individualistic capitalism."
This notion wasn't confined to economic theory. It acquired tremendous prestige in the study of Irish literature, where it became practically obligatory to discuss James Joyce or John Synge in the context of the literary movements of India, Africa or the Caribbean. It even found its way into art itself. The most popular Irish play of the period, Brian Friel's Dancing At Lughnasa, draws dramatic parallels between Ireland and Africa. One of the most popular novels of the period, Roddy Doyle's The Commitments has Jimmy Rabbitte claiming the Irish as the blacks of Europe.
More soberly, the historian Brian Girvin in his 1989 book Between Two Worlds, set out to show that in the sharp division between the rich liberal democracies of the West and the developing economies of the Third World, Ireland was an anomaly, neither one nor the other. He classed the country with Greece, Spain and Turkey. This sense that we did not really qualify as part of the rich elite of the world was widespread. To many analysts, we hardly seemed part of Europe at all.
In 1986, Joe Lee coined the phrase "sub-European" to describe Ireland's place in the world. It is a good summary of the general consensus in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Ireland was clinging by its fingertips to the European branch of the West, with its feet dangling into the marginal spaces between the rich and poor worlds.
We could debate, endlessly and uselessly, the accuracy or otherwise of this general notion. It did, however, have its merits. It sustained an obvious sympathy with the underdeveloped world, expressed in, for example, the massive reaction to Bob Geldof's Live Aid project. It put a certain amount of manners on our interaction with people from societies poorer than our own. We wouldn't have thought it particularly funny to laugh at Egyptian waiters and their paltry earnings. We didn't see humiliating badly paid foreigners as a bit of craic because we, or our children, were likely to be other people's badly paid foreigners.
Yet, within a decade, the sense we have of our place in the world has changed profoundly. What that change means is a subject to which I will return next week.