An Irishman's Diary

INTRIGUING as the invitation was, I couldn’t attend a book launch last Tuesday by the Governor of the Central Bank, Patrick Honohan. He hadn’t written the book in question, I hasten to add. Even so, it was intriguing because, rather than the hard-nosed economic study you might expect him to be promoting, this was a collection of religious folk-tales.

Given the propensity for financial traders to analyse every Central Bank utterance and (usually) find reasons in it to be nervous, Mr Honohan must have thought hard before appearing to endorse such an anthology: typical of the stories is one about an impoverished household showing hospitality to strangers and afterwards experiencing a supernaturally- inspired upturn in fortune.

Then again, he may have reasoned, the book isn't new. On the contrary. Its author, the one-time head of the Folklore Commission, Sean O Suilleabhain, first published Miraculous Plenty: Irish Religious Folktales and Legendsway back in 1952, when Ireland was a very different country.

So in reintroducing this slice of folk history to a modern readership, the governor could hardly be interpreted as sending signals to the markets. After all, it's not like he was promoting another of Mr O Suilleabhain's collections: Irish Wake Amusements.Now that might have worried the Stock Exchange. And yet, in his speech (which I read courtesy of irisheconomy.ie), Mr Honohan did find parallels between the stories in the book and Ireland's current plight.

“Sudden reversals of fortune, arbitrary and lengthy periods of distress, mysterious strangers offering advice which is received with a mixture of hope and scepticism, and rewards for good behaviour – all of these are grist to the mill of the traditional storyteller as fully exemplified in this collection,” he said.

Perhaps wisely, he adopted a neutral stance on the stories’ credibility. And in general, his speech was a cautious one. In any case, happily, traders did not appear nervous when markets opened on Wednesday. If anything, in fact, they were bullishly optimistic; although it may have been entirely coincidental that on the day after the Central Bank governor raised the possibility of miraculous intervention in the lives of the suffering poor, the ISEQ index closed up 1.8 per cent.

ONE OF the surprises of the current downturn, for me anyway, has been the failure so far of even a single statue to start moving. Certainly I haven’t yet heard of any such sightings, which were a central feature of Ireland’s last recession, in the mid-1980s. And all right, maybe hard times and moving statues just coincided back then. But I suspect not.

The fact is that the statue phenomenon was at its height when the effects of the recession were deepest, in and around the summer of 1985. Conversely, with the rise of the C****c T***r from the late 1980s onwards, the phenomenon promptly disappeared. By the early 2000s, the only risk of statues moving anywhere was if a road-builder or property developer decided they were in the way.

There seemed in this to be the basis of a new economic indicator, like the famous “Hemline index”. Indeed, I would be be very surprised if some PhD student somewhere hadn’t written a thesis on statue movement and its relationship with Irish GDP levels.

If there is such a study, no doubt it points out that the 1980s recession – in the technical sense of negative growth in successive quarters – officially ended in 1983. Thus perhaps, like rising unemployment, moving statues are what economists call a “lagging” indicator. That being the case, it may be too soon yet to rule out a revival.

I remember the summer of 1985 very well for completely different reasons. Or maybe they weren’t so different. A still-recent arrival in Dublin, I was, like many economic migrants, intensely aware of my ethnic origins. And it just so happened that in the mid 1980s, Monaghan was quite a cool place to be from. In fact, for a time, during the spring and summer of 1985, it became almost painfully fashionable.

Within the space of a few months, our up-and-coming Gaelic football team won a first-ever National League title. Then the Clones Cyclone, Barry McGuigan, became world boxing champion. Then the footballers retook the stage, swatting all rivals aside to win the Ulster Championship.

The very zenith of this glory era was the All-Ireland semi-final, when our heroes held the mighty Kerry to a draw. That was of course in August, during which – by coincidence or otherwise – the statue phenomenon was also at its height. In any case, for a week after the drawn game, even the most irreligious among us were seeing visions, usually involving the Sam Maguire Cup. Then, in the first 15 minutes of the replay, Kerry blitzed us for 2-3. And after that, the visions stopped.

From where I was watching the replay, I recall the mobility of the Monaghan defenders being compared unfavourably with that of the country’s top-performing statues. In any case, the bad start doomed us. There have been many ups and downs in the intervening years, but we’ve never been that close to glory again since. And as another National Football League starts this weekend, suffice to say that the prospect of supernatural intervention is now our main grounds for hope.