An Irishman's Diary

READERS may be familiar with Godwin’s Law of internet discussions: which states that as any online debate develops, the probability of a contributor comparing someone else’s arguments to those of Hitler and the Nazis “approaches one”.

There is a similar inevitability to discussions, online and off, about Ireland’s economic problems. Sooner or later, commentators – foreign ones anyway – will mention the Famine, either as a stick with which to beat opponents, or just by way of providing colourful background.

(On good-news stories, conversely, the probability of "pints of Guinness" featuring in the debate also approaches one. In fact, when discussing Ireland's fortunes, foreign journalists have a scale of reference very like that of the Hard-Black (HB) Index used by pencil manufacturers. At the happy end of the spectrum, they mention "the black stuff"; at the other, "Black '47".) Even so, I was rather struck by a Famine-related reference in the New York Timesthis week. It featured in an opinion piece about Irish bank debt, written by Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the IMF. Who, explaining to Americans why what is clearly an international crisis should have hit Ireland so hard, said this, "Many countries were exposed to the potato blight of the 1840s – it was a global affliction but Ireland was unusually dependent on this one crop (a phenomenon known as monoculture). The result was famine and emigration; the population never returned to its pre-1840s level.

“[Similarly] Many countries experienced debt-based property booms over the last decade fuelled, in part, by reckless cross-border lending. Ireland again proved to have something of a monoculture; this is the origin of its extreme vulnerability and an awful decade to come.” In other words, much as we flatter ourselves that we have an inherited folk memory of the Famine, we somehow forgot one of its main lessons. (There’s a well-known phrase that should also have reminded us: something about eggs and a basket.

The exact wording escapes me for now.)

It’s a bittersweet irony that 2010 – very much at the Black ’47 end of the commentary index – has seen Ireland export large numbers of potatoes for the first time in decades. “Ware potatoes”, to be exact, the strange-sounding phrase that distinguishes those for eating from the seed potatoes we always exported.

Ireland had a huge crop of the former this year, while much of the rest of Europe had a bad one. Thus, an old-fashioned kind of software was added to the newer kinds that contribute to Ireland’s still-flourishing export trade.

So at least we learned something from the Famine. The well-named “Lumper” potato – a monoculture within a monoculture, whose promise of quantity over quality had made it the dominant variety by 1845 – is long gone. Strongly blight-resistant varieties like Records, Roosters, and Golden Wonders have since replaced it.

Blight warnings are now an important part of our summer weather forecasts. And when this stock of hard-won knowledge about potato production is abetted by ideal conditions, as happened this year, we can feed the world. Or part of it anyway.

But if the ex-chief economist of the IMF is right, we didn’t learn enough from the 1840s. Our weakness for lumping re-emerged 150 years later, except that this time, instead of growing spuds, we grew housing estates. And it wasn’t just the peasantry. The lumpen propertariat eventually included all the banks as well, who continued pumping resources into the ground even as rumours grew about a bad smell coming from the fields.

THE ORIGINAL BLIGHT of 1845 is still with us, incidentally. Only last year, its genome was mapped by scientists, who now know that it is a water mould rather than the fungus it was once assumed to be.

And its effects are still felt too. In an Australian report on the genome mapping, phytophtera infestanswas described as "the mould that changed the world": meaning that it had created large and influential Irish populations in that country and others, most famously the US.

If our current crisis bears any real comparison with the former one, it is that it will also likely cause mass emigration – if on nothing like the same scale. Indeed, one of Johnson’s arguments was that, this time, it may not be just to seek work that Irish people go abroad, but in some cases to escape debts.

Mortgages here were of the “recourse” variety, he explained: so, unlike many Americans, Irish people could not just hand in the keys and walk away. On the other hand they could just leave the country, a path well-trodden by their ancestors.

But the main thrust of the NYT article was to explain why Ireland was so reluctant to default on bank debt, however crippling; or more precisely why our EU partners were reluctant on our behalf.

To paraphrase, Johnson pointed out that Ireland’s enthusiasm for property investment had spread well beyond national borders. German banks, especially, had lumped in after us, as had those of Britain, the US, France, and even little Belgium – now potentially exposed for 5 per cent of its GDP.

Thus, another Irish crisis now threatens to change the world. We may soon be exporting people again, as well as potatoes, but we could also be exporting the problem. The blight is global as before. The difference is that this time the lumpers are global too.