WHEN I was a boy, myself and my sister used to spend the summers on our granny's farm in Cloonyquin, a bout 15 miles from town. I didn't know it then, but that farm was a microcosm of a real economy. For not only did my granny rear cattle and sheep, but she also grew all her own vegetables and produced her own milk, eggs, bread, butter and jam. Only a very small range of the products consumed in the house had to be bought in, and even these did not involve expenditure of hard currency. On a Saturday night, the travelling shop from Bradys in Elphin would stop at the front gate, and my granny would take out a couple of trays of eggs and exchange them for items like sugar and tea.
Of course, even to begin telling such a story now just 30 odd years on is to invite, at best, condescension and, more likely, outright ridicule. Ah, but we were poor and backward then. Surely you're not suggesting that we go back to living in the 1950s?
It is assumed that the purpose of telling such a story is to invoke either a warm glow of nostalgia in recalling those less sophisticated times, or a cosy smugness at having moved beyond them. It never seems to occur to anyone that what one is attempting to do is make a rigorous economic argument. Time and again when I visit the supermarket, I find myself huddled in conversation with some fellow consumer in the fruit and vegetable section, debating why it is that it gets harder and harder to find any Irish vegetables. Sometimes I explain that it is because we are modern and sophisticated now, but they never seem to get the joke.
In the 1960s, practically every one of the gardens belonging to the houses along our street were intensively cultivated. Today, virtually all are overgrown with weeds. People who used to take pride in growing their own now buy foreign produced vegetables at the supermarket. This seems a small thing, but it is central to understanding what has gone wrong. The vegetable is both substance and symbol of decline. Moreover, it allows us to perceive how that decline has been dressed up as progress.
FOR we are not just talking about vegetables. The ethic by which the country, society and economy operated radiated outwards from the ethic of the vegetable garden. Out of the self sustaining economy grew a whole tapestry of economic activity.
Today, the upward spiral which this ethic created is in reverse, and the areas in which it flourished are in massive decline. At best, we lament that the modern economy has "left them behind", our most positive "solution" is that they be given a leg up into the "modern" world. We cannot contemplate that the modern economy wilfully destroyed them for its own survival, and that its all pervasive logic has prevented us from perceiving this.
By covering the concept of the self sufficient economy with a patina of nostalgic absurdity, we have successfully removed it as an option for modern living. The result is the destruction of diversity, autonomy and independence and a massive convergence of economic activity in the hands of the most powerful economic players.
The history of every town in Ireland reveals a similar pattern in the past 30 years the elimination of street markets and small shops, and the increasing dominance of supermarkets and large retailers, usually owned by chain store operators, and selling mostly imported produce. Over it all looms the shadow of the financial institution.
This process has been driven and buttressed by our membership of the EU, which has not merely made Ireland safe for the larger operator, but, with a dizzying mix of bureaucracy and paternalism, has actively sought to destroy the diversity of the economy by making life impossible for those wishing to operate to the old ethic.
The result is a whole society which no longer has access to any means of self sustenance. Indeed, "self sustenance" and "self sufficiency" have become terms of ridicule. Oh but we were poor then, they cry between snorts of derision. By what measure were we poorer? Were the towns of the west of Ireland really poorer when they were able to survive without compliment to any outside agency? Are they really better off that they have to wait for a nod from Dublin or Brussels to know whether they will live or die?
But surely, you say, reasonably enough, the economic indicators are better today than they have ever been. With growth levels of 7 per cent, how could we possibly have lost rather than gained by the process of modernisation? This is precisely the point we need to address, for the figures we use to measure our alleged prosperity are themselves part of the problem.
SPEAKING on the RTE radio programme The Tinakilly Senate two years ago, the brilliant systems analyst and industrial philosopher Mike Cooley made a telling point.
"Why is it", he, asked, "that if we grow our own lettuce and repair our own car, the gross national product goes down? Whereas on one of those new motorways they're now building, if you get carnage and a whole range of cars is destroyed and people are maimed and end up in hospital, the gross national product goes up?"
This allows us to see more clearly the meaning of the loss of our self sustaining ethic. We have handed control of our own survival to the wealthy and powerful interests who stand to profit from our continued dependency. They bombard us with analyses and predictions that inform us on a weekly basis that we are now much better off, when our own sneaking suspicion is that the opposite is the case. We are better off on paper, yes. But all of these things which made our lives better in the past have either been appropriated by the dependency making modern economy or discounted and ridiculed out of existence.
I've been reading The Gift of Good Land by the American writer Wendell Berry. He writes in his foreword that the core problem has to do with the fact that we now live in cultures which equate "economy" with "money economy". Thus, because we lack any other standard of measurement, "success and even goodness" are equated with monetary profit. One of the laws of this culture, he observes, is that "anything diseased is more profitable than anything healthy. What is wrong with us contributes more to the gross national product than what is right with us".
Today, 30 years after the death of my grandmother, we have reached a point of "progress" where the best means my own home town envisages for its survival is an institution for the incarceration of human beings. In the modern economy, most of us would contribute far more to GNP as prisoners than as workers. The victory of modernity over traditionalism can be measured in the fact that someone suggesting the building of a prison in modern Ireland is regarded as a prophet, and someone rabitting on about lettuce as a fool.