Partnership rooted in a goal to modernise

The single most important factor in the extraordinary growth of the Irish economy in recent years is social partnership. And you don't have to be a genius to see that the whole notion of partnership is in deep trouble. The nurses' strike, while it arose from some specific concerns, is also a symptom of a loss of faith in the fruits of partnership.

The flaunted wealth of a small, significant and highly-visible section of the community makes everyone else wonder about the point of moderation. And, most of all, the mounting evidence that Offshore Ireland never had the slightest intention of practising what it preached about sacrifice and selflessness casts a sickly light on the whole idea of trust.

Social partnership implies that, while everyone in a society may not have the same long-term interests, we are all in the same boat. The image it proposes is that of a potentially dangerous voyage in which survival depends on the entire crew agreeing on the destination and the course and pulling together to reach safety.

The reality, as we are discovering with more revulsion every day, is that, while the mugs in steerage were braving wind and wave, the new aristocracy was waltzing around in first class, only getting its finery wet when it spilled champagne.

It is hard, in these circumstances, to resist the temptation to scuttle the whole bloody boat. How can ordinary PAYE workers trust a business class which has been so unwilling to bear a fair share of the burden of change? How can anyone ask the relatively weak to be socially responsible while the strong can break the rules with impunity?

How can a Government act as the impartial facilitator of national deals when its integrity is so utterly compromised by the cosy relationship of some of its members to the business elite?

THESE are hard questions and they cannot be brushed aside. But the grim and obvious answers don't amount to a simple conclusion that the whole partnership process was one big con job. Just because the partnership approach has been used to deceive ordinary citizens doesn't mean that it is only about deception.

Partnership, after all, was not invented by smooth apparatchiks and sly politicians. It is rooted in a fundamental social reality: the fact that Irish society in the last two decades has been playing the same game, modernisation.

The national agreements of the last 12 years have been possible because, for all the differences between the major social groups, there has been agreement about one big thing: with a few exceptions, we all want in on global modernity.

This may seem to some people a very, very debatable contention. We tend to think about the last two decades by reference to the notion of a long and bitter war between a conservative, largely rural Ireland on the one side and a liberal, largely urban Ireland on the other.

This notion is given intellectual substance and emotional weight by the highly-charged debates on contraception, divorce, abortion and the role of the Catholic Church, which seemed to be fought not just between two shades of opinion, but between two cultures. Yet, from the perspective of the end of the 1990s, it is clear that those clashes, however important, were deceptive.

For what is much more telling than the fierce split in the divorce and abortion referendums is the relative consensus which has marked almost all of the referendums on the strengthening of the EU. When it came to the fundamental issues of money and the economy, what appeared was not an irreconcilable social split but a remarkable degree of agreement.

And what is the EU for Ireland if not the process of global modernity made flesh? When we are asked whether we want to be part of that process, we answer, again and again, with a resounding Yes.

It is obvious that the urban middle classes and what might be called the new working class (skilled workers in a knowledge-based, multinational-dominated economy) have bought into the modern project.

But it does not make sense to think of almost any part of Irish society as being resistant or passive in the face of change in the last two decades. Even small farmers, often imagined as the most conservative group in Irish society, have adapted to change in a remarkably supple way.

They switched to new kinds of agricultural production, took jobs off the farm, and encouraged their children to make the best use of educational opportunities. As Patrick Commins and Damien Hannon have pointed out, this ability to cope with change gives the lie to the notion of a demoralised and decrepit culture so beloved of American anthropologists.

After a period of increasing marginalisation, small farming families found ways to deal with the new world.

And if this is true of small farmers, it is even more obviously so in the case of large farmers. They also bought into modernisation in the form of headage payments and milk quotas, of intervention and export refunds. They may not have taken the larger EU project to their bosoms but they enjoyed its benefits so much that they were willing to take the social and cultural consequences of the changes which it stimulated.

Ironically, the one group in society which has gained least from modernisation and which has coped least well with its effects is the class which used to be thought of as potentially the most radical, the old urban working class.

Those who lost their jobs and their status when the traditional industries were wiped out by the single market and new technology are the one substantial group which has been unable to find strategies for adapting to change.

Their plight - most starkly evident in the miserably poor levels of participation by their children in third-level education - actually reminds us of how well most other social groups have managed to adapt.

If this is true then the key question now is whether or not we still have a common interest in coping with the process of modernisation. That question, of course, begs a number of others, especially that of who precisely "we" are now.

Any half-convincing answer must include a real and radical set of proposals for making the word "we" in Irish public discourse include those who have lost out to modernisation.

Yet assuming those questions can be placed on the table, it seems clear that the voracious process of global modernisation is going to continue and that no single class in Irish society can hope to cope with it on its own.

If the term "Irish society" is going to survive as anything more than a figure of speech in the new millennium, a shared response to change will have to result in some kind of social partnership.

That partnership cannot now be founded on trust or idealism or a naive belief in the good intentions of the elite. But it can be founded on a clear-eyed, watchful and hard-headed sense of self-interest.

Fintan O'Toole can be contacted at fotoole@irish-times.ie