Since Independence, Ireland has never quite believed itself capable of self-sustenance: that is the root of this crisis, writes JOHN WATERS
WHAT DOES any of us today imagine himself or herself to be worth? What is our work worth? Our creativity? Can any of us decide, on the basis of our remuneration, that we are engaged in a just and reasonable transactions in relation to our labour?
The truth is that we cannot. Perhaps we never could. Or at least it is a long time since we could, and certainly we cannot now. We live in a broke country, a country sustained by dipping into the future and hoping something will turn up. We are stitched into an international debt pyramid in which notions of value have been rendered meaningless. What it says on our pay packets is what it says on our pay packets. No more.
The dominant analysis of the present moment – that the past two years have seen the wiping out of several decades of progress, prosperity and confidence-building – is causing us to become yet again misled concerning the true gravity of what has happened. The belief that currently blocks us off from self-understanding is in the idea that we had a successful economy that recently started to go wrong. In truth, nothing in the living memory of our economy can any longer be taken for granted. We are lost in monetary space-time.
This is the fundamental truth of our situation. But right now we are not interested in looking at things fundamentally, but simply wish to see it all cobbled together again so we can proceed under the same delusions as before.
Thus far we have managed to reduce the implications of our situation to questions of management: the way the banks were operated, the political mistakes made in dealing with the crisis once it broke. But this crisis is of much deeper significance: it goes to the very heart of choices we have been making for several generations, choices made in pursuit of an easier, softer way to survival, prosperity and success.
This crisis cannot be spoken of or accounted for in numerical terms. It is as pointless counting our debts as counting our assets.
Our country has succumbed to an age-old disease spread by paper money, which by definition is devoid of substance. We allowed ourselves to be seduced by conjurers with hands that moved like rotor blades.
It is silly to talk about greed. Compared to what? If your country is flooded with cheap credit, what is the rational thing to do? When it becomes – if only theoretically – cheaper to borrow money than to earn it, what sane person would continue getting out of bed for a mere living wage? From where would a culture like ours expect to draw the wisdom out of which some kind of restraint might have derived?
Towards the end of the Celtic Tiger period, people would remark on how we had “lost the run of ourselves”. There’s a superficial meaning to this phrase, which snaps something of the madness that beset our country in those years. But we might benefit from reflecting on the phrase at a deeper level: the sense in which it conveys something of the way we became unmoored from any sense of our own history and capacities, until in the end we had so lost touch with reality that we imagined unexplained riches were no more than our due.
The awful truth is that, since Independence, Ireland, thinking itself incapable of self-sustenance, has constantly scanned the horizon for someone new to depend on, somebody who might be willing to provide the wherewithal for a half-decent existence in return for anything they might see about the place that might take their fancy.
If you doubt this, then consider that the only non-negotiable in the recent discussions between our Government and the international bailiffs was the 12.5 per cent corporation tax, which Ireland utilises to attract multinational industry: the thing we seem to value most about ourselves is our capacity to continue as a tax shelter!
Ireland has never respected its own resources, but has always given them away for nothing or next to nothing. If you drive around almost any section of our countryside, you cannot avoid noticing that almost none of the land is cultivated. And this, the consequence of our acquiescence in obscene European agricultural policies, is a symbol also of other oversights and neglects. Our fisheries are mainly exploited by Spanish fishermen because this was part of the firesale that enabled us to construct the vestige of a modern society. Our tourism industry is in the doldrums because we cannot decide which version of ourselves – traditionalist kitsch or cutting-edge modernity – we wish to promote.
Our present situation, then, is not some random happenstance, nor does it represent the destruction of real achievement by greed or day-to-day mismanagement. It is the inevitable outcome of how we have approached the business of providing for ourselves. Our present state of failure must be understood in these terms or be completely misunderstood.
John Waters' latest book, Feckers: 50 People Who Fecked Up Ireland, is published by Constable