OPINION/John WatersRumours that the Celtic Tiger, if not already departed, may be about to lope off into an imminent sunrise brings us to an interesting moment in the narrative of modern Ireland. The prospect of being delivered back to the place from which we catapulted in the 1990s provides opportunities for increasing our self-knowledge, some of which may be unwelcome.
Our national relationship with economics is like the one we have with the weather. Our fate in both departments is in the hands of external forces, of which we have no control and little understanding. Both subjects provoke much discussion but few accurate predictions. We find it best to err on the side of pessimism. Experience has taught us not to expect much, but we still get carried away at the merest sign of positive change.
Just as a sudden burst of sun has us grilling ourselves like rashers in the knowledge that clouds are not far beyond the horizon, the Tiger years spawned an unprecedented frenzy of conspicuous consumption which destroyed forever the myth of the unmaterialistic Irish. We have discovered that our past alleged attachment to frugality was just a way of accommodating ourselves to poverty, sour grapes disguised as virtue.
The shock of renewed privation would find us unprepared. The Ireland of the 1980s, with its massive budget deficits, crippling national debt and haemorrhaging population seems like a different country. It was. But because of our high dependency on foreign investment, it is not inconceivable that we could suddenly find ourselves returning to similar economic conditions, though without the social innocence of those times.
The present heated debate about immigration will seem silly if our own young people are again heading for the airports in a year's time. There is a degree of hubris about the assumption implicit in much of the rhetoric of the No to Nice campaign that outsiders will always want to come here. However, the discussion has caused us to forfeit the idea that we were entitled to export as many of our own people as we could not afford to keep, and still feel sorry for ourselves on this account.
Never again will Irish politicians be able to speak of "the safety valve of emigration" or declare that we cannot all expect to live on one small island. Our people may again depart, even in greater numbers than before, but we will no longer be able to claim national victimhood on that account. Being rich, even temporarily and largely as the result of creative accountancy, means having to grow up.
Another change which would undoubtedly follow a return to hardship would be a shift in our attitude to national leadership, which altered significantly without anyone noticing in the years of boom and bloom. Having staked his claim to political seniority as a facilitator of consensus, Bertie Ahern marked a departure from the old-style ex cathedra leadership represented by a line of Taoisigh from de Valera to Reynolds.
For all the mixed fortunes of the first 75 years of independence, there was a certain consistency to our political leadership, which was, generally speaking, geared to finding ways of proactively generating wealth from within. The Ahern years have spawned a new style - geared to management of good fortune arising from forces beyond the control of government. Mr Ahern's lack of ideology, love of consensus and much-vaunted affable disposition made him the ideal manager of the economic miracle. But we should not expect those who have excelled as managers of success to make equally good warders of failure.
It is interesting that this shift in the culture of leadership follows the pattern outlined by Robert Bly in his seminal foreword to Alexander Mitscherlich's book, Society Without the Father. According to Bly, as well as enforcing fatherlessness in the domain of the family, our modern sibling society enforces a kind of fatherlessness in the public realm, a condition first signalled with the election to the US presidency of Ronald Reagan. "When the siblings elect leaders," Bly wrote, "they do not choose a father-like figure who will tell them to postpone immediate pleasure for long-term goals, who says, 'You won't be able to do that yet', but they hire someone like Reagan, who tells them they can have everything."
This leads, he predicted, to chaos and regression, a narrowing of collective horizons to selfish group interests. It is a disturbing prediction as to the possibly not-far-distant future of this society, now enthralled by the desire to have it all today and screw tomorrow. The social energies which once might have counteracted such drifts can no longer be relied upon, because, ironically, the natural and necessary antagonism towards authority, inept or otherwise, is not possible in a society administered by our affable peers.