Something is happening, as a result of the prosperity of the Celtic Tiger, to the demeanour of dissent in this society. It may not be bad, but it is worth watching. Attending last month's annual Social Policy Conference of the Conference of Religious of Ireland (CORI), I was intrigued by an element in the proceedings which has taken three weeks to focus on.
For more than a decade now the most consistent opposition to the dominant economic ideologies in this society has been provided by the Justice Office of CORI, spearheaded by Father Sean Healy and Sister Brigid Reynolds, in making cogent, irrefutable contributions to the national economic discourse. Annual CORI Budget submissions have consistently cut closer to the bone than the contributions of any of the political parties. The yearly CORI Social Policy Conference provided innovative and radical socio-economic critiques which, if we had been truly serious about eliminating inequality, would long since have found their way into ministerial speeches and hence to public policy.
This year, there was, I felt, a change of tone, which I sensed might have something to do with the national economic success. It was not that the conference failed to meet previous high standards in expertise or research. Neither was there any significant change in values. There was, however, an absence of eccentricity, a scarcity of the often breathtaking glimpses of viable alternatives which previous conferences provided. CORI conferences always carried strong overtones of subversion. Although the purpose was engagement with mainstream economics and social policy, there was a strong emphasis on values and principles and always a hearty welcome for eccentric views.
This year's topic was Social Partnership. The list of speakers was mainly unprepossessing: a trade unionist, a man from IBEC, two members of the National Women's Council of Ireland, the Assistant General Secretary at the Department of the Taoiseach and a couple of familiar faces from previous years. As arresting as the line-up, however, was the implicit assumption of the conference that social partnership is unambiguously a good thing.
THERE are good questions on this score which CORI has not been slow in posing. After its first decade, it observed that, throughout the recent period of unprecedented growth, levels of deprivation in Irish society had remained constant, the numbers of unemployed had not fallen, waiting lists for housing had grown and the gap between rich and poor had been getting wider. The role of social partnership in all this has yet to be fully examined.
One might imagine, in a society experiencing spectacular increases in overall wealth, that even without any great effort to utilise new found prosperity to eliminate inequality, this would begin to happen anyway as a result of the increased size of the cake. Such a view would clearly be naive. One of the things about Father Healy and Sister Reynolds was that they were determined to box the economic and social experts at their own weight.
In CORI we had representatives of the leading spiritual institution in the land seeking to speak the language of the economistic centre, breaking with the conventional tone and content of Catholic socio-economic analysis, which depended on piety and appeals to philanthropy and compassion, to develop a rigorous economic analysis which its opponents could not dismiss out of hand. There was a sense of the dominant ideology of the society being chipped away at by dint of a concerted effort at internalising its logic and concerns and holding these up to maximum scrutiny.
This year, the contribution of the two CORI mainstays, Sean Healy and Brigid Reynolds, was as inspiring as always, but there was a sense that their emphasis on values and fundamental ethics was now even further adrift - no longer just from society but from most of their fellow speakers.
It was never the case that Father Healy and Sister Reynolds were advancing a mainstream economic analysis garnished with Christian values: what they did was translate the Christian message into the language of the economic order. The problem was that economists and politicians, while listening politely, did not seek to reciprocate by amending their own language and perspectives with a view to reaching a synthesis between values and value-for-money.
Since the first spotting of the Celtic Tiger, there grew, at most levels of Irish society, an acceptance of the victory of liberal economism in the battle for hearts and minds. There followed an acceptance that only by bowing to the dominant ideology would dissenters earn the right to contribute further. Just as in the wake of the Cold War, when socialism went underground, thereafter seeking only to proffer surviving elements of its analysis with apologies and disclaimers, most dissenters gave up attempting to argue with success. We were witnessing not so much the end of history as the end of eccentricity.
Simply put, CORI's worthy objective is to maintain a voice at the discussion table so as to put an end to the perception of poverty as a residual category, i.e. something to be dealt with when the "real" business of the economy has been attended to. In the recent phase of the collective bargaining process, CORI has been seeking to have inserted in the process a prologue phase in which the priorities would be adjusted to put poverty on the table alongside the existing interests of trade unions, management and politicians. This would involve a percentage of growth being allocated to deal with social exclusion as one of the starting points of the bargain-making.
THE obvious danger was that the efforts by CORI to continue being accepted within the dominant economistic order would result in some gradual modification of its methodology and approach, perhaps resulting in the radical arm of the Catholic Church coming to accept that Christianity and its values are not capable of challenging the prevailing consensus, but must themselves be modified to maintain any questioning voice at all.
My initial sense at this year's conference was that this had started to occur. But what I was observing was more subtle. Talking to those involved, it becomes clear that, to continue engaging with the flushed nature of economistic triumph, CORI has had to develop dual languages to deal with the mainstream and the alternative sectors of debate. One language is required to continue developing radical ideas at the fringe and another to bring these ideas, in refined form, into the power centres. Father Sean and Sister Brigid have had to play an increasingly cunning game, recognising that while radical voices must for the moment accept the difficulties of arguing with success, there is an unprecedented opportunity to exploit the official half-consciousness that remedial action may soon be necessary to avoid some impending if unpredictable disaster.