Politics continues, but no-one cares. 2008 finally saw the retirement of Taoiseach Bertie Ahern but he wasn’t brought down by an electorate seeking articulation of an alternative vision for Ireland, instead Ahern was force to step down over an issue of personal probity.
There is only one certainty in Ireland today: the political causes that once dominated political life are no more. This is not because we have overcome all of the problems – unemployment, exploitation, poverty and division all continue to exist – but because the issues themselves no longer motivate anyone. Politics has changed and no-one seems to have noticed. The public can be forgiven for failing to recognise the profound alterations in both the character and content of our politics – after all, our leaders seem to have been asleep at the wheel.
Popular republicanism is a dried-out husk. Parties founded on the principle of uniting the nation, Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin, now accept the North as a place apart, demanding ‘parity of esteem’ for northern nationalists where they once demanded democracy. When Bertie Ahern recently announced that he still sought a united Ireland, no-one believed him – or even listened much. (Cassidy, L. ‘Taoiseach supports idea of united Ireland’, Irish Times 6 April 2008) In an era in which Sinn Féin help to administer British rule in the Six Counties the meaning of ‘republicanism’ has been stretched beyond usefulness and parties which describe themselves as republican are engaging in nothing so much as zombie politics.
Ireland’s new-found prosperity, prior to the current recession, failed to fill the hole in the heart of Irish public life. Despite massive – if uneven – growth in incomes and a marked improvement in the standard of living of ordinary Irish people, we were told to tighten our belts. Now that growth is down we’re told to tighten our belts even more,
The spectre of economic uncertainty which raised its head in 2007 following the sub-prime crisis in the US mortgage market set the scene for unlikely tales of impending doom – ‘imagine the avarice of people who actually want to own their own houses,’ cried the complainants, or rather they don’t say it aloud, but it is the logical conclusion to the argument. In previous decades politicians told the public to tighten their belts the public responded by telling them the only thing that would be tightened was the noose around their necks – ça ira – but today when politicians and business leaders say we can’t have our cake and eat it we meekly respond by saying we’ve ‘had it too good anyway’.
With this there has come no growth of class consciousness. The majority of today’s, often green-tinged, critics of prosperity and consumerism are themselves affluent, rich even. Where in the past working class political organisations from the Labour Party to the trade unions sought a greater share of the pie for the people they represented, today capitalism’s radical critics seem to want nothing other than to shrink the pie itself and the share of the ‘lower orders’ with it.
The trade unions themselves, meanwhile, have retreated from their traditional role of winning better pay and conditions for their members are are now more likely to sell themselves to the workforce on the basis of ‘services’ offered. Partly this is as a result of entering into social partnership agreements with the government but it also mirrors a decline in union militancy internationally. Simultaneously workers’ complaints have themselves been transformed: where in the past industrial complaints centred on economic issues, workers are now more likely to frame their complaints in terms of stress or bullying. While there is no doubt that today’s post-industrial workplace can be an altogether unpleasant place, there is something significant in the re-framing of complaints in such personalised, and often infantalised, terms. Little wonder then that the unions havs so badly bungled the simple task of defending their members’ pay.
Ireland’s infamous domination by the Catholic church is also now a relic of a vanished past. Although legislation has not caught-up with the rest of Europe on issues such as abortion and even divorce, the arguments are more anaemic than ever before. So-called ‘pro-life’ groups such as Youth Defence continue to protest on the issues but no-one seems to actually be calling for free abortion on demand.
The Irish health service is roundly criticised by the public and the press alike but nothing ever seems to change and no-one makes serious demands for a genuine system of free, universal healthcare as seen in most other European nations.
The most striking development, however, is the growth of environmentalism. This is seen most clearly in the ascension of the Green Party to power in coalition with Fianna Fáil, long considered antagonists of the environmentalist movement, and is emblematic of the country’s wariness about wealth. The protests over the construction of a motorway pited the past against progress with many people, and most commentators, on the side of romance despite a country bowing under the weight of its poor transport infrastructure. The public face of the protesters, ‘Squeak’, reminds us that this movement is more concerned with preserving a mythical past than working to build a better future. This hodge-podge coalition of putative anarchists, middle class radicals, misty-eyed conservatives and well-to-do romantics presents no alternative vision, instead flatly demanding a halt to progress.
Abroad things have also changed beyond recognition. Anti-imperialism has been warped to the point where any militancy is directed against foreign regimes – Putin’s ‘aggressive’ Russia, China’s presence in Tibet or Mugabe’s Zimbabwe – rather than Western nations’ own adventures overseas.
Moreover, protesters hold the contradictory view that Western intervention is both positive and negative – positive in the former Yugoslavia as well as demanded in Darfur, Tibet and Zimbabwe, but somehow negative in Iraq. In the case of Palestine we can clearly see that yesterday’s call for solidarity has somehow morphed into demands for government to punish Israel. The difference can seem subtle, but it is not: the former sees Westerners standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Palestinians while the latter sees the people of the region as children in need of protection.
The Iraq war meanwhile spawned some of the largest protests in recent history with over a million people taking to the streets of London, for example, but as soon as the war actually began the protests melted away into nothing. That the crux of the protesters’ argument, meanwhile, that the war was in breach of ‘international law’ indicates how shallow the anti-war argument was in the first place, seeking the United Nations to stop the war rather than mobilising against it in a meaningful fashion. The legalistic complaint is, Slavoj Zizek himself reminds us, hysterical. (See: Zizek, S. ‘The Ticklish Subject: The absent centre of political ontology’, London, Verso, 1999) Where the radical of the past sought to overturn her oppression, the legalistic complainant instead turns for succour to the source of his complaint, demanding compensation.
Interestingly, the anti-Iraq war squad were often the self-same people who cheerled the bombining of Yugoslavia in 1999.
Lacking a moral purpose today’s political elites instead seek to govern through fear and so we lurch from one ‘crisis’ to another. International terrorism, ecological disaster, avian flu, societal breakdown, tsunamis and earthquakes are all exaggerated in order to create a culture of fear that gives politics the moral mission that it has lacked in recent decades.
Mini-panics centred on public health have taken on a life of their own with each passing week bringing us some new threat to personal or public health and well-being: so-called hosptial superbug methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), breast cancer, ovarian cancer, testicular cancer, listeria, necrotising fasciitis, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, cryptospiridum… the list goes on and on. The case of chlymidia is a particularly illustrative. The fact that the risks are much smaller than most people realise is seemingly as irrelevant as the fact that the infection is readily treatable and that the infection itself has little in the way of serious medical ramifications. One one level the chlymidia scare appears to be a beneficiary of the culture of fear but it also signals a return of pernicious moralising – the sex scare.
The business elite is no better. Drunk on the dogma of ‘corporate responsibility’ businesses hector and lecture about how their practices are good for the environment or the poor instead of quietly getting on with the business of making money. Today’s fearful capitalists mask their lack of purpose and wilful under-investment in the politically correct dogma of ‘sustainable development’. And yet, when caught with their fiduciary trousers down, such was seen in the the collapse of Enron and Arthur Andersen, no new political current arises and it’s business as usual – but without the creation of new jobs or significant capital investment. After all, in today’s ‘weightless’ post-industrial economy money can be created out of thin air, can’t it? When the Ponzi schemes fold and pension funds are left carrying the can business leaders and economist rush to blame anything and everything – the banks, government regulation, China – anything except, of course, their own failure to understand economics. Capitalism’s helpful critics then point to the dread spectre of public ‘over-consumption’, otherwise known as rising living standards and high expectations, to say that our supposedly greedy Western lifestyles are not only inherently toxic but also the harbinger of impending doom in the form of environmental catastrophe and attendant economic collapse leading to war and famine. Businesses respond by saying ‘Yes’, once again spouting about ‘sustainability’ as if the present was the best of all possible futures.
From the boardroom to the bedroom, the message from the top down is clear: it’s apocalypse from now on.
But the phantom of politics past cannot save us from imaginary problems or the very real tightening of controls on our lives. There is simply no-longer any clash of competing visions for society and without that the political process itself cannot have any meaning.
With 78 seats in the Irish parliament, Dáil Éireann, Bertie Ahern’s Fianna Fáíl party won a convincing third consecutive term in the 2007 Irish general election, that much is indisputable. Nevertheless, the resurgence of the Fine Gael vote and, most particularly, the collapse of the right wing Progressive Democrats have ensured that the composition of the new government is rather different from that which has ruled the country since 1997. Enter, apparently stage left, the Green Party.
With two ministerial posts and a junior ministerial position for its erstwhile leader Trevor Sargent, the 2007 election has seen one all-Ireland green party enter government in the Republic for the first time – though it wasn’t the one that many pundits expected – and so the question must be asked: why did a country then enjoying record levels of economic growth elected the Greens to govern?
The simple answer is that it didn’t – the Greens were appointed to the cabinet, not elected to rule, but to make that argument is to ignore the significance of the fact that, for the first time ever, Ireland now has an official policy of ‘sustainability’.
Undoubtedly the Greens would like to position themselves as antagonistic co-operators in government: the cheeky radicals who will use their principled positions to push Fianna Fáil to a transformation of Ireland.
In reality no such thing will occur. The Greens are not radicals and the transformation was already well underway. The in name only republicans of Fianna Fáil may be latecomers to the cause of sustainable development but it is the new orthodoxy the world over. The various Green parties dotted around the planet may have been the first kids on the block with the agenda, but it’s one that is now shared by virtually every political party in the Western world and whatever that means, it doesn’t add up to radicalism. In Ireland, the Green Party’s presence in the cabinet simply means the copper-fastening of the outlook that already dominates politics, an outlook dominated by caution and almost entirely emptied of real debate.
Radicals for more of the same
The Green Party’s ability to present itself as a radical alternative is rooted in a number of developments. For a start, the Progressive Democrats’ negative campaigning, encapsulated in the shrill election slogan “Left wing government? No thanks”, helped bolster the view of the then opposition parties as new voices. Just how anyone could view the prospective government in waiting of the unbearably dreary conservatives of Fine Gael, a rudderless Labour Party that is not much more than a photocopy of its British counterpart, and the Greens as left wing was not explained in any detail.
In fact, it doesn’t even make sense. Unless, of course, one takes the view, that the outspoken former Progressive Democrat minister for justice Michael McDowell presumably did, that being left wing means being interfering, punitive and anti-fun. Unfortunately, that’s probably not an uncommon view today with killjoy bean-counters and petty authoritarians such as London mayor Ken Livingstone being hailed as leading lights of the left. Even Britain’s new fat controller, the misberalist prime minister Gordon Brown, has been widely mistaken for a socialist principally on the grounds of how his grumpy gob compares with Tony Blair’s shit-eating grin.
More importantly, though, the modern environmental movement, of which the Irish Green Party is a component, has its roots in the counterculture of the 1960s. Prior to then, environmentalism was a strictly conservative and right-wing, occasionally far-right, movement composed largely of fusty aristocrats who were only too happy to keep the filthy proles walled into their grimy cities.
With the counterculture what developed was a radical, youth-oriented environmentalism that was able to successfully attach itself to the New Left of the day. Tied-up as it was with the events of 1968 and the Viet Nam war protests, the counterculture certainly looks left-wing, particularly today with our rose-tinted spectacles firmly attached. The problem is, it was no such thing.
The counterculture was in fact a retreat from the political realm that viewed the world solely through the prism of the individual – this was the era of identity politics as defined by the slogan, “the personal is political.” It certainly was an oppositional force, but a privatised one that was in opposition as much to the grey-suited straights of the left as the pin-stripe wearing squares of the right. And perhaps rightly so: the Soviet invasion of Czechslovakia in 1968 was an ideal opportunity for any slow learners who missed Hungary in 1956 to get up to speed with the idea that the Soviet system was as corrupt and ideologically bankrupt as, or worse than, anything the West had to offer.
And yet, in opposing all of the grown-ups, the flower children helped deliver the abortion that is the politics that we live with today: no hope, no ideals, just a narrow and self-serving view of other people as malignancies that must be kept in check.
The legacy of the counterculture is one of anti-democratic managerialism and a me-me-me world-view of narrow and negative individualism that breeds fear, contempt and intellectual self-indulgence. During the 1980s this focus on the self chimed rather nicely with the rise of the right and its focus on self-interest and the liberatory promise of individualism. Now that the euphoria for filofaxes, braces and ‘Wham!’ has been firmly consigned to the dustbin of history we are, in the absence of any alternative, faced with an altogether more alienating individualism based not on self-confidence, but fear and mistrust.
Even today ‘radical’ protest movements are focussed as much, or more, on the individual than on the issue at hand. Witness how opposition to the Iraq War was centred on the limp slogan of “Not in my name.” Front and centre we have outraged and terrified Westerners, not any real opposition to slaughter.
The same process can be seen at work in the various youth-oriented campaigns around third world poverty – photographs of people living penury are there for all to see the newspapers, but development is not on the agenda. Politics has become, in effect, a personal statement of lifestyle. Is it any wonder that what looks at first like youthful indignation can be so easily co-opted by superannuated pop musicians like Bono and Bob Geldof and their politician pals?
In fact, it’s pretty hard to even imagine a political party today that would share any goals with the left of the past, the left that wanted to see jobs and prosperity for all. More often than not, what passes for left wing politics today is a collection of managerial exercises and simple pseudo-religious morality plays on the vices of wealth and “excess”. Former British prime minister Harold Wilson’s vision of a country remade in the white heat of technological revolution would get pretty short shrift today, never mind Karl Marx’s Victorian optimism that saw the radical bourgeoisie as architects of a technical revolution that “accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals [and] conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.”
Instead we get pieties about our “footprint” on the earth, the personal penance of recycling and the spectre of carbon taxes and offsetting schemes – the return of Papal indulgences and sin eating. More and more, the correct approach to social and economic problems is seen as levelling down rather than raising up. This is why, whatever the urgency of any environmental problems that may be facing us, the manner in which we are instructed to deal with them is so individualised: cycle instead of driving, exchange your lightbulbs for dull eco-friendly ones, generate your own power, recycle your rubbish and – looming on Ireland’s horizon – privatised and metered water use to go along with the bin taxes already introduced.
Accumulation and its discontents
In the recent past Ireland has enjoyed record levels of economic growth, levels that any economist who deals in reality and not parlour games recognised would go on forever. Despite the popular idea that the press was a cheerleader for an ‘unsustainable’ boom, this simple fact was often extrapolated into tales of impending doom: spiralling interest rates, stagnation, unemployment and housing market collapse. It was Black Monday in much of the Irish press for as long as anyone can remember. The property supplements may have had a different message but who takes the views of estate agents seriously anyway?
After countless years of gloom-mongering it is finally the case that Ireland is facing some real changes in the economy and, as predicted, it started with house prices: in the first three months of 2007 the average price of a new house in Dublin fell to €517,865 (approx. £352,400) a drop of €1,654.
Why is the reaction to this so relentlessly negative? Was it not the case that Irish house prices were over-inflated in the first place and that a drop should be welcomed? And just how did house prices become the be-all and end-all of political debate?
The usual answer was that the narrow focus on house prices was a result of the Irish economy’s perceived over-reliance on building. In the period of March to May 2006, 262,700 people out of a total workforce of 2,108,300 were employed in construction. (1) Put simply, building was at the heart of Ireland’s improved economy. But given that it was well-known that the construction industry would face a serious downturn would a better response not be to focus on promoting a healthy, diversified economy rather than clamouring for austerity when one sector begins to look a bit shaky? Where were the demands for a properly diversified economy with a significant and productive industrial sector? Instead we were told to stop enjoying ourselves and get ready to be poor. Again.
Now for the first time Ireland has a party in government whose primary focus is on ‘sustainability’, not growth. In fairness, the Green Party is keen to portray itself as a modern and forward-looking organisation, one that will seek accommodation with economic development, not cripple it. Nevertheless, even when proposing policies that only the deepest green would find objectionable, the party strives to find a negative prism through which to view them. When Eamon Ryan, minister for communications, energy and natural resources, announced his support for continuing gas extraction and an attendant tax rise he couched it in terms of ‘security of supply’, that is, fear of Russia cutting off Ireland’s gas. A simpler argument might have been: this is a valuable resource and we should make use of it.
The Green Party’s overly cautious approach may seem to be at odds with a country that has seen such dramatic increases in income and quality of life but it is perfectly in tune with the pessimistic world-view that has developed in Ireland despite so much material improvement.
After decades of grinding poverty when the country’s most significant export was its population, the 1990s finally saw Ireland transform itself into something like a modern developed state. Emigration ceased to be the only option for anyone wishing to make a life for themselves and, during the current decade, immigrants bucked the centuries long trend and started to travel to Ireland hoping to make money. Previously, Ireland’s only significant immigrants had been a few well-off Brits, Germans and Scandinavians who’d made their money in their own industrialised and productive homelands and came to Ireland to live a romantic life rooted in a spurious view of Ireland being natural, ‘unspoiled’ country.
That Irish people have become suspicious of wealth is not shocking. At the end of the Cold War, while other Western nations were finding the decline of the traditional categories of left and right hard to adjust to, Ireland, which never had any significant left-right division in the first place, was gearing up for its own ideological collapse. Along with the country’s new found wealth, the simultaneous decline in the authority of the Catholic church and the breakdown of the popular republicanism that had bound the nation together left Ireland politically bankrupt. By the time that the boom was recognised in the mid-1990s it was widely felt that the manifest changes in Irish life were not all for the better. Affluent readers of broadsheet newspapers like the Irish Times were treated to many a treatise on how the country was in danger losing its soul to a supposed crass materialism and commentators loudly wondered if we weren’t happier when we were poor.
Many an eyebrow has been cocked at how Brian Cowen was able to embrace the Greens despite Fianna Fáil’s famous support for – and from – the construction industry, usually decried as the greatest environmental sinner in the land. This fails to take into account two simple facts. Firstly, Cowen, Ahern and co. would have come around to the guaranteed applause-bringer and vote-winner of sustainability on their own anyway. It’s the way the sails on the wind-turbine are blowing.
Secondly, in an era when ideas and ideology have been consigned to the dustbin of history governments are in favour of governing and not much else. A government shorn of politics will soon find itself reduced to petty economism, which is exactly what has happened in Ireland. Today’s twin fears of economic collapse and an indefinable loss in the national character are a direct result of the hollowing out of politics.
Despite this, there has at least been progress on the economic front over the last decade and a half. But there is a clear intellectual tension between the need to develop and the desire to conserve. The Irish Green Party may not be the tree-hugging hippies of its most strident opponents’ imaginations, but their entrance into government, particularly in coalition with Fianna Fáil, the primary architects of Ireland’s undoubted, if uneven, wealth, does indicate a country that is not at ease with its success.
The significant aspect to the Green Party’s presence to government is simply that – their presence. The other parties could easily have stolen its clothes without actually inviting it in but the vagaries of the Irish system of proportional representation brought the Party in and, if nothing else, it does reflect something about the national psyche. Despite the Party representing a minority of Irish voters, there has been no outcry at their ascension into the highest levels of government – just as there was not with the Progressive Democrats before it.
It should come as no surprise that an ideology which espouses a cautious and conservative approach to growth has risen to prominence just at the point when an Ireland denuded of much of its traditional political rhetoric is faced with an uncertain future. The immediate economic situation facing Ireland may yet turn out to be complex but it appears that the country has decided to deal with this by lowering its horizons. If Ireland has truly finished with the politics of all bark and no bite nationalism that sprang from the antagonisms of the civil war, it looks as though it might be heading for an equally empty political landscape concerned more with managing negatives rather than offering a popular vision of a positive future.
The fact remains: today we live in a world of super-abundance but are bedevilled by artificial scarcity.
(1) Central Statistics Office figures. See: http://www.cso.ie/statistics/empandunempilo.htm
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