Transforming Ireland - the challenges
A new book,Transforming Ireland: Challenges, Critiques, Resources by Michael Cronin, Peadar Kirby and Debbie Ging, critiques the impact of the free market during Ireland’s Celtic Tiger boom on a wide range of areas of public life such as the media and the pharmaceutical industry. It also examines the influence of the boom on health, education, state surveillance, immigrants, the welfare state, consumerism and the Irish language.
Challenging the notion that there is no alternative for Ireland but the present economic and political dispensation, the authors map out an alternative politics that could create spaces for hope and renewal in contemporary Ireland. Below, Politico publishes the Introductory chapter of the book.
Readers of Politico may avail of a 15% discount of the book. The book may be purchased here.
In January 2007, the Irish government unveiled its fourth National Development Plan (NDP) to cover the seven-year period from 2007 to 2013. Entitled Transforming Ireland: A Better Quality of Life for All, the Plan proposed to spend €180 billion in five priority areas – economic infrastructure; enterprise, science and innovation; human capital; social infrastructure; and social inclusion. Though widely welcomed by commentators as addressing Ireland’s many serious economic and social deficits, serious questions were also raised about its viability. It was pointed out that many of the projects promised in its predecessor had yet to be completed and had incurred major cost overruns. For example, only 38 per cent of the inter-urban highways that had been due for completion by 2006 were open by that date and cost overruns had included 92.4 per cent on the Cavan bypass, 98.6 per cent on the Nenagh bypass, 117 per cent on the Drogheda bypass and 306 per cent on the Youghal bypass (McDonald, 2007). Concern was expressed at the lack of adequate oversight mechanisms to ensure value for public monies, particularly as this is the first NDP not to be monitored by the European Commission (the previous ones all having been basically mechanisms to secure large contributions of funding from the European Union). Even before the Plan was launched, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRI) expressed its fears that it was overambitious and would fuel inflation (Morgenroth and Fitz Gerald, 2006). Finally, seasoned observers immediately claimed that it ‘has “general election” written all over it’, as an Irish Times editorial put it (24 January 2007). The newspaper’s economics editor, Marc Coleman, concluded: ‘That it has snowballed into a catch-all wish list for national happiness will blunt its purpose and impair its implementation’ (Coleman, 2007).
The contributors to this book are also concerned about transforming Ireland but believe that the challenges this presents require far more than throwing vast sums of money at poorly analysed, and even more poorly costed, lists of projects. Instead, the challenge of social transformation requires a sustained and thorough critique of the malaise that lies at the heart of today’s Ireland, and a mobilising of the resources of Ireland’s civil society to address it. For this reason, the book carries the same title as the NDP but a very different subtitle, and it is offered as an alternative approach to the dominant, mainstream view that finds expression in the other text. As such, it offers a real choice – not in the reductionist sense offered us all the time by neoliberal marketeers but in the sense that neoliberal economists and politicians constantly choose to deny.
This is the choice of a society based on different values, on different ways of relating public and private power (or state to market, to use the common shorthand), on different solidarities, and on different geographies of power, both locally and globally. Real choices do exist and if we are serious about transforming Ireland into a sustainable, humane and decent society which can offer a fulfilling quality of life, particularly to its most deprived and vulnerable citizens, then it is imperative that such choices be outlined more robustly and convincingly than is often done. Convinced that the 2007–13 NDP will simply deepen many of the crises and contradictions of contemporary Irish society, since it avoids any critical analysis of their sources in the structures and power hierarchies of that society, the contributors to this book offer a more critical reading of what transforming Ireland entails. This they see as a badly needed contribution to a society caught in the stultifying embrace of a carefully constructed and assiduously policed ‘consensus’ politics that effectively acts to marginalise and disempower critiques and alternatives. Breaking this embrace requires identifying the ways in which Ireland has changed over recent decades.
A transformed Ireland
Curiosity thrives on enigmas and good political questions are ones we are generally at a loss to answer. If there were easy answers, little time and energy would be needed to find them. For this reason, Ireland in the last three decades of the twentieth century was deeply attractive as a site of scholarly enquiry. The country, in the context of the developed world, was an anomaly. Firstly, there was the economic anomaly of a country which, despite proximity to large British markets and membership of the European Economic Community (EEC), consistently failed to achieve satisfactory levels of economic growth, had the highest net outward migration rate of EEC member states in the 1980s and experienced record levels of public debt and youth unemployment. Joe Lee’s Ireland, 1912–1985: Politics and Society was a forceful indictment of the scale of independent Ireland’s economic failure (Lee, 1989) and the title of a collection of essays edited by Therese Caherty and published in 1992 was eloquent, Is Ireland a Third World Country? (Caherty, 1992). Secondly, there was the social anomaly of a state in western Europe which banned all forms of artificial contraception, prohibited civil divorce, treated sexual activity between consenting adult homosexuals as a criminal offence and tolerated high levels of clerical interventionism in the educational and health services. The signal failure to separate church and state and the aggressive policing of private morality made Ireland conspicuously different from the more general drift towards liberal legislation in post-war Europe. Thirdly, there was the seeming political anomaly of a country mired in ethnic conflict, linked to questions of religion and territory. Thousands of people lost their lives or were seriously injured in decades of strife, and militarisation was an inescapable fact of everyday life in Northern Ireland. The presence of these ‘wars of religion’ in the pre-Bosnia, pre-9/11 secular vision of an Enlightenment world appeared both scandalous and perplexing. Therefore, as an economic, social and political anomaly, Ireland was attractively puzzling to anyone who cared about the present or future state of the island.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, what is different is that Ireland, in conventional economic and social terms, is no longer so different. In a widely reported survey, The Economist declared in 2005 that Ireland was the best place in the world to live, while spectacular economic growth had made Ireland by the dawn of the new century one of the wealthiest countries on the planet:
Between 1991 and 2003 the Irish economy grew by an average of 6.8 per cent per annum, peaking at 11.1 per cent in 1999. Unemployment fell from 18 per cent in the late 1980s to 4.2 per cent in 2005, and the Irish Debt/GDP ratio fell from 92 per cent in 1993 to 38 per cent in 1999. Throughout the 1990s Irish living standards rose dramatically to the point where the country is now, at least by some measures, one of the richest in the world, and has the fourth highest GDP per capita in the world. (Keohane and Kühling, 2007: 1)
Ireland in the last decade of the twentieth century shifted rapidly towards the standard neoliberal model of an increasingly deregulated trade in goods, services and labour and the relentless promotion of the market as an arbiter of efficiency, distribution and appropriate response to needs, both private and collective (Allen, 2007). If Ireland was no longer so anomalous in economic terms, changes to social legislation in the 1990s permitting, for example, the sale of contraceptives, removing the prohibition on divorce and decriminalising homosexuality meant that Irish legislation in areas of private morality was closer to the European norm. The IRA ceasefires of 1994 and 1997, the Good Friday Agreement (and more recently the St Andrews Agreement), the decommissioning of weapons and the establishment of a power-sharing assembly in Northern Ireland meant that military conflict was no longer a salient feature of political life on the island.
Therefore, the dominant story repeatedly told by the Irish president on tour, or by political parties making a pitch for the retention of power, or by the Economic and Social Research Institute providing comforting alibis for the status quo is ‘We’ve never had it so good’. When Tony Fahey, Helen Russell and Christopher Whelan (2007b) wrote an article in the Irish Times on the occasion of the publication of their co-edited volume Best of Times? The Social Impact of the Celtic Tiger, they unsurprisingly conclude their paean to the New Ireland by claiming: ‘It is therefore easy to agree with President Mary McAleese. In a speech in the United States in November 2003, she said: “If the men and women of Ireland’s past could choose a time to live, there would be a long queue for this one”’ The choice of metaphor is ironically appropriate, as in two key areas of society, health and education, waiting for treatment or to get a school place is the recurrent nightmare of citizens trying to access a public good in a political system that is completely beholden to the logic of the market and the primacy of private gain. While they were waiting to be treated as public patients or trying to find a school that did not have a waiting list of hundreds, the ‘men and women of Ireland’s past’ would have time to reflect on a striking feature of the Irish present, namely, the seizure of language itself by neo-corporate platitudes.
No area of Irish life is immune from the managerial Newspeak of ‘stakeholders’, ‘world-class’, ‘total quality management’, ‘excellence’, ‘best practice’, ‘strategic plan’, ‘mission statement’, ‘key performance indicators’, ‘customer care’ and other corporate shibboleths. In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Newspeak is described by the narrator as being ‘the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year’ (Orwell, 1949: 55). The impression of thought control and limited expressiveness is similar for any observer of Irish life as the restricted vocabulary of the business studies vulgate is applied indiscriminately to health, education, the arts, policing, indeed any sector in receipt of public funding. If consultants are the clergy of this new religion of the Word made Pound of Flesh, what explains its all pervasiveness and why does transforming Ireland also involve transforming the way we speak about Ireland? In 2000, the British sociologist Anthony Giddens opened the century with a solemn pronouncement on the new universal faith:
Capitalism has become the universal social and economic order of our time. Throughout the twentieth century it has been challenged from right and left, but with the fall of the Communist Soviet Union, it has emerged triumphant and stronger than ever before.
This new capitalism differs from that of previous eras … it is truly global, aided by extraordinary advances in technology and communication, and by unfettered global financial markets. Capitalism has a speed, inevitability and force it has not had before. (Cited in Graham and Luke, 2005: 14)
A key word in Giddens’ evangel is ‘inevitability’. Resistance is pointless, as fate and destiny are one. There is one ‘universal social and economic order’ and all must succumb to the overwhelming evidence of its presence and influence. Language then merely reflects a ubiquitous reality. There is no other way of ‘going forward’, no other way of ‘thinking outside the box’ but to speak the lingua franca of market instrumentalism. To use the language, to speak of students or asylum seekers as ‘customers’, for example, is already to accept a value system whereby all relationships are defined on the basis of commodified, financial transactions (Holborow, 2007). A further characteristic of the language is the soft fog of euphemism: ‘downsizing’ is losing your job, ‘consultation process’ means being told you are going to lose your job; mercenaries become ‘private security operatives’ and extra-judicial torture mutates into the gentle, Latinate abstraction of ‘extraordinary rendition’. The fact that much of the corporate Newspeak originates in the English-speaking world makes Ireland even more vulnerable to wholesale incorporation into the looking-glass world of managerial rhetoric.
However, from the point of view of transformative practices, it is important that we bear in mind that languages have a past and future as well as a present. In other words, the present infestation of public language with the default rhetoric of the market is, in historical terms, relatively recent. When Milton Friedman published his key work, Capitalism and Freedom, in 1962, he claimed that he felt he was part of a ‘small, beleaguered minority regarded as eccentrics by the great majority of our fellow intellectuals’ (Friedman, 1962: vi). Advocacy of an unfettered free market, wholesale privatisation, the commodification of free public services and ruthless tax cuts were ideas considered to be the idiosyncratic beliefs of a chosen few but, through their adoption by key political actors and vested interests, over the decades the dissident credo of the neoliberal sect became the universal gospel of large parts of the developed and developing world (see Allen, 2007: 25–37). Now it is those writers and thinkers in Ireland and elsewhere who challenge the ‘inevitability’ of the new ‘social and economic order of our time’ who are part of a ‘small beleaguered minority regarded as eccentrics by the great majority of our fellow intellectuals’. But, ironically, it is the signal success of the neoliberal intelligentsia which points to the potential for their undoing. What they showed with startling clarity was that new ideas and perspectives, no matter how modest their beginnings, have a remarkable ability to shape economic and social realities. The language neoliberal thinkers and their state, corporate and academic cheerleaders have bequeathed us may be universal in its spread, but there is no reason to suppose that it is eternal in its duration. This is not only because of the inevitable contradictions of a system which benefits the few rather than the many but also because beleaguered minorities, articulating the distress of the economic and social majority on the planet, have the potential to destabilise the placid certainties of corporate Newspeak.
A good example of the dominance of a narrow, neoliberal agenda over our way of thinking (and, indeed, the lack of debate about that agenda) was the campaigning for the 2007 Irish general election. What the electorate was offered was repeated (and successful) pandering to a deliberately restricted version of economic self-interest. The only form of forward thinking on offer was fear. Failure to vote for the government parties was portrayed as tantamount to throwing everything away. Paradoxically, for many people, onerous mortgages, high levels of personal debt, crippling price rises and the significant burden of indirect taxation meant that voting for an alternative looked unacceptably risky. In other words, the kind of politics which had backed people into a corner of indebtedness and social anomie was presented as the only way out. Part of the difficulty for the electorate was that there did indeed appear to be no other way out, as the much-touted alternative of Fine Gael and Labour was not an ‘alternative’ in any meaningful or credible sense of the word. In everything from the lamentable fudge on state complicity in US torture flights through Shannon to the cynical opportunism of belated tax cuts, Fine Gael and Labour played a game whose neoliberal ground rules had been clearly laid down by Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats. No party can ever hope to defeat Fianna Fáil by pretending to be Fianna Fáil. Nobody does Fianna Fáil better than Fianna Fáil. The philosophy of unprincipled populism which has served the dominant government partner so well does not provide a sustainable basis for real opposition.
Ironically, what the 2007 election demonstrated was the perverse triumph of a form of thinking associated in earlier decades with the doctrinaire left, namely, economic determinism. If the economy was held to explain everything and only one form of economic thought was held to be legitimate, then opportunities for debate or contestation were scuppered in advance. The question then became one of choosing between rival sets of consultants to run the business and the incumbents, not surprisingly, got the contract. Thus, a noticeable feature of the election and its aftermath in Ireland has been the unholy alliance of threat and triumphalism. Vote for the neoliberal status quo or face financial ruin and are we not surely living in the Best of Times? If instrumentalist economism is a means of stifling debate, equally effective is a home-grown boosterism, with its coercive rhetoric of self-congratulation. A telling example was provided by Maureen Gaffney in an Irish Times magazine supplement on happiness. She informed her readers that:
We seemed to have used our prosperity as an opportunity to enjoy stable family relationships, to develop our personal expressiveness and to show the world what we’re good at. Given Ireland’s economic, cultural and religious history – still in living memory – we have embraced prosperity, the good life and personal freedoms with unabashed relish, and we won’t lightly let them go. (Gaffney, 2007b: 68)
Who is the ‘we’ being referred to here? Who apart from self-regarding national elites, who are now richer than ever before, are included in the charmed circle of the chummy pronoun? Self-interest, however, in the context of global meltdown, is self-delusion. The only sustainable form of self-interest is one which looks beyond the picket fences of dynastic self-preservation and moves to broader, collective well-being as a way of ensuring a better life for all. No amount of triumphalist hype – always in Ireland the flipside of an inferiority complex in its over-eagerness to convince – can conceal the real and urgent need for change. The chapters in our Transforming Ireland illustrate this.
As the different chapters demonstrate, current Irish society displays many of the worst features of a system dedicated to the ruthless expansion of the self-interest of the powerful. Part I, ‘Culture and society’, contains three chapters. In chapter 2, John Walsh, examining the case of the Irish language, shows how market-led values do irreparable damage to fragile cultures. Piaras Mac Éinrí in chapter 3 interrogates the nature of racism and a multiculturalism dominated by the perceived needs of the economy, and he re-imagines what a truly multi-ethnic Ireland might involve. The following chapter, by Debbie Ging, looks at the deeply damaging consequences of unrestrained consumerism for the formation of gender identities and relationships. Part II, ‘Media and social change’, contains two chapters. Chapter 5, by Sean Phelan, illustrates how the Irish media have internalised a neoliberal view of the world and consistently place their coverage of Irish society within the framework of this paradigm. In the following chapter, Roddy Flynn shows, in examining the Football Association of Ireland’s attempts to sell the rights to broadcast Republic of Ireland soccer matches to BSkyB, the possibility for public reaction to force governments to stand up to the power of market actors. Part III, ‘Social control’, contains three chapters. In chapter 7, Michael Cronin highlights the contradiction between the dominant discourse of freedom and choice, and the growth of an ever-more coercive state. Denis O’Sullivan in chapter 8 charts the changing meaning of education in state discourse, from one based on citizenship to one based on the logic of the market. In chapter 9, Orla O’Donovan explores how the pharmaceutical industry has gained increasing power over health information and the treatment of illness, with questionable consequences for our health and general well-being. Part IV, ‘Power and politics’, contains three chapters. Gavan Titley in chapter 10 examines the politics of Irish mobility and argues that a dominant discourse on cosmopolitanism disguises deep divisions and inequalities in Irish society. In chapter 11, Mary Murphy analyses the changing nature of Irish social policy and current recommendations for its reform, and argues for the importance of greater public debate and activism to ensure a more robust and equitable social policy. Chapter 12, by Peadar Kirby, contests the dominant politics of inequality and maps out what it would take to promote a genuine politics of equality. The contents of this book stand in stark contrast to the constrained nature of public debate in today’s Ireland.