Poverty: Grim but Authentic!

Alex Massie

Wednesday, 6th May 2009

There is, as you might expect, some good stuff in Christopher Caldwell's Weekly Standard piece on the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger. But it also contains some strange thinking, albeit of a kind that is often found when foreigners consider the Irish. Thus:

This [prosperity and immigration] is all very exciting for the Irish, but there is nothing particularly Irish about it. Irish identity has often been--explicitly and officially--a matter of protecting citizens from both the temptations of modernity and the vicissitudes of prosperity...
De Valera's Irish Republic was organized around the idea that money doesn't matter that much. This may have been a noble aspiration, it may have been sanctimony and foolishness, but there was at the very least something bold and, as Yeats would say, indomitable about it. Next to De Valera's uncompromising Christian renunciation, those two something-for-nothing ideologies, modern capitalism and modern socialism, are practically indistinguishable. Over the last 20 years, Ireland found riches a good substitute for its traditional culture. But now the country has been harder hit by the financial downturn than any country in Western Europe. We may be about to discover what happens when a traditionally poor country returns to poverty without its culture.

This is rum, hyperbolic stuff. The Irish economy may contract by 10% this year and, on a per capita basis, the 26 Counties aren't likely to remain amongst the richest dozen countries in the world, but Ireland is not, despite its problems, going to return to its impoverished roots.

What's more perplexing is why anyone should want it to. Caldwell doesn't quite say it, but the implication to be drawn from his piece - and from others like it - was that Ireland was a better, more wholesome, happier place when it was poor and that it was foolish for the Irish to believe that they could ever aspire to something more than that. Didn't they realise their lot was to be backward and patronised?

Sure, maybe it was all too much to be entirely true and, sure, perhaps the good times couldn't last forever. But that's no reason to suggest that poverty was somehow ennobling and more authentic than prosperity. Them good old days - back when the Irish were all saints and cholars don't you know - were so good that thousands of young Irishmen and women were forced to leave their native heath in search of work and prosperity elsewhere. Dev's Ireland - and its legacy - was a failure, even if it was bold.

It's all very well for foreigners to bemoan the cost of the Celtic Tiger - especially its vulgarity - and wax lyrical about them Rare Ould Times, but they (we) didn't have to live there. For that matter, the schadenfreude with which Ireland's economic woes has been greeted on this side of the Irish Sea is pretty unbecoming.

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MattF

May 6th, 2009 2:12pm Report this comment

My hope, now forlorn, was that prosperity would stem the flood of "Irish" bars and restaurants in the US. Aye, and begorra. Bah.

ben

May 6th, 2009 7:44pm Report this comment

This sort of attitude is not restricted to the Irish, of course. Many peoples and cultures are viewed by outsiders as being quaint and precious and therefore suitable for preserving in aspic. Amish children, for example, are condemned to a lifetime of ignorance and poverty because their culture is deemed to have rights that their people don't.

Kittler

May 6th, 2009 9:05pm Report this comment

A De Valera suspicion of prosperity could also be found among some Labour folk in Scotland 30/40 years ago. At the time of the big oil discoveries off the Scottish coast, I can recollect some denouncing independence and the SNP, for wishing to transform Scotland into a Switzerland, a petty bourgeois (popular adjectives with the left in that era)nightmare. Wealth was to be garnered and carefully distributed in a non frivolous manner, via party led agencies.

hadrian

May 6th, 2009 9:45pm Report this comment

It is also signally inaccurate to style capitalism as a 'something for nothing' ideology along with welfare dependency/rights socialism. Capitalism demands work IN for reward out. And in a sense just about any and every culture has the individual enjoying much more than he personally really has earned. That is the advantage of communal cooperation and division of labour.
The sentimentalising of backward cultures is a recurrant theme- the 'noble savage'. I doubt with the demise( or at least severe decline) of the Roman Catholic hierarchy's grip on the populace that the 'old Ireland' will ever resurface. One genuinely sad feature of the Irish, that has no direct connection to the present emergency, is their own negligence of their own language and its ancient literature. Irish Gaelic has many advantages yet as a living tongue is nowhere near as prized or vigorous as, say, Welsh. That is a scandal.

Fergus Pickering

May 6th, 2009 11:44pm Report this comment

You will never get Irish people to speak Irish when English is so available and they are such masters of it. And who ion his right mind would want to live in North Wales where it never stops raining and there's nothing to do.

AndrewD

May 7th, 2009 10:40am Report this comment

You are missing the point Mr Massie and it has nothing to do with nationalism - or rather only with the English variety. The subs are parked barely 20 miles from Scotland's major centres of population. If anything goes wrong the results will be to virtually wipe the country out. It is grossly irresponsible to base them so near to Glasgow. If they must be in Scotland they should be in a purpose built base as far as possible from people - or don't Scottish lives matter? How would you like them moored 20 miles down the Thames from London say? Think it would ever even be considered? No. Thought not

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