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from 13 january 2002 blue vol II, 18 |
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by Robert Allen
This tiny island on the edge of the western world is ruled by bureaucrats and politicians in Dublin and Westminster, but it is controlled by the CEO's of the corporate world - the people who dictate the rules and practices of globalization. For much of the last decade of the 20th century the process of controlling the domestic budget by suspending wage increases while encouraging consumer spending contributed to the success of the 'Celtic Tiger' economy. Immigration replaced emigration with net increases to the population bringing the total number of people to almost six million. No one has been able to identify the specific factors that have led to this economic success, why Ireland's economy has fared better than anyone else's in Europe and why, in Third World terms, it has become a model for other underdeveloped countries.
Perhaps the reason is not so complicated. Those who are given the task of explaining capitalism are unable to do so because they actually do not understand how the free market really works. But ask a low paid worker and you'll be given the answer. It won't be an economic analysis either. And it's highly likely it'll be accompanied by several expletives.
The Irish are known the world over as erudite, friendly, vivacious and warm, and woe betide anyone who should say they are capricious and selfish, cynical and negative, and frequently violent, yet that is now a prevailing characteristic of the "new" Irish. Social background seems irrelevant because it is cynical, selfish desire that drives the individual in modern Ireland. The "individualism" inherent in the Celtic spirit was rooted in nature and community, and latterly in nationalism as successive generations of Irish sought to control their own destinies. The Celts saw themselves as people of a holistic ecological, physical and spiritual world. To them it was all one world - a world they were born to defend.
The modern Irish, whose genes have more in common with Saxon, Angle, Norse, Norman, Anglo-Norman and Pict antecedents and latterly Europeans of many cultures than the 'Celts of the Invasions', exhibit their individualism in shows of apathy, competitiveness, cynicism, ignorance, racism and sectarianism. We do not see these characteristics because they are hidden behind a sincere, smiling, Venetian-like mask. Kieran Allen summarized this change when he wrote that, "the entrepreneur has replaced the rebel as the hero of modern society". In 1993 the environmental director of an industry confederation confronted me with the cynical cutting edge of this new society. "Do we want to be organic farmers and waitresses or do we want to get on with it?" By 2000 the edge had been sharpened. In Dublin I was told by a university educated twentysomething to "get back where you belong" - presumably meaning Belfast where I was born in 1956. (Belfast sits astride counties Antrim and Down in the northeast of Ireland, and like the rest of the six counties known as Northern Ireland is now regarded by many southern Irish people as a separate state.) Racism and sectarianism is commonplace in Dublin - Ireland's cosmopolitan city.
Quite simply Ireland is a microcosm of globalization. It paved the way for globalization with state policies since adopted by other Third World, as well as First and Second World nations, and it would seem to the ignorant that the foresight of Irish bureaucrats and politicians in the mid-20th century is now benefitting its people. Although an economist coined the term 'Celtic Tiger' in 1994, the Celtic Tiger economy was actually born in 1958 when the Irish government invited foreign corporates (significantly from the USA) to set up shop in Ireland. The idea was that they would teach the Irish how to be successful capitalists. Instead US (and British) corporates, despite opposition mostly in rural Ireland, gradually took over Irish society. US investment, initially in pharmaceuticals and subsequently in electronics, in Ireland is the highest in Europe. Allied to this is the success of the financial services sector, which manages the profits of the corporates - in 1998 the International Financial Services Centre in Dublin managed $116 billion of funds, in direct competition with other tax havens.
Yet, despite this economic success workers, even in the IFSC, have not benefitted. Between 1987 and 1997 wages as a percentage of gross national product (GNP) declined by a quarter. Throughout the 1990s average profits in all sectors ran 50 percent higher than wage increases. In 1999 the average industrial wage was £329.85 a week for men and £221.86 for women.
These figures make little sense until you realise the cost of living - the percentage of this wage that is spent on the basic necessities. When the Irish Congress of Trade Unions Secretary Peter Cassells stated that many people "cannot afford to buy or rent a house anymore" he was also admitting that employment itself is not the answer, and that the trade unions (which have a 520,000 membership - among the highest per worker in Europe) have failed them because the partnership agreement with the government has not benefitted workers. The ICTU, in a document about the partnership, recognize that "ownership of capital, especially large amounts of it, still gives individuals and families the most powerful advantage in reaching the top rung of the ladder and staying there," but that most people worked at the bottom rung of the economy and were "excluded from economic participation". Workers in this rung "rise early and queue for the first bus to get to work while most people are still asleep. They clean offices and cook breakfasts, make up hotel beds and prepare sandwiches ... work in clothes factories and launderettes and do a whole range of essential jobs without which the economy would grind to a halt".
Since the early 1990s Ireland has become a building site. A crane towers over every church and scaffolding seems to climb like ivy over every other building. Pubs do a roaring trade, especially at weekends even in places where people and money are not constant companions, cornershops are being refitted as small supermarkets and the buses and trains are always full. The place is truly booming, it appears to the casual traveller. It is possible to look at Ireland's cities, towns and villages and believe that this economic boom euphemistically called the Celtic Tiger is actually improving the quality of peoples' lives. You have to scratch the surface to see the reality.
Behind the facade of modern Ireland is the stark reality that almost a quarter of the total population is functionally illiterate, that one in six are living, according to the United Nations, in "human poverty", and that Ireland has the highest rate of poverty in the western world after the USA. As Sinn Fein's Robbie Smyth put it: "The squalid reality of the Celtic Tiger is low paid workers, an under funded health service, under funded public transport, house prices out of the reach of ordinary citizens, a chronic shortage of local authority housing, a rampant heroin crisis, rural poverty and environmental deprivation in urban working-class areas."
Ireland, like every other industrialised nation in Europe, has a two-tier society. The elite are very rich, a small section of the population are relatively well-off but the majority live on credit or on the edge - mostly content with their consumerist addictions and oblivious to the factors that shape their daily lives.
Opposition to globalization in Ireland and analyses of the social implications of an economy tied to global capital has been muted and ignored. The media in Ireland has never understood or wanted to understand what has been happening to a country still thought of as a Celtic Nation with Celtic sensibilities and a history of struggle with a turbulent Atlantic and capricious weather patterns. But Ireland no longer looks west, it looks east. The population growth is in the urbanized east coast. This gives those who live there a false impression of the country. Not only is Ireland partitioned into two political and economic entities, it is also divided into two cultures - those who live inside the Pale and those who live outside it (just as it was when the British banished the indigenous people to hell or to Connaught after Elizabeth I unleashed her dogs of war 400 years ago).
None of the liberal political parties in Ireland - Fine Gail, Fianna Fail, Labour, Progressive Democrats, Green Party, the Unionist parties, SDLP, Sinn Fein - appear to know what is happening, either. Rhetoric is abundant about Ireland's social problems but not one political party has devised policies which see an Ireland able to survive without corporate capital. The Socialist Party of Ireland, which campaigns on a 32-county platform like Sinn Fein, is perhaps unique here because it sees the effects of globalization on Irish workers in a way no one, not even Sinn Fein, does. And Sinn Fein's analyses about the problems are erudite and succinct. However, without corporate capital and, despite what many Nationalists believe, without British capital, Ireland's fragile economy would collapse. And this is now starting to happen. Some people cannot envisage a united Ireland, others see no other vision. Those who see these modern Irelands, the Republic of Ireland of the south and west and Northern Ireland in the north-east, do not see an Ireland that can survive without corporate capital and without British rule. Soon they may have to.
The Celtic Tiger economy is starting to diminish at just the time when people are flocking to the country. Many are returning home, coming back with their hopes and dreams intact, from an homogenising Europe that no longer needs cheap Irish labour. Others are coming from Britain, desperate to escape a disintegrating society, and some are even coming from America - believing in the romanticism of their forebearers' homeland.
It would be very easy to shatter their dreams with a negative view of modern Ireland, because the Ireland they have returned to has been laid waste by failed politics. So instead we must be positive - now that the corporates, who can no longer exploit Ireland's labour and its environment, are packing up and leaving. And the British, despite the protestations of the Unionists, are also waiting for the right moment to slip away - like thieves in the night.
Instead we must say to our youth and to the young people who are returning to their homelands that we can create in an independent Ireland an eco-social model for a society free of globalisation and colonialisation. There are people in the country who know that something drastic must be done to change Irish society. They know we must generate a new social and economic vision and plan, or the future of Ireland will be tied to the failure of globalisation.
These are people, who by their own nature are not cynical or selfish or fascist, who are altruistic and caring and sharing? They are the dispossessed but they are not weak. Tom Collins sees the nature of the society which is emerging amongst the dispossessed on the fringes of Irish society as "one which has a renewed interest in traditional Irish society, but has rejected its caricature; it equates personal growth with social commitment; it espouses spirituality but discards religiosity; it is committed to democracy but distrusts politicians; it has fundamental commitment to work but is likely to be unemployed; it is locally committed but globally oriented; it is coming from the outside in rather from the inside out".
So we know what we must do. We must begin replacing the bureaucrats and economists and politicians, who are unable to restructure Irish society, with people who have the visions and plans for a society that is not tied to a colonial lifeline or a corporate lifeboat. Some countries, and many people, are restructuring their societies and their lives with bioregional visions and plans. In Ireland such activities are seen as "communist" utopias and "hippy" dreams. They have no place in Irish society. But this is not about anarchism or communism or nationalism or republicanism or socialism or any other ism, it is about creating a fair and equal society that is communal and egalitarian.
It is not hard to imagine either. We were moving in that direction when the program drawn up by Whittaker and Lemass was so disastrously implemented by selfish bureaucrats who couldn't see further than their own Dublin 4 homes. In the course of 40 years Ireland has lost the heart and soul of its cultural identity. Words like creativity, trust, love, altruism and mutual aid have lost their energy and meaning. Peoples' lives have become so atomised by modern culture that many people have lost the ability to care - for themselves and for others. Nurturing friendships, relationships and kindredships has become difficult for many people. But our spirit has not been crushed.
It will not be such a difficult task. In many places all over Ireland it is beginning to happen. It is also happening in the far reaches of Europe, in the landlocked communities of Switzerland, on the island communities of Italy, in the coastal regions of Norway and in communities in advanced capitalist countries like Germany. In Ireland it might be called a Celtic Future with a eye to a Celtic Past but it does not matter what it is called or what words we use to describe it. Simply our future must be an eco-bioregional one, in which every community works collectively to maintain a local economy that can function in a national economy with other communities, because each community will utilise its own expertise and skills.
The last quarter of the 20th century saw a haemorrhaging of rural areas, and a gradual build-up of urban areas, the shift into the conurbation around Dublin intensifying during the 1990s. If Ireland is to survive and thrive in the 21st century that trend must be reversed. This does not mean our cities must be dissolved, but it will mean a change in how we live, work and function in our urban areas. Despite what some people may believe about 21st century living, it is not about cities containing millions of people. Irish society can bear such a transition because most people are from rural areas and Dublin, Belfast, Cork, Limerick and Galway are essentially cities of accumulated villages.
We need to think hard about our basic needs and how they should be provided. Food, clothes, shelter and fuel are the four basic requirements of any community. We need to think about these requirements as people who live together on a small island, and how we can acquire these needs without depleting and destroying our natural resources. Ireland may be low on mountains but those that we have should be put to use to provide hydroelectric power - an area the ESB is already working on. There is certainly no shortage of rainwater pouring down from the mountains of Down, Galway, Tipperary, Cork and Kerry. Our windswept west coast needs to be dotted with wind turbines, despite the protestations of idiotic environmentalists who think they spoil the landscape. It is essential that we generate electricity without resorting to the use of fossil fuels. The technology exists to allow us to use water and wind power. Houses and buildings need to be fitted with solar panels, even though sunshine is not a resource we can boast about, but they will generate sufficient energy to justify the expenditure.
More significantly we need to build an integrated public transport system, with trams and trains and buses run on electricity. Even though the idea is to get people to live and work in their own communities, the cities of Belfast, Cork, Dublin, Galway and Limerick will need transport systems that function efficiently. The Germans, French, Swiss and Italians have all realised that you must have an adequate public transport system if you are to get your workers to work on time and unstressed.
Our first task must be the empowerment of our communities, rural and urban, with the release of funds to set up community-owned projects that generate both jobs and income. Bismark once joked that if the Dutch ran Ireland they could feed Europe. Behind this remark is a truth we need to realise. Land under the control of a community that has the skills to grow foodstuffs and the raw materials to make clothes and other essential items will become partially self-sufficient very quickly. There is a myth that Ireland has neither the climate nor the soil to establish such operations, but that is all it is - a myth.
The creation of forest gardens and farms will take a generation but time is not the reason for not getting down to it. Reforestation is essential if we are to create communities that do not need to depend on imports for food, clothing and shelter. One third of Ireland's land mass can be reforested easily because it is not suitable for human habitation. This will help with precipitation but it will also provide the necessary natural barriers against storms and winds. Much of the west and the western coastal regions need to be reforested.
We also need to utilise the resources of the sea to rebuild soil structure in areas where it is naturally barren, again in the rocky west coast. The combination of seaweed and sand that underlined the plot of JB Keane's play The Field is crucial here. Dara Molloy and Tess Harper on Arainn will testify to its fertility by showing you the bountiful farm they have made on what is a windswept limestone rock with barely any soil. The planting of trees also improves soil fertility by adding humus - decaying leaves and twigs and seeds - to the land. Hence the reason for implementing a system of forest farming, with a variety of species sowed in every community farm.
Although polytunnels are prey to a wild wind, they are essential for the propagation of seeds and the early growth of seedlings and saplings. They are now so prolific in Europe, in climates not unsimilar to Ireland's, that they might be regarded as a new and verdant species. The use of polytunnels will allow a community to produce herbs and vegetables that can be grown for processing and sold as a value-added product.
Essentially each community - and by community I mean 300 people, so a town of 3,000 people would constitute ten communities - would need to create a bioregional centre that allowed them to grow broadleaved trees, fruit trees, nut trees, shrubs and hedgerows in a replication of a forest landscape with perennial edible plants, annual vegetables, legumes, herbs and cereals in small horticulture gardens, keep various animals for their meat, milk, eggs, skin, fleeces and hair or wool, and erect buildings for use as work spaces, accommodation and leisure plus buildings for storing and utilising recyclable and reusable domestic, food, animal and human waste.
The bio-centre could be an old school or factory or warehouse or if nothing like this is available it could be purpose built. Its function would be to establish a multi-skills and resource bio-centre for the processing of food, clothes, domestic materials and other related activities. The bio-centre could have several food processing units, a cafe and restaurant, an accommodation unit, a training school, a multi-media unit, sections for the production of materials made from wood, metal, wool, clay, an administration unit and an area for the germination of seeds and sun-loving annual plants.
Although the idea would be to eventually establish a multi-purpose, self-sufficient, bioregional resource, the initial stages would need to be funded and resourced from outside the community. Funding would come from state, UN, EU and private sources.
Such a venture would see herbs, trees, vegetables, meat, cheese and eggs grown for the community and for use in the cafe and restaurant, for sale in the shop, for use in processed food and for raw materials in the resource centre. Surplus herbs and vegetables, meat and cheese and eggs could be sold to local hotels and restaurants. Kitchen utensils, clothes, pottery and other domestic needs would be met by the craft-makers. The various foodstuffs could also be processed in numerous ways. The herbs could be dried for herbal teas. Fresh herbs could be stored in oil pressed from vegetables grown on the farm. Vegetables could be cured, dried and fermented. Meat could be turned into pates and salamis. And much more. We just need to be creative and imaginative.
Other initiatives would include local waste management, setting up recycling bins and storage centres for the various wastes - paper, glass, wood, metal cans, food, etc. The paper could be pulped and used for various projects in the centre. The glass and cans could be sold to reprocessing companies. Leftover food could be collected for the farm animals and other food waste could be collected for compost.
Computers and telecommunication technology could be utilised for various purposes. This could eventually include the establishment of an information oriented media in the form of newsletters, books on community history and videos of community activity, but simply might be used to teach computer and telecommunication skills.
The point of such a venture in every community is that it is a focus for our basic human needs - food, clothing, shelter and warmth. Surplus food, clothing, pottery, etc would be sold to blow-ins and tourists. If tourism or eco-tourism (that quaint new term) is to be accepted as a natural extension of Ireland's economy (and attraction), it is essential that tourists pay a premium price but are given value for money. A tourist tax and a tourist price for every expenditure is essential for an economy such as Ireland's.
Our attraction is our location on the western seaboard, our culture and, when we put these initiatives in place, our foodstuffs, craftwork, clothing, crockery - whatever our imaginations allow us to create, and our local produce. A tax on the millions of tourists who visit Ireland each year would go a long way to funding these initiatives and boosting a national budget that desperately needs funding to support healthcare, childcare, public transport, housing, social and welfare services and a bloated civil service that needs to be put to work providing solutions to the problems caused by decades of colonialism and globalisation.
The solutions for a future Irish society are not hard. These are only some of them. What is difficult is removing the gobshites who presently control the state from their lofty pedestals. The sooner we do that the quicker we can build societies that benefit every single one of us.
Ní neart go cur le chéile.
(No strength unless together.)
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This is an edited extract from Ireland Unbound, a work in progress, by Robert Allen.
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Nowhere on the planet has globalization completely changed the culture of a people than in Ireland. Colonized since the 12th century, Ireland is the only country in Europe (aside from specific regions) , where the practice of imperial rule has produced an economy similar to the so-called Third 'underdeveloped' World. All of the factors inherent in Third World politics exist in Ireland. Once an agricultural economy with the potential to self-sufficiency, Ireland is now a partitioned island with an industrial economy completely dependent on the success of globalization, on the unimpeded flow of capital and the exploitation of its labour and its environment.
It is not a co-incidence that people, especially in rural Ireland, want to see a return to community and family values - without the Christian hypocrisy. Neither is it a surprise that some people are adamant we must not lose our Celtic culture, particularly our language at a time when American-English is becoming the lingua franca of the world. And it should not be a great shock to anyone that we need to return to the values that epitomised our Atlantic Celtic Culture. We must replace individualism and selfishness with the collective mutual aid that once characterised the word 'Irish'. Now more than ever we need to look deep within our Celtic hearts and find the means to create a society for everyone.
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