On the political level, there was an obvious contradiction between the message coming from government that the Irish were more American than European on the one side and, on the other, the message from that same government that the Irish should vote for treaties enhancing and expanding the EU. The Nice Treaty was defeated in a referendum in 2001. Though it was subsequently passed in a re-run in 2002, the defeat prefigured the initial rejection of the Lisbon Treaty by Irish voters in 2008. The underlying scepticism about where Ireland belonged, largely created by the government itself, could not be turned on and off at will. The Celtic Tiger’s tendency to snap at the European hand that had fed it in its infancy was encouraged by the same politicians who, when it suited them, insisted that the Irish should be good Europeans.
These confusions in the big picture were also felt at the level of everyday life. If Ireland was metaphorically wandering all over the map of the world, the Irish were literally wandering all over the map of Ireland. Rampant, badly planned development destroyed a coherent sense of place. A vast amount of effort in the late 1990s was put into the development of a National Spatial Strategy, under which regional ‘gateways’ and ‘hubs’ would develop a critical mass of population and employment and become sustainable urban centres. It was not simply ignored but actively destroyed by the government. When Charlie McCreevy announced in 2003 a plan to ‘decentralise’ 10,000 civil and public sector employees from Dublin to the regions, three-quarters of them were to be sent to towns that were not planned for growth under the strategy. It was a clear signal that the whole idea of organising space in a rational way was being abandoned. In 2007, five years after the strategy was supposedly implemented, the president of the Irish Planning Institute, Henk van der Kamp, pointed out that population growth in many counties with ‘gateways’ or ‘hubs’ was actually much lower than that in counties without them. In other words, the spatial strategy was completely meaningless.
The effects were felt both in the cities and in small towns and villages. On the one hand, rising house prices in the cities forced would-be home owners out into new commuter belts. Just 4 per cent of the growth in the Irish population between 2002 and 2006 took place in the five main cities combined. The result, especially in relation to Dublin, was a vast expansion of the effective area of the city, in terms of the places where those working within it had their homes. Large swathes of Wicklow, Wexford, Meath, Louth, Westmeath, Carlow, Offaly, even Cavan and Monaghan, became parts of outer Dublin. The very concept of Dublin became extraordinarily diffuse. As early as 2001, the president of the Royal Institute of Architects in Ireland, Tony Reddy, pointed out that Greater Dublin ‘could occupy an area the size of Los Angeles by 2010’, even though it would have just a quarter of the American city’s population.
In planning terms, this was an outstanding achievement and an example to the world. The European Environment Agency, advising the new Central and Eastern European member states of the EU, pointed to Dublin as the ‘worst case scenario’ for the handling of growth.
On the other side of this equation, builders, aided by complaisant local authorities, slapped up huge numbers of houses, usually in identikit suburban estates, as appendages to old villages. Many of these villages were simply swamped. Between 1996 and 2006, the number of households in Stamullen increased by 726 per cent; in Ratoath by 651 per cent; in Sallins by 417 per cent, and in Kinnegad by 379 per cent. Even a village like Virginia in Cavan, all of 83 kilo - metres from Dublin, grew by 124 per cent. With both men and women having to work in Dublin to pay what were still very high mortgages (and to pay for the cars that were now an absolute necessity: 90 per cent of households in commuter counties like Meath and Kildare had at least one car), maintaining a strong sense of place was always going to be a struggle.
Even within the core of a city like Dublin, new apartment complexes often lacked any real sense of connection to the old working-class areas in which they merely happened to have been built. Mary Benson, in a study of the inner-city district of Ringsend, just two kilometres from the city centre, found that those living in new apartments tended to have a very weak sense of place: ‘For these residents, Ringsend does not hold any intimate meaning. They do not involve themselves in any meaningful way at a local level. Their social networks are located in specific places away from Ringsend rather than being anchored locally . . . Although they share spatial proximity, there is little evidence of spatial association. ’
Just as the Irish relationship to space was being confused by all of these forces, something similar was happening in relation to time. This too happened on both a global and an intimate level.
The Irish boom coincided with not just one ‘end of history’ but four. There was the general Western illusion that, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, ‘history’ was over and the American model of free-market democracy would be established as the universal norm. There was the complementary illusion that the historical cycles of capitalism had been ended by the sheer brilliance of the masters of the universe. Gordon Brown was making this claim as early as 1997, but it was a commonplace, especially in the Anglo-Saxon economic world of which Ireland was a part. And there was a specifically Irish ‘end of history’. Two of the great continuities of Ireland since the eighteenth century - mass emigration and political violence - seemed, by the late 1990s, to be definitively over.
Together these forces fed a feeling that the past had little relevance to the new era and that it should be, quite literally, obliterated. On a visit to Shanghai, Bertie Ahern sighed with envy at the power of the city’s mayor to bulldoze everything in his way: ‘Naturally enough I would like to have the power of the mayor that when he decides he wants to do a highway and, if he wants to bypass an area, he just goes straight up and over.’
This fantasy of absolute power over the landscape and its awkward remnants of history was symbolised in the crassest, but perhaps the most characteristic, action of the boom years: the driving of a motorway through the Tara/Skryne valley in County Meath. The Hill of Tara and its surrounding valleys are an ancient sacred landscape, with at least seventy major archaeological monuments, ranging from a Neolithic passage tomb to Iron Age ceremonial earthworks, in and around the hill itself. Because of the spread of commuter dormitories into north Meath and Cavan, it was deemed necessary to build a motorway. The planners and Fianna Fáil seemed to take a perverse pleasure in rejecting alternative routes and insisting that the motorway should go through the Tara valley. The sheer glee with which this was done was a symptom of a deeply neurotic kind of temporal arrogance. Nothing mattered except now.
Paradoxically, this obliteration of a sense of historical time also suggested that the future would be pretty much like the present. The operative tense in the grammar of Ireland’s boom was the present continuous. The idea of the future as a different time, with its own imperatives, was largely absent from the Tiger mentality. Sustainability - a concept that incorporates a sense of the future into the present - was the great unthinkable. Thus the utter contempt for planning and environmental considerations expressed in Bertie Ahern’s irritated complaint in 2003 that every big infrastructural project had to ‘go through eight hoops, through all environmental, planning and blah blah blah, and every blah costs a few hundred million’, and his loftily surreal dismissal of all objections to motorway routes as being about ‘swans, snails and people hanging out of trees’.
The non-existence of the future meant that it was okay to build huge numbers of one-off houses in the countryside where the inhabitants were assumed to be ageless - otherwise it might have seemed wise to think about issues like isolation and immobility that might arise when they got old. It also underpinned the decision, in the age of global warming and peak oil, to create a completely car-dependent society. With very limited fossil fuel resources of its own, and a share of energy from renewable sources that was less than half the OECD average, Ireland became one of the highest per capita carbon emitters in the world. Ireland’s total energy consumption in
creased by 83 per cent from 1990 to 2007 - a bad enough record. But transport energy use increased by 181 per cent. The future that Ireland was imagining was an American motopia of the 1950s in which petrol was dirt cheap, guilt-free and infinitely available.
The consequences of this inability to imagine the future were not at all abstract. Since the present was one in which property prices were constantly rising and the historical experiences of boom and bust had been rendered irrelevant, there was no point in listening to those who droned on about what had happened before. To insist that all known housing bubbles had always burst was to miss the point that this was a new time with its own new laws of perpetual motion.
The other paradox, though, was that this apparent reassurance that the vicissitudes of history had been disarmed did not create a sense of calm but, on the contrary, generated hysteria. Time speeded up to a frenzy and slowed down to a enervating grind.
The process of speeding up was a function both of work and of the property market. The pressures of highly productive workplaces and of juggling paid employment with childcare made a nonsense of the old Bord Fáilte image of Ireland as a place with a relaxed pace of life. In a 2006 study from the Economic and Social Research Institute, 57 per cent of working people and 62 per cent of dual-earner couples reported feeling rushed or stressed on weekdays. Even simple tasks that allowed for a degree of dawdling were speeded up: the proportion of children walking to school was cut in half in the boom years.
Meanwhile, in their book The Builders, Kathy Sheridan and Frank McDonald quoted one property industry insider on the shift in the idea of a ‘phase’ in relation to construction and sale of housing estates: ‘Before the boom, it used to be Phase 1 this year and Phase 2 the next; now there was a day between them if that.’ Builders would set a price, sell a lot of houses quickly and then decide that the price was too cheap. ‘What happens then is that you call the next bunch of exact same houses “Phase 2”, and the price is hiked maybe 15 per cent. And that could all happen in a few days or in an afternoon. ’
In the property bubble, the clock was always ticking loudly - time really was money as prices rose by the day and the pressure to buy something, anything, right now became irresistible. Yet partly as a result of that same property mania, much of life moved at a teeth-grindingly slow pace. In the 2002, the main opposition party Fine Gael was much mocked for an ad campaign suggesting that the Celtic Tiger was really a Celtic Snail. The imagery was hopelessly out of tune with the popular mood, but it was not inaccurate.
The poor level of investment in public transport and the consequent dependence on cars made Ireland into the traffic jam capital of the world. Seven out of ten Irish workers were travelling to their jobs by car, and the average distance was nearly 16 kilometres. By 2006, there were 1.2 million cars on the road for a population of 4.2 million - more than one car for every four people, including children. The number of people travelling to work by car increased by nearly a quarter between 2002 and 2006. The results were predictable.
A Small Firms Association study, published in 2001, found that the time taken for a small packet of goods to travel five kilometres in Dublin - 57 minutes - was effectively the longest in the world. This journey time compared to 13 minutes in London, nine in Singapore, and 37 in Mumbai. The only city in the survey to be slower was Calcutta, where most business deliveries were still made on foot. For the same reasons, the average speed of buses in Dublin dropped steadily as the property boom gathered pace. In 2001, it was 15 kilometres an hour, compared to an international average of 20. In 2003, it dropped to 13.5 and in 2005 it was 12.9. In a society that was always telling people they had to move fast, moving very slowly was an increasingly common experience. Waiting - in a car at the infamous Red Cow roundabout on the M50 into Dublin, on a very long list for hospital treatment, in a serpentine queue at the overcrowded Dublin airport - was one of the characteristic modes of life in a frantically fast society.
Perhaps the most confusing thing about the Irish sense of time was that its grand narrative refused to go in a straight line. For what the Irish in Ireland were experiencing as new - rapid urbanisation, multiculturalism, the need to make one’s way in a polyglot and physically unfamiliar society - was a recapitulation of the experiences of their own ancestors when they emigrated from rural farms to huge metropolitan centres in the US or Britain. The diasporic life was now lived at home - a logical outcome of the economic reversal in which, instead of Irish labour moving towards American capital, American capital had moved towards Irish labour. The sense of estrangement felt by generations of emigrants could now be felt without actually going anywhere.
These changes in, and confusions of, the Irish relationship to space and time had a profound cumulative effect. They made it difficult for Irish society to develop a coherent image of itself. The place was hard to grasp.
What made it even more so was, paradoxically, one of the great strengths of Irish culture: its capacity for double-think. For a range of reasons - the simultaneous existence of paganism and Christianity, the ambiguous relationship of indigenous society to a colonial power, the long experience of emigration - Irish culture developed a particularly strong capacity for operating simultaneously within different mental frameworks. This is one of the reasons for the rich inventiveness of Irish artistic life and for much of the humour, teasing and wordplay that enliven social interaction. Irish double-think is wonderfully summed up by the old woman in the 1930s who, asked by Seán O’Faoláin if she believed in the little people, replied, ‘I do not, sir, but they’re there.’
Yet this same capacity to be in two minds has also been at work in many of the most shameful aspects of Irish society. Hypocrisy, in which Irish life abounds, is one of its forms: double-think is closely allied to double standards. So too is the extraordinary capacity of the society to both know and not know things simultaneously. Irish people knew very well that the appalling system of Church-run industrial schools existed in order to inflict pain and punishment on children, yet there was genuine shock and disturbance when the systemic abuse was revealed in the 1990s and confirmed in 2009 in the relentless and devastating report of the Ryan inquiry. In Ireland, there was a refinement on Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous ramblings about known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns. The Irish added another category: unknown knowns, things that were understood to be the case and yet remained unreal. At its most extreme this worked as a kind of collective psychosis, analogous to the idea of dissociation in psychiatry, where, in response to trauma, the mind distances itself from experiences that it does not wish to process.
This mechanism was at work in relation to corruption. Charles Haughey understood this with a clarity approaching genius. Instead of hiding the vast wealth for which an innocent explanation was impossible, he flaunted it, relying on the capacity of the public at large both to know that he must be corrupt and somehow to confine this knowledge to a dark corner of the brain where it remained inert and irrelevant. His success strengthened the workings of the unknown knowns - when his gargantuan appetite for other people’s money was formally and undeniably revealed, it was necessary for the large swathe of the population that supported him to believe that it had not known about it all along. With this habit of mind so well ingrained it was possible to vote for a fraudster while believing that this was not an act of collusion but merely, for example, an expression of sympathy with a man who was good to his Mammy.
Gradually in this way, the Irish power of double-think became less charming and playful and more like George Orwell’s definition of the word he invented in his novel Ninteen Eighty-Four: ‘The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them . . . To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which on
e denies.’
Again, the consequences of this way of thinking were not abstract. The greatest unknown known of all was the fact that property prices were artificial and unsustainable. This was known both from history and from common sense. Economists and regulators knew it from studies and statistics. Ordinary punters knew through the operation of basic intelligence. It simply made no sense that a three-bedroomed semi in a Dublin suburb was ‘worth’ €1 million or that an apartment in Cork had the same value as a chateau on the Loire. Yet these realities were also unknown.
One contributor to the sense of displacement was undoubtedly the slow death of Catholic Ireland. The institutional Catholic Church had dominated both the public identity and the personal values of a majority of the population from the middle of the nineteenth century until the institution itself began to implode in the 1990s. The gradual rise of urban, secular and Anglo-American cultural norms on the one side and the revelation of horrific crimes of child abuse on the other broke that dominance. What the sociologist Tom Inglis called the ‘moral monopoly’ of the Church was ended.
For social conservatives, the loss of religious faith is an adequate explanation for the confusions of Irish life in the Celtic Tiger years and for the amorality that ran through them. But this explanation does not bear much scrutiny. In the first place, the Church was not a beacon of moral certitude - it was a deeply corrupt institution that tortured and enslaved children in its industrial schools and that placed the need to protect its own reputation by covering up child abuse ahead of the safety of vulnerable children. And secondly, the great nexus of amorality, Fianna Fáil, was arguably never more closely aligned with the Church than it was under Bertie Ahern. It was Ahern who passionately denounced as ‘aggressive secularism’ any attempt to debate the Church’s continued control of the education and health systems. It was he who attempted to enshrine Catholic teaching on abortion in the constitution. Above all, it was he who used over €1 billion of public money to save the Church from the legal and financial consequences of its tolerance for child abuse when he agreed a deal to indemnify the religious orders against being sued. The institutional Church was not edged out by the governing culture of the Celtic Tiger - it was closely allied to it.
Ship of Fools Page 17