The real effect of the loss of Church authority was that there was no deeply rooted civic morality to take its place. The Irish had been taught for generations to identity morality with religion, and a very narrow kind of religion at that. Morality was about what happened in bedrooms, not in boardrooms. It was about the body, not the body politic. Masturbation was a much more serious sin than tax evasion. In a mindset where homosexuality was much worse than cooking the books, it was okay to be bent as long as you were straight. This nineteenth-century ethic was not pushed aside by the creation of a coherent and deeply rooted civic, democratic and social morality. It mostly collapsed under its own weight of hypocrisy. The familiar code of values, the language in which right and wrong could be discussed, lost its meaning before Irish society had fully learned to speak any other tongue.
One of the few areas of Irish life that had any continuing sense of integrity was artistic creativity. But here, too, there were no easy ways to get one’s bearings. The last big economic and cultural shift, the opening up of the country to foreign investment in the late 1950s, had been played out with remarkable potency in the theatre, as a brilliant generation of playwrights (Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, Thomas Kilroy, John B. Keane) created vivid dramas of a society torn between past and future. This was possible because there was a single governing narrative - the conflict between tradition and modernity, between the local and the global, between the values of a rural, Catholic society and the aspirations of the young for personal freedom, emotional satisfaction and material abundance.
The problem with the world of the Celtic Tiger was that there wasn’t a single big narrative that could be shaped into a clear conflict. The personal choices thrown up by social change were rather less heroic: agonising about whether to stay in a small village in Donegal or to emigrate to Philadelphia is rather more dramatic than wondering whether to buy a holiday home in Bulgaria or Florida. The sense of conflicted spaces (going into exile or staying at home) that shaped so much of the Irish artistic imagination in the twentieth century was not easy to generate for a generation that treated Ryanair like its bus service and did its Christmas shopping in New York. It is not for nothing that conflict (as opposed to bickering) virtually disappeared from Irish drama in the Celtic Tiger years and that monologue replaced dialogue as the preferred form for the younger writers.
A particular problem was that Ireland did not have a tradition of large-scale social realism. Irish history and society had been too angular, too discontinuous, for a realistic literature to thrive. Indeed, the glory of Irish writing had long been the distorting strangeness of the ‘cracked looking glass’ that did not so much reflect society as rearrange it into dreamily disconnected shapes. In the Celtic Tiger years, however, there were times when the country could have done with a kind of art that was forensically descriptive of contemporary Irish society, ordering its chaos into a recognisable whole. There were occasional triumphs of Irish realism on screen, like Lenny Abrahamson and Mark O’Halloran’s superb conjuring of unofficial and invisible lives in Adam and Paul, Prosperity and Garage, or Eugene O’Brien and Declan Recks’s micro-studies of Midlands anomie in Pure Mule. It was also true that the emergence of the Irish crime novel in such small masterpieces as Gene Kerrigan’s Little Criminals and Dark Times in the City suggested that international genres like the thriller might be more useful in depicting a globalised culture than the more specifically Irish traditions proved to be. But no one in any form could manage the kind of realist epic that would give a multi-layered and shifting society a sense of where it was and how it got there.
It may have been, in fact, that the disruptions of time and space in boomtime Ireland were simply too complex to be dealt with in the same work. On the whole, Irish literature was far better at dealing with time than with space. It had relatively easy access to a framework - the extended family - in which time unfolds naturally. The great familial myths of Sebastian Barry or Marina Carr, or the more intense and intimate worlds of, say, Anne Enright’s The Gathering, were very powerful correctives to the sense of a continuous, timeless present tense that dominated the boom years. They reminded people that the past doesn’t just go away.
On the other hand, the rarer engagements with the fractured sense of space (Tom Murphy’s The House, say, or Colm Tóibín’s novel Brooklyn) dealt with the idea of living in two places at the same time, but did so by projecting themselves backwards to an era long before the Celtic Tiger was even imaginable. On the whole, it was easier to deal with that unruly beast either by confining it within the cage of familial intimacies or by seeking the possibility of narrative order in older, more distant settings.
There was also the paradox that the most thoroughly globalised brand of Irish culture in the boom years was also the most conservative. Aspects of Irish culture were commodified as never before in boybands, popular women’s fiction and Irish dancing shows. At least the first two of those, however, tended to be peculiarly archaic. The Boyzones and Westlifes were little more than the Irish showbands of the 1960s, scrubbed up, slicked down and without the cumbersome need to play instruments or be particularly good at music. The popular fiction writers who sold vast numbers of books in shiny covers around the world were of very mixed quality, but in broad terms their work derived (at worst) from jazzed-up Mills and Boon and (at best) from the Irish short-story tradition of the 1930s. In both cases, the trick was to package and market aspects of pre-Celtic Tiger Irish culture as globalised commodities, not to actually respond in any real way to contemporary Ireland.
One of the real markers of this was sex. It is a lavish understatement to say that Irish sexual mores changed in the 1990s. Yet, while the end of the Franco era in Spain, which produced a surge of sexual energy in a previously repressed Catholic country, gave the world Pedro Almódovar and Penélope Cruz, the breaking of Ireland’s sexual Berlin wall gave the world Boyzone. What the boybands and much of the chicklit shared was a strangely antiseptic, coy sexuality. They were, after all, sometimes overlapping worlds: in Cecelia Ahern’s P.S. I Love You, the heroine dreams of listening to ‘the soothing sounds of her favourite Westlife CD’. The same heroine has a ‘neat little chest’ instead of breasts, and on being given a present by a friend giggles, ‘It’s a battery operated . . . oh my God! Ciara! You naughty girl!’
The dance shows, however, did, in an odd way, respond to the changing nature of the Celtic Tiger - they got infinitely worse. Riverdance, which created the genre and became the most commercially successful Irish cultural export of all time, was actually a highly sophisticated piece of work. It created and enacted a myth that really did capture something about the way Irish people hoped to see themselves in the 1990s. It took a traditional and rather despised form - Irish dancing - and injected it with the steroids of sex, speed, Irish-American optimism and fake tan. But it was a genuine synthesis of traditional forms and music (composed and performed by people who really understood and valued it) on the one hand and Broadway pizzazz on the other.
And its narrative was actually the nearest thing the first phase of the Celtic Tiger created to a myth of itself. It played out a story of globalisation (Irish dancing evolving in the mists of time, being taken to America by emigrants, fusing with other cultures, and then, by implication, returning on the winged feet of Michael Flatley and Jean Butler) that was also a comforting narrative of cyclical continuity. What was coming to Ireland now was simply what had left it before. Life in a multicultural society wasn’t a threat to tradition, but an enhancement of it. Along with the spectacle and the showbiz, Riverdance was a statement about how it was possible to be Irish in the twenty-first century.
If Riverdance was the great mythic spectacle of the first phase of the Irish boom, before it became a bubble, the characteristic spectacle of the second part, appropriately enough, was Michael Flatley’s 2005 show The Celtic Tiger. In its precisely calibrated mixture of stupidity and lavishness, it was the perfect show for a society that had more money than sense.
&nb
sp; The Celtic Tiger broadly replayed the narrative of Riverdance , from the Celtic mists of time to American emigration to cultural fusion to triumphant transatlantic return. But this time it was not a broad metaphor for the globalisation of Irish culture, but quite specifically the unfolding in dance, song and spectacle of the Celtic Tiger itself. The tiger was now the prime emblem of Ireland - two huge, Disneyfied tiger faces flanked the screens and one of the climactic dances featured slinky women in tiger-striped costumes crawling, pawing and rubbing themselves in ecstasy (house prices must have been up again) as if they were escapees from a porn remake of Cats.
The extravagant ludicrousness of The Celtic Tiger did not make it any less authentic an expression of its subject matter. Indeed it probably made it more so. One of the fascinations of the show was its high kitsch presentation of Irish history as a pure pastiche in which whole eras melt into each other. Thus, it began with Flatley dressed presumably as a Celtic warrior but actually as a cross between a particularly louche Roman general (Caligula playing at soldiers perhaps) and Elvis Presley in Las Vegas. All Irish history is sweet - up to a point. Devout monks dervish-dance with lurid temptresses, with nary a word about the corruptions of the flesh. Horny-headed Vikings dance chastely with Irish maidens. An Irish Garden of Eden blossoms.
But then the chorus line of Brits invades, identifiable by their red coats and powdered wigs, goose-stepping and robotic, like clockwork Nazis. They burn a thatched cottage. (The Irish maidens barely escape the fire, but, distressingly, the bottom three-quarters of their skirts have been consumed by the flames.) There is much writhing around to indicate the Famine. Father Michael Flatley enters in a nineteenth-century soutane intoning the Lord’s Prayer. The Brits surround him and shoot him dead with their fingers. A man sings ‘The Four Green Fields’ (a traditional nineteenth-century ballad written in the late 1960s). A boy playing, of all things, soccer is blown up by a British tank (presumably one of the little known nineteenth-century prototypes exclusively used for oppressing the Irish). Then Michael Flatley leads the 1916 Rising. It is not surprising that he wins, since the Brits are still in their redcoats and powdered wigs and are still using their fingers for guns. Everybody sings ‘A Nation Once Again’. Ireland is free and triumphant.
But there’s not much to do in Ireland now that it’s free, so everyone goes to New York. They dance with homeboys and Spaniards and Michael dances dressed as a gangster with nifty spats and a Tommy gun, so he’s clearly doing well. But what of Ireland back home? It’s struggling to become modern: here’s Kathleen ni Houlihan as an Aer Lingus stewardess in a green uniform, dancing a jig in high heels - modernity and tradition. Then Michael and his crew of sun-glassed beefcake boys in Pan Am uniforms fly her over New York. She sees Ireland’s destiny. She does a striptease act, peeling off her green Irish uniform to reveal underneath a bra and panties imprinted with the Stars and Stripes. Ireland was really America all along and now the Celtic Tiger has allowed itself to reveal its true identity. All that suffering - the Famine, the evictions, the murder of Saint Michael Flatley by the redcoat Brit bastards - has been repaid at last. Flatley leads the chorus line in a big, rapturous tap-along to ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’. The triumph has come: we are real live cousins of our Uncle Sam.
Risible as all of this is, it is the best that Irish culture could do in constructing a mythic version of the meaning of the Celtic Tiger in its manic, delusional phase. It was crass and bloated, vulgar and ridiculous, but it came to a conclusion that made some kind of sense: Ireland is not Ireland any more but someplace else. And it came up with a name for that place: America.
There were other names too, of course: Bermuda, Liechtenstein, Dubai. And they were all attempts to escape from a reality that would ultimately assert itself, the real society behind the dreamy facades.
9
Fair Play to You, Willie
‘The world watched in astonishment. That is no exaggeration.’
- Seán FitzPatrick, chairman of Anglo Irish Bank
In late November 2008, there was a business lunch in the pavilion at Leopardstown racecourse. The star turns were the former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and his old pal Seánie, more formally known as Seán FitzPatrick, chairman of Ireland’s third largest bank, Anglo Irish. Less than two months previously, Fitzpatrick’s bank had precipitated a crisis that led to a state guarantee of all deposits in Irish banks. Yet both Bertie and Seánie were on jovial form. Both referred to the coming end of the recession, which they both called ‘the other side of the hill’. Bertie quipped, in relation to the venue, that ‘If you can’t make money any other way, you can try it on a horse.’ Anyway, he added to cheer up his listeners, ‘I think Seánie has a bit left.’
Less than a month later, on 18 December 2008, Seánie resigned as chairman of Anglo Irish. It had emerged that FitzPatrick had €84 million in loans from his own bank. The lending was approved by the bank’s credit committee and known to its internal auditor. Anglo Irish had, however, been cooking its books to hide these liabilities from shareholders and potential investors. Each year, as the deadline for the annual accounts approached, FitzPatrick borrowed whatever amount he owed to Anglo from a building society, Irish Nationwide. The auditors would examine the books and see no holes. Within a few days, FitzPatrick repaid the money to Nationwide. The sums involved were huge: at one stage in 2007, FitzPatrick’s loans amounted to €129 million and in June 2009 the figure stood at €106 million. The purpose of the operation was entirely straightforward - to hide the fact that Seánie was taking large chunks of the bank’s cash for a private gambling spree on Irish and international property, the financing of films and the purchase of shares in Anglo Irish itself. Fitzpatrick had been doing this end-of-year financial shuffle for eight years, to the tune of €228 million in total.
Even more bizarre than this juggling act at a supposedly reputable bank, however, was the fact that the Financial Regulator knew about it. Anglo Irish didn’t tell the regulator, and its auditors Ernst and Young never managed to spot the strange pattern of money coming in from Irish Nationwide and flowing out again, always between 26 and 30 September of each year. But Irish Nationwide’s auditors, KPMG, had warned its directors of the ‘reputational risk’ from the loans. The building society, in turn, had covered its own behind by informing the Regulator. As Irish Nationwide’s chairman Danny Kitchen explained in a formal statement in May 2009, ‘The Society, in line with its normal reporting procedures, informed the Regulator of this loan amongst others and at no time was any adverse comment received.’
More outlandish still was the reaction, in December 2008, of the Financial Regulator, the government and the Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan to the revelations. Firstly, the Regulator, Pat Neary, confirmed that his office ‘became aware, following an inspection earlier this year, of matters surrounding loans from Anglo Irish Bank to Seán FitzPatrick’. It had merely ‘advised Anglo Irish Bank to ensure that these loans are reported in the annual accounts for 2008’ - please stop cooking the books. But this was not a matter of any great consequence since ‘it does not appear that anything illegal took place in relation to these loans’. The highest pitch of indignation the Financial Regulator could manage was to mutter that ‘the practices surrounding these loans were not appropriate’.
It was not hard to understand this urge to slap Seánie about the head with a feather. The Financial Regulator, under Neary, had known about FitzPatrick’s dodgy back-to-back loans for years from Irish Nationwide’s reports, had actually spotted them in the Anglo Irish accounts early in 2008 and had done next to nothing. However personally uncomfortable individual supervisors may have been, the Financial Regulator was institutionally bound to underplay the affair. If FitzPatrick’s book-cookery had been illegal, then the Financial Regulator had failed to stop a crime. It followed, therefore, that nothing illegal can have occurred.
But this standard exercise in corporate arse-covering also became official government policy. Just as Ireland’s international reputat
ion was disappearing over the horizon, the crew of the ship sent a signal to shore - it’s perfectly legal to doctor your annual accounts in Ireland.
Brian Lenihan issued a statement on behalf of the government. It ‘expressed his disappointment at the circumstances surrounding the resignation of Mr Seán FitzPatrick as chairman’ of Anglo Irish.
Disappointment had always been the emotion of choice for Fianna Fáil and other members of the Irish establishment confronted with scams, swindles and con-jobs by respectable bankers. Charlie McCreevy, as Minister for Finance in 2000, commented on the revelation of the DIRT conspiracy: ‘I must again say that the standards the public are entitled to expect were not adhered to in many financial institutions, and that was very disappointing.’ Bertie Ahern, in the same year, was ‘gravely disappointed’ that a member of his party, Denis Foley, was part of the Ansbacher scam. The Moriarty report into the way his mentor Charles Haughey trousered the equivalent of €45 million was also, funnily enough, a cause of ‘grave disappointment’.
Being disappointed was Fianna Fáil’s default mode when faced with crookery. Instead of reflecting on the ways in which they might have colluded with the behaviour in question, it allowed them to present themselves as victims whose feelings had been quite terribly hurt.
Lenihan’s insipid statement was a signal that the government was adopting as its own position both FitzPatrick’s claim in his resignation statement that his behaviour has been merely ‘inappropriate from a transparency point of view’ and the Regulator’s self-serving insistence that nothing illegal had been done. These two positions were in fact conflated by the Tánaiste (deputy prime minister) Mary Coughlan later the same day when she said of Lenihan: ‘As he said, he is disappointed about the actions, although not illegal.’ It was now official government policy, broadcast to the world, that Seán FitzPatrick had broken no laws when he shifted tens of millions of euro off the books and into his own investment schemes eight years in a row.
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