WHITHER MOTHER IRELAND?

Economic crisis, emigration and high unemployment – we’ve seen it all before, But can 2013 offer Irish people a fresh start?

Artists, filmmakers, writers, historians and other academics came together late last year to find answers to that question at The Future State of Ireland conference in Goldsmith Art College in London.
Some speakers at the event questioned the assumption that there is one unified, homogenous Ireland with a shared present or future.
“We’re not all in it together,” filmmaker Mary Jane O’Leary told the conference, adding that austerity policies are hitting some people – those with disabilities, single parents, the poor – far harder than others and will continue to do so.
While the Celtic Tiger years sometimes felt like a great leap forward out of the dreary past into a shiny new future of multiculturalism, prosperity and increasingly relaxed attitudes to sex, much didn’t change. But we may not be as tied to the past as some people imagine.
For example, the tragic death of Savita Halappanaver in a Galway hospital has galvanised public opinion in a way that’s likely to ensure the government will be held to its promise to legislate for abortion later this year.
Other speakers suggested that Ireland’s future is as much about what hasn’t happened as what has. Art writer Emma Cummins pointed out that the landscape here is now littered with relics of the idea of prosperity that so suddenly disappeared – ghost estates.
“We are not,” she said, “haunted by our past, but by a future that didn’t happen”.
“Our very recent history up to the crash of 2008 predisposed us to expect a certain kind of future which has now been exploded,” historian Roy Foster agreed. “When the shower of temporary riches that apparently rained down on us in the late 20th and very early 21st centuries came to an end, there came to light a certain sense of disgust at the inadequacy and venality of the way Ireland has been governed.”
So it could be that the derailing of that prosperous future contains the seeds of other, deeper changes in Ireland. One of the curious things about the Irish response to the economic crisis has been the absence of action. Living in Barcelona, Irish filmmaker Mary Jane O’Leary has witnessed strikes and mass protests against austerity in the Catalunyan city. It made her wonder why Irish people have been so passive – consenting, almost – since the 2009 bank bailouts.
“There was a sense of desperation about it,” she says of the protests in Spain. “People already knew they had lost so much. But I could see the dignity people gain from this.”
Along with London-based director Treasa O’Brien, Mary Jane is making a documentary titled Too Good To Resist: (Un)Popular Resistance In 21st Century Ireland, asking why Irish people are so peculiarly unwilling to take to the streets to voice their anger at the direction the country’s course has taken.
It’s not the first time Irish filmmakers have wondered why Ireland seems to be stagnating when social change is gathering momentum elsewhere in Europe. In the late ‘60s, journalist Peter Lennon came home from Paris to document Ireland’s stultifying traditionalism. O’Brien and O’Leary cite his famous documentary, The Rocky Road To Dublin, as an important starting point for their own investigations.
Among the theories about Irish inaction are that emigration has extracted many discontented young people from the country, and that social partnership – the pay deals periodically struck between employers, the government and trade unions – defused potential tension between workers and the state.
They also want to examine whether the clientalist nature of Irish politics has prevented the kind of state-wide solidarity that would underpin a serious protest movement in Ireland.
The two filmmakers are aware that Ireland’s loss of sovereignty is contributing to the dispiriting sense that resistance really is futile.
“Who do you protest to in Ireland now? It’s the EU and the IMF – you can’t vote them out,” O’Leary rues.
See facebook.com/2good2resist.