A Test of Our Mettle

History doesn’t always present with flags and trumpets. You only know it for what it is after the fact. Yes, sometimes events inarguably mark historic hinges – the assassination of JFK, the Munich air disaster, the Yom Kippur war, the Sputnik, Nelson Mandela’s freedom walk. But mostly it’s more casual. Things are the way they are until we notice that in fact they’re different…

Just a week or two is all it took this time. There we all were ridin’ high on the pig’s back and whap! Down we came. The ESRI did the figures and called it recession.
All of a sudden the boom years seem so far away. The papers and radio programmes are full of it. And full of shit as well. We’re getting a bizarre mix of nostalgia for the early ‘80s and weird, post-Catholic guilt. You know the type of nonsense – ‘we’ve had the party, now for the hangover’. All that bollocks.
There’s a lot of ochoning and ullagoning going on. Some people – mostly idiots paid by gullible media to have opinions – figure it’s all over, that our goose is cooked, that the bad old days are here again. Hey, we’re not where we were 20 years ago! Get it out of your heads! Recession is a technical term usually meaning no growth or negative growth in GDP for two quarters. It’s not the end of civilisation. It’s not even the end of the Irish economic success story. It’s part of a pretty normal cycle in the economy.
But we are in a key moment of change and – just as we’re not in the ‘80s now – neither will we ever return to the late 90s. And if things really screw up, for example if Israel attacks Iran and oil prices go totally out of control, well, all bets are off.
A few things are in play. For a start there’s the credit crunch. Not our doing, but certainly our problem. Blame George Bush and his arse-licking frontiersman financial services wackos. Apart from leaching over $40m a day from the US economy to spend on the war in Iraq, Bush’s presidency facilitated, encouraged, even pandered to a shower of irresponsible venture capitalists who lent money in ways that are still to be unravelled and in so doing put the world’s financial services at grave risk of meltdown.
Then there’s the decline of the dollar against the euro. Great if you’re a shopper headed for New York, but bad in more or less every other way, especially for exporters.
On top of that fuel prices have rocketed. Inflation is soaring. And, for various reasons, including the credit crunch, property won’t sell and building has ground to a halt. Jobs have been lost. FAS is organising recruiting fairs to help construction workers migrate. The Government tax take is down.
It’s a pretty good test of our collective mettle. But it also shakes up a lot of assumptions we’ve developed in recent times. One of these is to do with the New Ireland. It’s hardly a coincidence that inward migration, including refugee applications, has been declining in line with economic activity. In turn, this raises questions about our demographic projections. We’ve been all self-congratulatory about the huge range of cultures we find amongst us. That may change. Ireland may be a fascinating case study of the new mobility of the world’s labour force, as well as of capital…
Across all this, of course, we must layer the rejection of the Lisbon Treaty. We’ve benefited hugely from membership of the European Union. The place we have occupied in the European imagination is unique. It has been partly fashioned by others’ perception of our landscape, poetry, drama and music, partly by our apparently more relaxed and devil-may-care attitude to life and partly by our solution-focused ability to find the common purpose amongst conflicting causes.
Our economic success was universally welcomed. We’ve been the golden child, so to speak. But the European imagination only thought of the good stuff, not of the Irish capacity for malice and meanness, parochialism, self-interest and begrudgery.
As dark clouds gather, everybody’s going to need friends. Rejection of the Treaty doesn’t seem such a great idea all of a sudden. Being applauded by the United Kingdom Independence Party makes us look like shabby west-Brit colonial stoolpigeons. Pissing on the shoes of our most generous and supportive friends makes us look petulant, not thoughtful.
We can and will dig out of this recession, probably by 2010 if all goes vaguely to plan. Indeed, if Obama wins in the US, the surge of New Deal optimism is likely to trigger the restart of growth in the US economy as early as next Spring with wide knock-on benefits across the globe.
Let’s just hope that Israel doesn’t hand us all the biggest headache of all…