As the cold winds of January swirl outside, we contemplate where we are. Not quite Shit Creek, but certainly the North Atlantic. And we can’t seem to find a paddle. We are committed (by the last Government, let’s not forget) to paying off the debts of mad bankers. And it’s hurting us very badly indeed.
A friend who is about to retire pondered the injustice of this. He had just been advised on what he might do with his retirement lump sum. There was mention of various kinds of investment options. Each came carefully wrapped in a warning: the value of investments can go down as well as up.
“Well,” he said, “that’s what those foreign bankers were doing with the Anglo-Irish bonds, they were investing and they should accept what everyone else is expected to accept… that the value can go down as well as up. If you gamble on a horse, you don’t get a second chance, do you?”
Indeed.
Last week the Irish Times published a letter from a large group of academics and social justice activists calling for an emergency budget to create jobs, generate sustainable growth, raise incomes and reduce poverty. The list was longer than the letter. Many of the signatories would be familiar from the TV3 programme ‘A Scare at Midnight with Vincent Browne’, or whatever it’s called, and if they’re not, they may well be soon.
It’s an important statement, which is of a piece with other critiques, generally emanating from the left, of our present scenario. But one is struck by its almost poignantly civic-minded, even polite, tone. There is an absence in this, as in most responses to the crisis, of two strands of action.
The first is get-up-and-go: the idea of rolling up the sleeves and digging ourselves out of this mess, creating new industries, new jobs, new kinds of jobs and new thinking, away from the niceties and norms of ordinary politics and economics. No offence, but there were no entrepreneurs on the list.
The second is direct action. It is said, for example, that there are bastards in banks who are persecuting home owners over mortgages and who won’t allow those in financial difficulty the same latitude as the banks themselves have been afforded. And so on. I don’t know if this is the case but if so, what do people do?
They phone Joe Duffy. They enter mainstream systems to look for help. Sometimes it’s too much and they fold in on themselves. In general, they remain civil and law-abiding.
Attitudes were very different in the past. There is a deposition in Clare Library by Andrew O’Donoghue. In 1912, a hundred years ago this year, he was kept at home from school because, as he tells it:
“It was a time of land agitation all over – in Co. Clare especially, some landlords owned miles of country and the people wanted the land divided between small tenants or others under the Land League. The cry was then ‘the land for the people and the roads for the bullocks’ and that led to the cattle drive and to arrest and imprisonment of those engaged in them and to retaliation from the landlords… Clare at that time (my school days) was called ‘the county of Moonlighters’ …”
What O’Donoghue is describing is the late stages of the Land War, throughout which there were regular outbursts of local violence and intimidation, boycotts and resistance to evictions.
Shadowy groups formed from time to time under various names and in various locations. They were not above threatening and even attacking individuals and institutions they perceived to be inimical to the interests of local people.
A century of agrarian unrest was put to bed through land reforms such as the Labourers (Ireland) Acts of 1906 and 1911 by which 40,000 rural labourers were financed by the British Government to become proprietors of their own cottage homes, each with an acre of land.
With all due respect to everyone then and now, it’s unlikely that the land problem would have resolved without constant direct action.
Fast forward and there’s nothing comparable, other than calls for non-payment of the household tax, water charges and septic tank charges. Indeed, it is little short of bizarre that the possible loss of teachers from small rural schools should excite so much more anger than the possible eviction of neighbours for non-payment of their mortgage…
People talk about rejecting the EU treaties to show their rejection of austerity – this being a code for the whole shit-storm we are in the middle of. Irrational? Yes. The treaties aren’t the issue. The problem is the decision to bail out the banks while at the same time allowing, at the micro level, the pursuit by banks and building societies of mortgage holders to pay in full.
Yet, unlike a century ago, there has been no direct action targeting individuals and institutions. This forbearance says much for the strong acceptance by the Irish people of the structures and processes of their State. We make our own laws and by and large respect them.
But our great-grandparents wouldn’t have been so compliant. And if we could ask them, they might well tell us that some things can’t be dealt with by Governments and need to be dealt with at close quarters. They’d have been whistling for Captain Moonlight…
Or, in the Wild West, they’d have sent for a Man With No Name…
Of course, where the Captain and his men might have torched haystacks and disrupted auctions, the 21st century offers many forms and arenas for non-violent action, including cyberspace and the social media.
But here’s the point: reason yields to rage when injustice grows roots. The differential treatment of bank bondholders on the one hand and the distressed mortgage holders on the other is a particular bone of contention. There could be trouble brewing.