The Winter of Our Discontent

Well, this is a winter of discontent, that’s for sure. It’s the coldest and snowiest since 1991. And there’s rain. And floods. But of course, you’d put up with all that if we weren’t also contending with economic Armageddon. Which, by the looks of it, we are.

It’s been one tsunami after another. Except, of course, that after a tsunami you have some chance that friendly nations will pitch in to help. But we can’t rely on that because we don’t have too many friends these days, partly because we got ahead of ourselves during the Celtic Tiger era and partly because in the Lisbon referendum we pissed on their shoes just to show we could.
Hubris, hubris, hubris, say it and say it again. It describes folly, exaggerated self-confidence or arrogance, usually (in Greek tragedy) ending in retribution or downfall. We’re working our way through our very own Greek tragedy.
And things really look grim. Day after day the list of closures and layoffs grows. In some cases they are firms with a strong old industrial base, the kind that we have long thought doomed anyway. But there’s also others, like Ericsson, which are the kind of jobs we’ve been hoping would drive the next economic wave, and losing them is a bit of a blow.
Many forces are in play. But it’s hard not to see these developments (and the weather!) as reflecting also the extraordinary pessimism of modern Ireland, the savagery and self-hatred we encounter at every turn.
Architectural historians use the term Brutalism to encapsulate the architecture of the 1960s and 1970s. It seems appropriate also to describe the public discourse in Ireland in 2009… the New Brutalism.
Maybe I misjudge investors and entrepreneurs, but I doubt it. Few visiting this country and reading the daily papers and listening to the radio could feel that there was any kind of constructive capacity here at all.
But there is. To paraphrase Obama, we’re as smart as we were last month, or last year. What we make is as good. What we do is as good. Our hands are as skilful, our hearts as strong, our words as winning.
We’re also wiser. Look at the bitter pills we’ve swallowed and the hard lessons we’ve learned in the last months. This is, if anything, a smarter place to invest. But such is the gloom, and the mounting despair, that nobody has the time or energy or vision to see it.
Fury is understandable. We have been taken for a ride by many. Some fat cats have lived high and mighty at our expense. Worse still, as their cardhouses tumbled, they brought ours down with them.
There will be choices in days, months and years to come, of course, but armed with our new knowledge, awareness and rage we can start to refashion our society to better frame and deliver on what we value.
Of course we’ll have to eat humble pie for a while. For example, remember the jauntiness with which Mary Harney told visiting US businessmen that we in Ireland were strong admirers of the American frontier spirit and were closer to Boston than Berlin?
But as Barack Obama sets out his programme for Government it is clear that the US is moving closer to Berlin and that, unless we change direction, we could be stranded high and dry, closer to Birmingham than anywhere else.
Indeed, as this whole economic catastrophe has unfolded it is the social economies of old Europe that have best weathered the storm. Had we been closer to Berlin ourselves we’d be in a better place now.
There may be a light on the horizon. It is interesting that Dr. Robert Kennedy, head of Business administration at the University of Michigan, believes that our economy will bounce back and will outperform the rest of Europe over the next decade. He makes the case eloquently.
He predicts that more jobs will be lost to Eastern Europe from our manufacturing base. But, he says, where we have an edge is in our ‘highly skilled, educated workforce’. He further argues that advanced economies have to move on from manufacturing and distribution to services and specialist areas. And, as it happens, among many areas in which we are way ahead of the field is nanotechnology… so we’re already starting the next wave…
It ain’t going to be easy. And there has to be a far greater sense of equality built into the new deal than was the case before. But others have dealt with similar circumstances, like the Finns – and look where they got to. If we must, we will. We can.
The darkest hour is just before the dawn.