New Definition Proposed

Election (n): That event that occurs every five years where the Irish people exercise their right to vote in a new Opposition.

Beyond Irony

Meanwhile in Kerry, an embittered old man polishes his father's medals and stares into the middle distance, while a nation celebrates.

The only sound, other than singing, during God Save The Queen was of a large portion of the Irish media muttering "Ah crap, there goes my pre-written story". Their attempts to whip up some controversy last week over the matter were despicable and pathetic. We deserve better.

No Béarla or On Not Being Sasanachs

Manchan Magan's sojourn around the island speaking only Irish confirmed what most of us already knew - as a country we either can't or won't speak Our Official Language. Seeing him appear on RTE's The Panel last week did make me wonder if someone a little less floppy haired and fey (say a random Seoige sister) would have had more success. Or at least encountered less hostility.

His experience does beg the question of why should we try to promote and preserve a language amongst the populace when the overwhelming majority of people display no inclination to use it. Perversely, the same people, i.e. us, who won't speak it a) dishonestly claim on census forms that they can and b) regard attempts to lessen its importance as some sort of national betrayal. Witness all the letters to the papers in the aftermath of Fine Gael's suggestion to drop mandatory Irish after the Junior Cert.

Why do we desperately want to keep it but have no interest in using it?

The usual reasons given in support of Irish - it's importance to our cultural identity or heritage, it's beauty as a language, are fair arguments to speak and restore the language. They are not arguments to preserve it in some undead, ultra marginalised, zombie like state. The only argument I have heard in favour of this arrangement is the pub stool one: "Lads, if we don't have a different language, what is there to distinguish us from the English?" (at which point the 'debater' will sit back, fold his arms and look insufferably smug). Note that actually speaking or knowing how to speak the language is not required, just having it in existence and paid lip service to, is sufficient. (Let's leave aside the fact that being indistinguishable from the English is axiomatically assumed to be an horrendous fate).

In short, it is a tribal symbol. Its value to us is symbolic, not practical. It's a linguistic Celtic jersey.

Anyone who has 'gone travelling' knows it is always easy to spot the Canadians abroad. They always, always, always have a little maple leaf motif somewhere on their clothing or bags. Within the first 60 seconds of conversation with them they will mention they are Canadian. What they are really saying of course is that they are not American. Given the hostile attitude of large swathes of the world to the US, it is probably a wise policy. Unless you are pretty tuned in to the subtleties of accent, one tall, healthy looking, even-toothed North American is pretty much indistinguishable from any other one, nationally speaking.

As a country we should either decide to speak the language or ditch it and distribute lots of shamrock (or your favourite motif) badges/hats/shirts/whatever instead. It would be more honest and a lot cheaper.

Prosperity = Good, Poverty = Bad

There was a piece in the Irish Times by academic Joe Clery on Saturday about Fairytale of New York, the Pogues classic, it concludes:

"And when our home-grown neoliberals summon up the sorry ghost of the 1980s to remind us we have never had it so good, MacColl's and MacGowan's duet can be a reminder that not all back then was misery and despair; there was also resilience and resistance."

The fact that hard times can bring out good qualities in people is no argument to return to them. Out of necessity, solidarity in Blitz time London was sky high, but I don't see anyone making a case against peace. Have people really forgotten just how fucking miserable the 80's were in Ireland? It Sucked-with-a-capital-S. We were a poor, insular, insecure, Church-ridden, tax-dodging, miserable little people. I got out as soon as I could and so did 50% of my friends and classmates to London, New York, Amsterdam. There was 16.7% unemployment when I left college. I can remember only a handful of Irish companies recruiting on the Milk Round and loads and loads of UK ones. Tell that to the young people today, and they just won't believe you...

So anytime I hear someone bemoaning our recent prosperity (I can't bring myself to write 'C____c T___r') or the "Oh dear what have we become" brigade, I get quite uptight. Give me the problems of prosperity over those of poverty any day. Yeah even the traffic. Or the house prices. Or the 'loss of our spirituality', whatever that is. As Des Bishop points out, we have traffic jams because now people have jobs to go to and can afford cars to do so. If you had a decent enough job in the 80's life wasn't too bad because relative to everyone else you were quids in. Back then my father was able to drive from the northside of Dublin to his job in Ballsbridge in about 40 minutes. Great. Wonderful. But two of his three sons had to emigrate. We're both back now, because of prosperity.

It wasn't just poverty that made Ireland in the 80's shite. Hand-in-hand with it, went the small-town, small-mind, squinting-window begrudger attitude. Nobody could disentangle cause and effect relationship with those two. We were poor because we were shite and vice versa. I suspect there are at least two types of people people complaining now that everything has gone to hell in a hand basket since we 'got rich':

• Those who were pretty comfortable during the bad times and now only see the down side of prosperity. Their relative position in society has slipped. After all what's the point of being able to go on a second foreign holiday if your house painter can too?
  
• Those who object to how we got here because it does not fit with their political ideology. We got here through a combination of many things but most people agree that our low tax policy and foreign direct investment primarily from U.S. companies were key. If you denigrate the outcome, you denigrate the process by which we got here.
  

Prosperity clearly has not benefited everyone equally or even fairly. Growth has created huge problems, exacerbated by our sometimes pitiful Governmental response to it. But it has resulted in the greater good to the greater number. People are a) happier despite what our commentariat tell us and b) here. It gives us the means to assist those who, for whatever reason, have not benefited from it - if we want to. Would the Niall Mellon house building initiative in South Africa been possible in the 80's (if apartheid had not existed)? It has also gone hand in hand with a dismantling of a lot of the old begrudger attitudes. Success can be admired now rather than be derided as the product of 'pull' or dodgy-dealing or luck.

Repeat after me. Prosperity = Good, Poverty = Bad.

Even when the prosperity we have is unbalanced and sometimes inequitable. If pointing this out makes me a 'neoliberal', I'll take that risk.