Climbing out of the abyss

REIMAGINING THE FUTURE: In the first of a series on how creative thinking can offer a way forward, artists and writers talk to SEAN LOVEabout where we're at and how we can move on

OKAY, WE’RE IN a mess, and we all know there is a startling absence of vision and imagination from our leaders. Not just in the political arena – though it runs throughout that layer in Irish society. The media have turned to the usual array of commentators and economists. Thankfully, all are experts on everything; we may be morally and financially bankrupt, but self-importance and hysteria are not in short supply.

It is difficult to be optimistic as we face into uncertain times, punch-drunk from a litany of scandals and failures. And, as someone with great faith in the fundamental decency of most people, I feel the strain on my own trust. But at this point in our history, we need trust in each other more than ever. We need to face up to the entire mess and map a way out of it.

Is there any role for the arts in charting that way out? Some readers will have noted Seamus Heaney’s words, quoted in a recent Irish Times editorial: “We are disposed to believe that the work of artists helps to create our future . . . that the effort of creative individuals can promote a new order of understanding in the common mind.” We could take that as our starting point. We are all aware of brilliant things quietly happening all over the country, individuals and groups working away. I thought it might be interesting to talk with some writers and artists about Ireland’s future.

Alan Gilsenan

Film-maker

“Any discourse about Ireland, where we’re at or where we’re from, always takes place in an arena that prizes logic and rationality above everything else. And yet, as soon as a baby is born, or somebody dies, or there is a suicide, or somebody has a car crash or a nervous breakdown, what we reach for is art. Art defines us. To a large degree, I think we are ruled more by our heart, by our instincts, by our spirit – and yet our society, the social mores under which we live, are dictated more by logic and rationality.

“I think we imagine our world out of our past, our hopes, our dreams, out of our mythologies. When we look back to the origins of the state, to the 1916 Proclamation, that rebellion was a work of art. As a military rebellion it was a disaster, but they were primarily artists making statements. They knew the value of symbols. What seemed to happen was that people like Pearse, McDonagh (minor writers with a revolutionary aspiration) and people like Yeats (major artists with a minor interest in politics) looked at our past and our cultural inheritance, and they invented this idea. The Ireland that we live in was imagined by our artists, and those artists included the signatories of the Proclamation.

“To a large degree, we achieved that future, at least in practical terms. If you think of what people in the early 20th century were hoping for, a lot of that came true – confidence (veering into over-confidence, but that’s another story), prosperity, autonomy, a sense of ourselves in the world, a sense that we are the equal of any nation.

“Unfortunately, for all the progress we made, a lot of that progress was one dimensional. And that’s why I think, that – notwithstanding there is an international context to the recession – as a country, we seem to have got into a sort of lockjaw. The system is just imploding on itself. At leadership levels, in all the institutions of the state, they seem paralysed.

“If we look back at the 1980s, there were substantial social problems with high unemployment and emigration. But paradoxically, there was also a sense of spirit. The generation who emerged then was confident, but not over-confident, with a sense that they could shape their country. There was an energy that you could change things, and, as we know, most of the social wars were won.

“And then we come into the 1990s, into the boom years, and it became an incredibly cynical age, money was everything. And if there was any transcendent dream, it was only about more success/more money.

“No ideas. No dream. No vision. Success measured only in monetary terms.

“Media fell victim to the same thing. It became product, dominated by its ability to sell. For the arts and the media, society needs them to stand outside, to observe, be iconoclastic.

“But what you have now is a soap-opera version of being argumentative. It’s being played out as a soap opera. There is no room for subtlety or for exploration of the grey areas, which creates a false, sensationalist debate. When did we last hear a news bulletin say, ‘Things are quite bad in the HSE but actually not as bad as we thought they

were . . .’ Every report has to be hysterical, which provokes a similarly hysterical response from political circles.

“We have aped the British/American media style. Maybe we have been subsumed into that world, but I sense that there is still a distinction, an Irish audience that is different. People in Ireland are still very engaged with the place they live and what is happening. It’s just that this is not reflected in our media now. The media need to find a credible way of working for people in Ireland.

“Equally, in lots of ways, the arts in Ireland are as ossified, as fossilised, as everything else. You could look at the arts and see that while we do a good job of selling our reputation, the arts in recent years have also been defined purely by commercial success. The arts, in fact, haven’t done anything radical, haven’t shown any leadership. I don’t think all individual artists have failed us, but the arts have. Across the spectrum, we have spent huge amounts of money being more systematic, to what end? All these wonderful corporate governance and mission statements don’t seem to have got us anywhere. People only have to look at their daily lives, at local schools, hospitals or environment . . . and any of us can see that we have clearly got it wrong. We have messed up. And while there are real economic difficulties for lots of people now, it seems to me that there is a slight sense of relief that the bubble has burst, of letting go. It seems possible now to start re-inventing things a little. And there are loads of very interesting projects all around, on the fringes, not part of the mainstream.

“The leadership engines in Irish society, in politics, corporate world, professions, religion, public services, media, arts . . . seem to be entrenched. It isn’t working, and there is a certain smugness, a certain arrogance, a self-satisfied ‘this is the way it is’ which is entrenched.

“They need to come out and say: ‘We got it wrong, we thought we were doing the right thing, but we messed up.’ And across the board, I think we need to clear the decks. That layer needs to get out of the way, and things need to change. We have to be radical. Let new ideas come through. Re-invent and re-establish what we want as a people. There is a hunger for that.”

Anne Enright

Booker Prize- winning novelist and writer

“During the boom, there was a radical state of denial, like everyone had gone mad. It’s very difficult to respond artistically to that. When the society is crazier than the artist, it does pose a serious problem for art. It was a kind of communal fantasy, glorious in its way. There is a great book to be written about it.

“Overall, I think we should acknowledge that we’re not actually doing too badly. People have asked me how much Ireland changed during the boom. I don’t think it changed much. People just had more money. And that only makes a difference to how much stuff you can buy – and everyone bought loads of stuff.

“Maybe the real question for us is when do people stop getting greedy? What is enough? And not to underestimate the real, profound impact of the crash on a lot of people’s livelihoods – but the things that were strong before the boom were strong during the boom and will continue to be strong now.

“So, if I were to promote anything, it would be new family values. Uphold the constitutional imperative to look after the family, as it exists now rather than de Valera’s idea of the family, which was a chop for him and sausages for all the kids . . .

“If you look at a model of how to do that, the people that have been most successful in doing that are the Scandinavians, and their high-tax economies, the opposite of the road we took in terms of looking after each other. And they’re very good at it . . . It’s a real pity this crash has happened now, because, if it hadn’t, in 100 years’ time we might be really mature, comfortably bourgeois with Scandinavian communal systems, lots of good affordable creches . . .

“Being a woman in Ireland is okay. Compared to other countries where there is more nominal equality . . . there is a sense in Ireland of us all being in it together, which makes it a lot more fun to grow up in this country, for either gender. Though there is an underswing of misogyny that has to be addressed. Its opposite is a kind of reverence for women. We have to ask, for example, why more boys were sexually abused by the religious orders than girls.

“If we were starting again and I could make one major intervention, I would disestablish the Leaving Cert. We may look at the builders and say how disgraceful they were, or, in days gone by, the publicans, who were viewed as having licences to print money . . . But the middle classes have forged themselves licences to print money, in all the professions, in pharmacy, law, medicine . . . In all of them, you get your child seven As and off they go. And for somebody aged 15, 16, or 17, that their idea of success is to get enough points to get into one of these professions, where theyre going to rip off and condescend to the rest of the population for the rest of their lives, is a disgrace.

“I would rather see the curriculum revamped with fewer subjects and a greater emphasis on humanities and civics – call it culture. This isn’t a criticism of the teachers. The teachers in general are brilliant, but they are trying to fit into this sausage factory system . . . It’s true some arts and music classes could be expensive and hard to do properly because teachers need special expertise. But civics doesn’t cost extra. Basically, there needs to be time in school for children to stand back and think. Thinking should be compulsory, like Irish . . .”

Michael Coady

Poet

“I think an awful lot of people saw through the bubble, but none could stop it. It was a form of social cannibalism, a group of professional predators feeding off the hysteria at the expense of the prey: young people trying to find somewhere to live. As a society, we were eating our own young, in some respects.

“Certainly, there are lots of things we should be angry about, and we are angry about. But there is also this clamorous discourse that produces very unpleasant self-righteousness. This ranting self-righteousness is the kind of stuff we got in previous generations from the clerical side, which everyone heard from the pulpit. Well, we don’t tend to hear it from the pulpit any more, but it’s actually there, louder than ever, because it’s coming from the media, from columnists and chat-show hosts. It is even more amplified now, and it doesn’t even recognise itself for what it is – sanctimonious, self-righteous ranting on an either/or basis. It’s almost medieval in the sense that what it wants is people to be put in the stocks, or heads on the block.

“I think there is a hubris out there, certainly on behalf of some of the media. Being positive about things runs against the current of cynicism and irony, both of which I have come to feel are more of a problem than anything else. There are reasons for questions and honesty, certainly. But cynicism is more fear than anything else. It has been the fashionable mode. But it’s an evasion.

“There is a lot of good stuff happening in Ireland, off the radar. There is such a thing as civic or moral virtue, and we don’t see it acknowledged enough. Maybe because one of the other things we are awash in is celebrity.

“I love what Yeats said about culture, ‘a community bound together by imaginative possessions’. Geography and history, place and happening, every aspect of people living together, wherever they are, once they are bound by language or tradition or song or belief or experience of any kind in the one place, for long enough.

“Education is the foundation. I really believe that involving young people in the arts is a source of salvation in many ways – spiritually, materially . . . I cannot imagine anything better than a young person learning to play music, and it really angers me how little status music in particular, but the arts in general, have in mainstream education in Ireland. It’s a systemic fault, not the fault of individual teachers.

“The arts in general are disregarded by our education system. The teachers are not trained or qualified to teach them. The arts need specialist teachers, by and large. Unless you are lucky enough to find a musically inclined teacher in a school, children are coming out of school knowing no song. They know no poem by heart. They’ve never been given the opportunity to play even the most rudimentary musical instrument. This is a huge area that we have marginalised. It’s like a cultural lobotomy.

“The arts, ultimately, are about what an awful lot of human life is about: telling stories. I think the centrality of story is a deep human need, which expresses itself in everything. In religion, in the visual arts, film, drama, creative writing – they are all about story, a deep, deep human need for it that cannot be eradicated. Music is perhaps the most amazing of the arts. Why a symphony or a cello will move you is beyond language.

“Yes, we should invest heavily in education and the arts. But the most worrying thing is that there seems to be no real sense that it should even be done. Education has become part of the economy, and there is a sense that if our schools are not satisfying the needs of industry, then we have failed. That runs totally counter to the meaning of education, to the needs of a healthy society. I think there has been a very strong penetration of that idea since the 1960s. Of course, education also needs to prepare you for a job, but we have lost the balance.

“There are so many wonderful things in the world: the books you haven’t read, the music you haven’t heard, the places you haven’t seen. So many things there to be tasted. And all that limits us is our share of time, and the older one gets the more conscious one becomes of this reality. So why you would waste it passively watching television, or reading sanctimonious rants in the newspapers is beyond me.”