Rolling back years with self-inflicted purdah

Our house is still in mourning for the St Patrick's Festival. This was to have been the first year the littlest one might go to the parade and take her place on the stepladder. From babyhood she has participated in Paddy's Big Day Out, had shamrocks painted on her face, flaunted home-made tricolour hats and explored the funfair. This carnival weekend when Dubliners of all ages party together has been part of the backdrop of the children's lives, one of the peak events like Christmas or birthdays or summer holidays.

We who grew up with the industrial grimness of the parades of the 1960s, with Hail Glorious St Patrick ringing in our ears, mourn last weekend even more. We are shaken by its disappearance from the calendar. Like citizens of Robespierre's revolutionary France, we feel as though we had woken up to discover the Committee of Public Safety had abolished Christmas.

It is not just that we missed the party. We fear we have reawoken in the monochrome world of the 1960s, that the tough decades of building a society which our children could celebrate have been set at naught. We remember what characterised the 1960s and (we thought) distinguished it from now. Then Ireland was dependent on agriculture as its major industry and Britain as its major market. We thought that had changed: that this was an industrial, even post-industrial society; that joining the EEC had unlocked us from Britain's embrace; and that our great success in attracting mobile investment and developing our own industry had liberated us from de Valera's Ireland.

Ireland was "a quiet place" from 1945 to 1960, political scientist Tom Garvin has written. "Forty per cent of the population earned its living from farming . .. The general ethos was small-town and rural, country life being celebrated as being superior to, and anterior to, the lives of people who were forced to live in big cities."

We older urbanites remember that era and now, having lived through the dizzying boom, watch with horror as the years seem to roll back. Intel's plans are on hold, the needs of agriculture dominate and our every civic freedom seems vulnerable to the disregarding British.

Not all of us are close to the land. My paternal grandfather left the farm in Kerry in 1914, my other grandparents were urban already. There are many city dwellers now, struggling to develop a civilised urban way of life, suspicious that our leaders' closeness to the land can sometimes blind them to the needs of the cities.

We are doing our best to be patriotic but doubts assail us. The DART is full of bemused tourists who may not enter museums or parks and who, if they leave Dublin, are turned back just within sight of the Cliffs of Moher. We watch France where agriculture is a huge national industry but no one has proposed cutting off access to the tourist magnet of Mont St Michel, close to an outbreak of foot-andmouth. The French appear satisfied that animals and those closest to them are the significant vectors of disease.

This crisis is forcing us to examine what kind of society and economy we have built since the 1960s. The British are clear about their priorities. They put cheap food for industrial workers first when they stopped protecting agriculture and repealed the Corn Laws in 1846. They import most of their food. Distressing as it is for us, their refusal to allow foot-and-mouth affect other sectors is logical for them.

And what about us? Agriculture, forestry and fishing employ 123,000: the processed food industry employs 40,000, many in activities immune to foot-and-mouth like processing potatoes, fish or vegetables. Contrast these numbers with the 110,000 people employed in hotels and restaurants, the 243,000 people employed in shops and wholesale, the 280,000 people in other forms of industry, the 178,000 people in construction.

Of the 430,000 new jobs created since 1995 when the unemployment rate was 12 per cent, a quarter have come from businesses like hotels, restaurants and shops; 40 per cent from construction. In the four years to 1999, food processing added a grand total of 850 jobs and employment in farming dropped by over 20,000.

THAT is not cause for celebration. Of course food production should be a major industry for us as for the French. But this is not the 1960s: other sectors are equally, if not more, important. We cannot afford to abandon tourism. Even many farmers depend on tourism to survive. If we do not re-emerge rapidly from this self-inflicted purdah, when the bodies come to be counted, when the next unemployment figures are in, look not just for mart employees and meat factory operatives, watch out for waitresses, chamber maids, chefs, mime artists, tour guides, performers with Macnas - the foot soldiers of boomtime Ireland.

Most frightening in the monochrome waking dream of the last few weeks has been the coincidence of foot-and-mouth with the high technology slowdown in the US. When the ESRI assessed the risks to the economy of "shocks and surprises" 18 months ago, it warned that worst of all was "if a number of external shocks were to coincide". Remember how its cautions against over-inflating the economy were dismissed as the views of "pinkos" and "creeping Jesuses"? So is the party now over?

Happily much remains within our control. Deciding to re-open Dublin for business - and fun - would be of much more than symbolic importance. Our vibrant ability to entertain and be entertaining (in music, film, street theatre, sport, good food, beautiful scenery) is now at the centre of our culture, not just the struggle of a small literary caste as in the 1960s. It is the heart of modern Ireland, attracts not just tourists but businesses, coaxes many emigrants to return, keeps the young at home.

Let's celebrate in the deferred St Patrick's Festival the many-hued nature of the Ireland of 2001. And let's do it soon.