Time to think of America

The Americanisation of the Republic as "the 51st state" was the theme of a sharp and succinct profile of the State last Tuesday on BBC Radio 4, the station mercifully short on phone-ins and magazine programmes. Presented by Olivia O'Leary, it left the listener to ponder what the effects of this Americanisation are and will be.

The facts backing the Americanisation of Ireland are clear. Over 25 per cent of US manufacturing investment in the EU is in the Republic. Nearly half our exports are by US multinationals. The US is our largest single source of investment, with more than 500 companies employing more than 74,500 people, that is, 70 per cent of those employed in IDA-supported companies and about 7.5 per cent of total private sector employment.

The next largest source of foreign investment is Britain and in third place comes Germany. The US and Britain, both outside the euro zone, are sources of 84 per cent of jobs generated by foreign direct investment in the Republic. It is easy to see how the Irish economy is exposed to the corporate health of the United States, even as we rightly celebrate that companies such as Dell employ more than 5,000 people here.

There is a paradox in the Americanisation of Ireland. If we are culturally and economically growing closer to the US, at the level of high policy we are supposed to favour the closer integration of the European Union. It will not please the enthusiasts for further EU integration that Irish people should orient themselves westwards across the Atlantic. The EU integration process is built on economic integration, to lead to political and cultural integration. A common market for coal and steel, agriculture and fisheries, supra-national rules about competition, a single market and, ultimately, a single currency, would bring Europeans together politically and culturally.

Economics would lead politics, although in relation to our own State, Sean Donlon, former secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs, disagreed in the programme with the Taoiseach's view that economic development would stimulate political integration with Northern Ireland.

It would be a tangy, but not bitter, irony if Ireland, through leveraging its membership of the EU to make itself more attractive to US investment, became more Americanised than European.

The close historical and political connections between the US and Ireland were detailed by Ms O'Leary, but the main idea was that the Americanisation of Ireland has really happened in the 1990s' economic boom. It would have been much harder to argue in the trough of our 1980s' depression that Ireland was being Americanised, except to the extent that we simply supplied labour to the US.

What does it mean to be Americanised, rather than Europeanised, or even Anglicised? If it means anything more profound than conspicuous consumption or new spending habits, it is about attitudes and values.

It is not commonplace in the Irish media and political circles to admire American attitudes and values. American crassness is looked down upon and American virtues ignored. When I lived there, I often felt the easiest way to rationalise this was to say that we were as ignorant of the complexity of America as Americans were of the complexity of Ireland. We are certainly as prone to the use of unquestioned caricatures of Americans as they are with us.

It may be a cliche that America is the land of possibility, even while being a bad place not to succeed in. By contrast, most of Europe, even in the most generalised statement, would never be described as a land of possibility. A land of culture, of history, of sophistication, of intellectualism, perhaps, but not open, possible, new, or full of opportunity.

Since we are becoming more Americanised, we should take the time to reflect on the best aspects of America and embrace them fully. These include a constant openness to try and try again, sophisticated financial markets, highly customer-oriented products and services, and sheer brilliance at the higher ends of academia, scientific research and even media (it's not all primetime TV). The programme ended with Seamus Heaney saying that a "locus of possibility" was now being created in Ireland in "an unstoppable movement". This is a very American movement.

My personal touchstone for the difference between the US and old Ireland, or Europe, was when I returned to the Republic from California, the most New World of the New World, a place of immigration from the rest of the US. I was appalled to be asked in a job interview what school my father went to. Not even where I went to school. No one in California would ask that, or would care. I hope no one now asks it in Ireland. I'm glad I'm now back in California.