A dearth of originality leaves Ireland in a cultural desert

It's a pity Dermot Desmond's multi-storey glass pyramid will not be built in Dublin docks. A tall, handsome, striking building, it was to contain an aquarium and simulated tropical forest. Although the architect was American, the promoter, like the location, was Irish. In a city and country fast becoming a derivative English-American mish-mash, it would have provided a note of distinction - and might have spurred creative innovation in Dublin and outside it.

Normally a nation maintains its cultural visibility through a combination of distinctive inherited things - language, religion, manmade environment, customs, arts - and distinctive creative innovations. What Lara Marlowe some months ago called the "Temple Bar Celtic Tiger culture" has little time for the inherited elements of Irish culture. Pushing them to the margins or wishing them buried, it displays its English and American "with-itness" proudly. Hence the urgent need for creative innovations if Ireland is to remain culturally visible in the world.

I write as one who lives on the Continent, where Ireland figures in the news only as Northern Ireland politics. News of creative innovation never reaches us from Ireland. In a very concrete sense, the lack of such news from Ireland makes Ireland absent from Europe - and in effect from the world.

Europe, the West generally, is an evolving co-operative life in which fresh leads, models and perspectives come now from this country, now from that. In this context of give and take, Ireland is a non-contributor - a taker not a giver, a parasite of ideas and models, not a supplier.

Proud as we are to have the contemporary West - its ideas and ethics, its practices and problems - now at home in Ireland, we assume they are here simply to absorb or gawp at, not to think about, critically, inventively and with effect. That work, we assume, is for London and New York. Heads bowed in anticipation, we await their next directives.

The result is that, as the distinctive Ireland of modern times - rural, Catholic, poor, struggling for freedom, anti-imperialist, restoring its Gaelic language - passes away, a blank space is replacing it, culturally speaking, on the international scene.

"Prospering on massive American investment, a nice place for holidays and weekends, the home of excellent entertainers and craic" doesn't add up to the kind of presence that merits one serious or respectful thought - except from east European competitors for US investment.

People who want English or American lifestyle know where to find the genuine articles and have no need of "Paddy" imitations.

To put it bluntly, what is making Ireland culturally invisible is not so much the Celtic Tiger's marginalisation of traditional Ireland as the lack of originality in Irish thinking and practice which preceded the Tiger and which still continues. Originality is another way of saying creative innovation.

Even if we did not know it from personal experience, we could assume that this dearth of originality in Irish life is not due to a complete absence of questioning, freethinking, inventive Irish minds. Presumably, there are at least as many such minds here as in any other nation of our size.

No, the absence of originality that can be observed in Irish public thinking and in Irish practice is due to something else; namely, effective opposition by Irish society to Irish original thinking getting published and discussed, or having its projects implemented. Put differently, the controlling forces in Irish society effectively compel Irish people to outward conformity and imitation.

I said that creative innovation is needed urgently if Ireland is to remain culturally visible in the world. It might be argued that there is no pressing need for such visibility to continue - or to be restored. The world can get along without Irish innovative thinking or action - can even, if need be, find substitutes for its Irish entertainers. In the Republic of Ireland, massive cultural derivativeness and economic boom go hand in hand without apparent contradiction.

All that is true. No imperative requires that we regain cultural distinctiveness. But it would still be a momentous event for Ireland, after all its history, to end up a mixture of Lancashire and Massachusetts. Minimal self-respect demands that we should at least be aware of what is happening, and consciously choose our cultural dissolution rather than drift into it, mindlessly.

Desmond Fennell's latest book is The Postwestern Condition: Between Chaos and Civilisation.