Code words disguise the old left v right debate

For those with long political memories, the appearance of the words "Sile de Valera", "solo run" and "our nation" tend to generate a bit of a buzz. Bertie Ahern could be forgiven if the first brief reports of her speech in Boston on Monday night gave him a few palpitations.

In the event, as the speed with which both the Taoiseach and Tanaiste endorsed Ms de Valera's sentiments amply demonstrated, this was no solo run. But that does not mean that the Minister for the Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands has lost her ability to speak in political code. The hidden message in her complaints about the European Union may not have been "Bertie Out". But there was a message, none the less, and it was not just about Europe and Irish culture.

Sile de Valera told her audience at Boston College that the EU is not "the cornerstone of what our nation is and should be". She strongly implied that the fears for "our unique identity, culture and traditions" that were expressed at the time we joined the EU in the early 1970s were now being realised. Some regular but unspecified "directives and regulations agreed in Brussels" are now undermining our national culture.

Unfortunately, however, she gave no indication of what, in her mind, the cornerstone of our nation really is. She gave no definition, however vague, of Irish culture and identity. And she didn't tell her audience what "directives and regulations" are undermining our sense of being Irish.

Can a pluralist nation made of many different strands, including two that have been in bloody conflict for much of the 20th century, be said to have a single "cornerstone"? And shouldn't a Fianna Fail minister remember that the last senior member of the party who went in for mystical evocations of our nation, culture and identity was Charles Haughey, whose sense of being in touch with the true spirit of Ireland didn't stop him stowing his money on the Cayman Islands?

A cynic might suggest that the most obvious recent blow delivered by an EU institution to our "culture" was the refusal of the European Investment Bank to support the culture of cronyism that is one of our fondest traditions.

The only hint at what Sile de Valera's un-European Ireland might look like, moreover, came in her image of the failure of the EU to be sensitive to the differences among member-states: "Brussels, Birmingham, the Burren; the same European Union, different worlds."

It may just have been the allure of alliteration or the need to get in a reference to her own constituency, even in a discussion of geopolitics. But it is hard not to suspect that this contrast between big European cities and a lovely but half-empty region of rural Ireland is not just an old romantic myth given one more spin on the merry-go-round.

Somehow, "Brussels, Birmingham, Ballsbridge; the same European union, different worlds" doesn't quite have the same ring. But it would be a lot closer to the reality of contemporary Ireland.

Unless the Minister can come up with a much more concrete demonstration of the undermining of Irish identity by EU regulations, it must be assumed that her Boston speech was part of some other agenda. The strongest hint at what that agenda might be came at the end of the Minister's address: "As we embraced Europe, we seemed at times to forget our close and very important ties with the United States of America." '

Here we get to the nub of the matter. The real debate we are being asked to embark on is not about the EU. It is about Ireland. And the question for debate is whether Ireland is an island off the west coast of Europe or off the east coast of America. This is a question, not of culture and geography, but of economics and politics. It is, though typically disguised in cultural abstractions, an old-fashioned debate between right and left.

It was hardly surprising that Mary Harney was quick to weigh in on Sile de Valera's side, for it is she who has set the terms for this debate. For some time now, she has been asking us to accept that the Irish economic model is not really European, but American. She has been setting what she sees as an American free-market, de-regulated economic system against what she characterises as an over-regulated, over-interventionist European model. In this sense, what she and Sile de Valera are really trying to protect as Irish identity and culture is our right to be American.

FOR ALL the codes and obfuscations, this is an overdue argument. Ireland has reached a point, economically, where its wealth per capita sits somewhere between the United States and Sweden. The choice for the next decade is whether we want to be more American or more Swedish. Or, to put it more simply, whether we want to pursue some variant on the New Right philosophy that dominated the 1980s or some form of European social democracy.

Mary Harney and Charlie McCreevy, two of the dominant figures in the present Government, have never made any secret of their support for the first alternative. Sile de Valera's speech on Monday night was a signal that she wants to join their camp.

What's interesting, though, is how tentative and indirect these arguments still are. The Americanists, if such they may now be called, have been remarkably loath to spell out what their economic and political model actually entails. One side of the system in the United States - an entrepreneurial culture, high levels of personal freedom and the generation of vast wealth - is played up. The other side - massive inequalities, the absence of a social safety net, a fierce lack of sympathy for those who don't make it - is played down. It doesn't do to mention the absence of a national health service or the massive under-investment in education.

This reticence suggests, perhaps, a lack of confidence in the true appeal for Irish people of the full American model.

Could it be, perhaps, that a fondness for the welfare state and an inclusive sense of society have become a part of what Sile de Valera calls "our unique identity, culture and traditions"? If that were so, of course, it would not be those faceless bureaucrats in Brussels who are setting out to seriously impinge on our culture.

fotoole@irish-times.ie