MERRIMAN SUMMER SCHOOL:THE UNPRECEDENTED political incompetence and mismanagement of recent times would have to be dealt with through a combination of creativity, questioning, protest, voluntary effort, hope, defiance and originality, the historian Diarmaid Ferriter said at yesterday's opening of the Merriman Summer School in Ennis.
Prof Ferriter, speaking on The Lost Decade? Crisis, Continuity and Change in 1950s Ireland, drew parallels with the current crisis.
Despite the conservative culture of 1950s, civil servants like Tom Barrington and Ken Whitaker recognised that there were significant psychological shifts necessary if Ireland was to emerge from its chronic difficulties.
“Most importantly, and in this there is much relevance to contemporary Ireland, they demonstrated the intellectual capacity to respond to new ideas, and recognised the importance of stimulus as opposed to the Irish Department of Finance’s obsession with fatalism and cuts,” he said.
The constraints administrations had at the time when Ireland was emerging from the isolation of the second World War were in contrast to the advice, knowledge and analysis available to politicians today.
There has been an avoidance of difficult decisions and a refusal to take a long view. “To think that it looks like we are going back to the very basic mistakes that were made in the 1930s and 1940s which is to start cutting education, cutting that whole area that you really need to think long term.”
The generation of politicians that came later and inherited so much and had so much, particularly in the years of the Celtic Tiger, had managed to squander so much. “That is a worse state of affairs than in the 1950s,” he said.
During that decade a determination to interrogate the failures of independence had emerged, along with a multitude of voluntary organisations to tackle unmet needs. The Dublin unemployed elected their own TD, Jack Murphy, in 1957. Through organisations such as the Irish Countrywomen’s Association and the Irish Housewives Association, women had often succeeded in bringing about change and modernity, including rural electrification.
The State had given an overdue recognition of the importance of the arts by creating the Arts Council in 1951. The decade had seen the emergence of the Dublin Theatre and Wexford Opera festivals while writers, poets and playwrights wrote vibrant, enduring and powerful work.
He said it was scandalous that the arts were treated as luxurious extras. “We have very little else that we can promote and cherish at the moment in terms of what we have to offer ourselves and the outside world.”
The Merriman Summer School, which has the theme of Are we there yet? Facing the future anew, continues in Ennis until Saturday when it will host a symposium on the economy with Prof Frances Ruane, director of the ESRI, John McHale, professor of economics at NUI Galway, and Michael Smyth, head of the school of economics at the University of Ulster.