In the land of the Emerald Tiger

WHAT do we do now that we have no one to blame but ourselves? For the Republic of Ireland, as the good times rolled on, 1996 was arguably the first year in history when it was no longer possible to blame British colonialism, the nightmare of our benighted past, for our problems.

Some 75 years after the signing on December 6th, 1921, of the Anglo Irish Treaty establishing the Irish Free State, that state lost one of the key ingredients of its political and cultural make up.

After centuries of imagining ourselves in the shadow of a bigger, more powerful, and above all richer neighbour, we are faced with the necessity, not just to think again, but to find a whole new way of thinking. For in 1996, Britain was still bigger but it was not, in terms of political influence, obviously more powerful. And, most disturbingly, it was not richer.

1996 could be described as the triumphant culmination of the Free State, the year that Irish independence lost its temporary, unfinished, provisional character and took on a permanent look. Towards the end of the year, a number of odd, stray occurrences began to cohere into a pattern.

One was the anniversary of the Treaty and the fact that, at the age of 75, it is hard to go on pretending that you are not really responsible for what you have become.

Another was the successful Dublin summit of the EU, in which Britain was so obviously an inconsequential presence on the margins while Ireland was at the centre of things, comfortable and competent. The sight of Irish ministers like Ivan Yates on British television calmly, almost patronisingly, explaining to the British what they would have to do to sort out the BSE problem, was such a reversal of inherent norms that it was almost comic.

For centuries, England was phlegmatic, assertive, and business like, while Ireland was unsettled, uncertain, and fretful about its national identity and its place in the world. Now, the roles are reversed - it is in Britain that questions like nationality, sovereignty and identity are sites of confusion and contest, while the Republic seemed, in 1996, to have gone beyond all that.

A third symptom was the fact that the Free State, so long regarded as a dour and grudging surrender of romantic destiny to contingent pragmatism, acquired, through Neil Jordan's Michael Collins. its own astonishing glamour, its own myth of origin in which the stolid burghers of Cumann na nGaedhael suddenly became Hollywood stars - sexy and heroic.

But most of all there was the sensational, if largely unreported, fact that, in 1996, Ireland produced more wealth per head of population than the United Kingdom. As recently as the early 1970s, after the last great boom for the Irish economy, gross domestic product (GDP) per head of population in the Republic was half that of the UK. In 1995, if the EU average for GDP per head was 100, Ireland's was 95.1 and the UK's 98.3. But right at the end of this year, Eurostat and the European Commission estimated that for 1996 the figures were 100.7 for Ireland and 98.9 for the UK.

And they expect this gap to widen so that, by 1998, it will be 106.3 for Ireland and 99.6 for the UK.

It is true, of course, that substantial amounts of the wealth produced in Ireland are drained off by the repatriation of profits by multinational companies and by the servicing of the still formidable national debt. But these too reflect national choices - the decision to depend on foreign investment for industrial growth and the decision to borrow huge amounts of money in the 1980s. If they are problems, they are our own problems, for which we have no one to blame but ourselves.

And however much was drained away, it didn't take an economist to see that an awful lot was left. What Newsweek magazine described at the end of December as the Emerald Tiger ("No need to search the Far East. The best answers to Europe's economic problems are much closer to home. Ireland is booming.") was not so much on the prowl as on the razzle dazzle.

Economic growth of 6 per cent in 1996, on top of an 8 per cent growth rate in 1995, sent money pumping through the system. The average price paid for a second hand house in the Republic in 1996 was £71,592 - a full £10,000 higher than in 1995. Each of the two major banking groups is estimated to have made profits in the region of £375 million in 1996. In Dublin's Financial Services Centre alone, there are around 250 executives earning over £250,000 a year each.

And not for nothing did an apparently endless succession of new shopping centres come on stream for 1996 was the year of the shopper. For the higher earners, these are the best of times. In 1990, the Republic's consumers spent £16.3 billion on goods and services. In 1995, the figure was £22 billion. Even taking inflation into account, it is likely that in 1996 the Republic's consumers will have spent in real terms over £4 billion more than they did in 1990.

AND yet, all this conspicuous consumption did not lead to a society at ease with itself. Normally, those who preside over such good times could expect to ask in the glow of national gratitude. Instead, the opposite has been the case, and 1996 was a year of extraordinary popular scepticism about leaders of all sorts, a year in which the whole idea of authority - political, moral, religious - became utterly problematic.

For the Catholic church, the passage of divorce legislation symbolised a much greater loss of authority. Just as, throughout Europe, the industrial revolution and Protestantism tended to advance hand in hand, the new prosperity created by Ireland's post industrial revolution also saw an ambivalent kind of mass conversion to Protestantism.

An MRBI poll for The Irish Times indicated that the most important tenet of Protestantism - the right of individual conscience - is now accepted by the great majority. Just a fifth of Catholics said they followed the teaching of their church when making "serious moral decisions", compared to 78 per cent who said they would follow their own conscience.

But, in many ways, the authority of the State was no more stable. For an increasingly articulate, educated and confident population, the old order of clientilist politics and shoddy public services was increasingly intolerable. The success of a relatively small group of women, Positive Action, in forcing the political and legal systems to respond to the scandal of the Blood Transfusion Service Board was one sign of changed times.

The cynicism about established politics in general manifests in events as disparate as the pathetically low turn out in the bail referendum, the fact that a revolutionary Trotskyite Joe Higgins almost won the Dublin West by election. The tide of rumour that swept around the single fact of Michael Lowry's resignation was another.

As to why such bad feelings about those in power should go hand in hand with such unprecedented prosperity, one explanation may well be that the public does not associate the good times with national politics at all. Ministers may get to spend the Brussels billions but the public knows that it has people outside the State - mostly German taxpayers - to thank for them.

Ministers may get to announce huge industrial investments like IBM's 3,000 job project for Dublin or Intel's $1.5 billion investment in Leixlip, but the public knows that the real decisions have been taken on the far side of the Atlantic.

This is the paradox of the Republic - its national independence is underwritten by transnational corporations and by a supranational EU.

Its separation from one political and economic union - the United Kingdom - 75 years ago is justified by its membership of a bigger political and economic union, the EU. Its cultural distinctiveness lies not in any fixed inherited tradition but in the way that it reacts to an overload of global stimuli, taking possession of Anglo American norms, putting its own stamp on them and exporting them back to England, America and the rest of the world. Its sovereignty is a power that can be exercised mostly by giving it up.

In such a radically open culture, it is difficult for national politicians to claim the credit for anything good, yet when things go wrong, they are the only visible objects of scorn. A multinational corporation that pulls out of Ireland, as for instance Semperit did in 1996, is, by definition, gone. Local politicians who had no power to influence its decision one way or the other are left to face the angry workers.

ANOTHER reason for the air of disaffection that was so palpable in 1996 was that the new money has not been spread evenly. The Conference of Religious in Ireland year in 1987, saw their take home pay increase by over 50% by 1996 while someone earning £10,000 in 1987 experienced a rise of just 38%.

In 1989, the Economic and Social Research Institute estimated that 31 per cent of the Republic's population was living below a poverty line set at 60 per cent of the average income. In 1996, the ESRI suggested that this number had risen to 35 per cent. The poverty gap is getting bigger because, while a senior company executive has received a salary increase of 133 per cent since 1987, the social welfare payment to an unemployed person with four children has risen by just 62 per cent. Some social welfare payments have still not reached the levels recommended as a minimum a decade ago.

And this is the embarrassment of riches - we are running out of excuses for the poverty, the slum like primary schools, the heroin epidemic that has raged unabated in Dublin since the early 1980s and, above all, the stubbornly high levels of long term unemployment.

For 75 years, Ireland has blamed its social failures on economic underdevelopment, its underdevelopment on history, and its history on Britain. In recent years, the notion of Ireland as a Third World country has had a certain degree of intellectual currency as, for instance, in the programme for a conference held in Belfast in 1991: "Ireland is, supposedly, a modern Western country... But, in fact, there are striking parallels between many aspects of Irish society - in our economy, politics and culture - and the situation in the so called Third World countries. Given our shared histories of colonialism, this is hardly surprising."

More pragmatically, the notion of Ireland as an oppressed and impoverished nation has had its financial rewards. There has been money in poverty: £2 billion a year in EU social and regional funds to help bring Ireland up to European levels of wealth and development. We got the money because we were, in relative terms, poorer than our neighbours. And that very concentration on equity between EU states distracted attention from the rather more awkward question of equity within EU states.

At a European level, we could thump the table and talk about the responsibility of the rich to the poor while, at home, we could mutter about the free market and the rising tide lifting all boats.

It is difficult to do this and even more difficult to wallow in post colonial self pity, when the ex colony is wealthier than the old mother country and the worst suffering that most of the oppressed people are enduring is the inordinate length of the queue at the new Irish branches of British retail outlets which sprung up like mushrooms in 1996.

That difficulty was most obvious in the confusion and uncertainty that beset Sinn Fein and the IRA in the wake of the ending of a ceasefire meant to "hold in all circumstances". But it was also evident in the obvious fact that Northern unionists no longer know what to make of the Republic either.

The fact is that both unionists and nationalists have had a vested interest in the image of the Free State as a decrepit, underdeveloped, impoverished backwater.

For nationalists, that image supplies the necessary sense of grievance - "look what the Brits have done to us, and if only we were free we would be the happiest, most prosperous people on God's earth".

For unionists it provides the necessary warning - "look what we would be like if the boggy mediocrity of the South was allowed to spread across the Border".

For nationalists, Ireland being a Third World country is a source of pride, lending the glamour of international anti imperialism to a squalid ethnic conflict in an obscure corner of the First World. For unionists, the Republic being a Third World country allows the rather comic illusion that Northern Ireland itself is a beleaguered outpost of threatened modernity.

BUT either as an excuse for failure or a dire warning to stick to and nurse for fear of something worse, the rich Republic, rolling in dollars and ecus, is of little use to either nationalists or unionists. And, though it is not considered polite to say so, Northern Ireland, with its declining British style industrial base, is of little use to the high tech multinational led economy of the Republic.

As Will Hutton, editor of the Observer, has put it the North has become, for the South, a problem not a prize. The more prosperous the Republic becomes, and the less that prosperity depends on trade with the UK, the less attractive the idea of a united Ireland will be to its citizens.

And in 1996, the Republic definitively set itself on a path of increasing economic divergence from the UK. As both a single European currency and Britain's self imposed exclusion from it became increasingly likely, the Republic made the implicit but momentous decision to join it anyway and take the consequences.

The early part of the year, when the punt stayed well above the value of sterling, provided a foretaste of the possible problems, putting a tight squeeze on smaller Irish companies dependent on the UK market. But the remarkably low level of concern about this suggested that the Republic had already taken a deep breath and decided that changing the map of Europe so that Ireland would be closer to Germany and further from Britain would bring more benefits than costs. Few decisions taken with so little soul searching and so little debate could be so historic.

And so we found ourselves by the end of 1996 slipping slowly but inexorably away from our old partner, our old enemy, the unfailing source, if not of all our ills, then certainly of all our excuses. We found ourselves approaching the destination that we used to dream of - that of the Irish as average Europeans, standard citizens of the rich North, driving along our splendid new EU financed motorways from our American computer plants to our British shopping centres, bypassing our very own Irish reservations for the long term unemployed and their children, parking our 1996 registration cars in the driveways of our rapidly appreciating houses.

If we were rather quiet about our good fortune, it may have been that, after all, we rather enjoyed being a special case and that there is something rather disappointing about being average Europeans, without the burden of history to blame for our failures. Or it may have been that we were just too busy shopping.