With Budget 2025 upon us, an old phrase comes to mind: more money than sense. The State has an almost surreal surplus of €25 billion. But it has no coherent sense of how to spend it.
Alongside its embarrassment of riches, Ireland is running a large and unsustainable ideological deficit. In one of the weekend’s pre-budget spin stories, we were solemnly informed that there was an “ideological clash” between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael over some minor detail – which really would be two bald men fighting over a comb.
Around the beginning of the 21st century, Ireland took a prolonged leave of absence from ideology. Its old self-images were dog-eared and down-at-heel. They were packed away and consigned to the attic of collective identity, not quite out of mind, but largely out of sight.
By then, the State’s ideological model had served its time. It was once a very strong alloy, composed in equal parts of nationalism and Catholicism. These elements were mined from the depths of Irish history and forged through centuries of oppression, humiliation and resistance.
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In spite of – or perhaps even because of – the State’s many failures, this fusion of religious and national identities retained its emotional power. In a society continually pulled apart by mass emigration, it offered the compensatory illusions of stability, certainty and comfort. It was conveniently portable – you could hold on to it in the ethnic enclaves of Birmingham or Brooklyn almost as firmly as in Ballina or Ballydehob.
It was also very good at making its own contradictions disappear. If you didn’t like it, you could feck off out of the country. If it didn’t like you, it could lock you up in an industrial school, a Magdalene laundry, a mother and baby home or a mental hospital.
Challenges to this ideology accumulated, especially from the 1960s onwards. But it was remarkably robust. It rested essentially on an alliance between Fianna Fáil and the Catholic Church and, right until the end of the 20th century, that was still a winning combination.
And then it unravelled with extraordinary rapidity. This was partly a delayed reaction to long-term social change: urbanisation, globalisation and hugely expanded education were always going eat away at its foundations. It was also partly due to a combination of inward migration and the peace process, both of which made it necessary to develop a more pluralist notion of Irish identity.
But a lot of the energy behind this shift was negative. It was fuelled by repulsion. The authority of the institutional church and Fianna Fáil’s hegemony both paid the price of unaccountable power. They corrupted themselves.
A plural society like the one Ireland has become can dissolve into tribal identities and nativist reactions if it has no common language of belonging, no shared sense of what really matters
And what happened around the turn of the century was that they both lost the ability to cover up that corruption. The larger social changes that had already taken place broke the bonds of loyalty – and once loyalty was gone, omerta went with it. The rocks were turned over and most Irish people were repelled by what crawled out.
I don’t for a moment want to compare the repression that people suffered in Ireland with what was endured under Soviet domination in central and eastern Europe. But there is one valid point of similarity – in both cases, a totalising ideology collapsed under the weight of its own corruptions, contradictions and absurdities. And in both, this implosion created a vacuum.
In Ireland, for the first decade of this century, the vacuum was filled with euphoric consumerism. We had our own version of the end of history, in which all the restraints of religiosity were lifted, the Troubles were over and we could borrow against the future because it extended before us in an infinite prospect of bliss.
Infinite bliss ended in tears. And in a weird return of a kind of secular religiosity: Catholic guilt without the Catholicism. “We all partied.” We were all guilty of the sins of our banks and property speculators. Our gallant allies in Europe passed us the whips with which we flagellated ourselves to show our repentance.
And then what? Two ideological structures had collapsed in short order – Catholic nationalism and hedonistic capitalism. What came next is a delightful Irish twist on technocracy and pragmatism – technocracy that is short on technical competence and pragmatism that is not very practical.
The shock of State failure in the bank collapse produced a governing system that is even more centralised, even more top-down. It is command-and-control that is all command and no control. Grand plans go hand-in-hand with chaotic delivery – the housing disaster and the fiasco of the national children’s hospital being the most obvious examples.
Without a clear sense of purpose or values, the State has ended up as a process of endless crisis management. It runs faster and faster just to chase after a society and an economy that are speeding ahead of its physical capacities.
It does this because it has no narrative. It has run through various stories about itself: the island paradise that would follow independence, the martyred nation maimed by partition, the spiritual beacon for a fallen, materialistic world, the magical model of neoliberalism, the penitent spendthrift anxious to prove its firm purpose of amendment. They all exhausted themselves – and us.
But what happens when there is no functional ideology is that we become prey to a lot of dysfunctional ones. A plural society like the one Ireland has become can dissolve into tribal identities and nativist reactions if it has no common language of belonging, no shared sense of what really matters.
We have a windfall – but the golden apples seem to have fallen on our heads and left us dazed and confused. Our governing culture has lost its great get-out clause: “If only we had the money...” It has arrived at a point where its old habits of mind – fatalism, excuses, buck-passing and blame – are no longer of any use. But it does not know what to do without them. Hence what we’ll probably get with this budget is an early Christmas – with no wise men and no guiding star.
