“The Irish”, said Samuel Johnson, “are a fair people – they never speak well of one another.” “Out of Ireland have we come./Great hatred, little room”, wrote WB Yeats 150 years later. Mutual resentment was, for a long time, the subsoil of Irish life. In the bestselling Irish history book of the 1980s, Joe Lee’s Ireland 1912-1985, the distinguished historian thought it necessary to explain a flourishing national pastime: begrudgery. He argued persuasively that the Irish culture of begrudgery was sustained by the perception that advancement was a zero-sum game.
Prosperity and prestige, he wrote, were seen as static quantities. “The size of that cake was more or less fixed in more or less stagnating communities and in small institutions. In a stunted society, one man’s gain did tend to be another man’s loss. Winners could flourish only at the expense of losers. Status depended not only on rising oneself but on preventing others from rising. For many, keeping the other fellow down offered the surest protection of their own position.”
This attitude was everywhere, not just in economic life but in academia and the arts. Success, either within Ireland or on the international stage, was strictly rationed – there was only so much of it to go around. If you were getting more than your fair share, it meant there was less for me.
This changed in the 1990s. The waning of begrudgery was one of the more benign side effects of the Celtic Tiger. It became clear in most parts of Irish society that the size of the cake was not fixed. One person’s gain did not have to be at another’s expense. Doing well – in business, in the arts, in life – was not necessarily predicated on keeping the other fellow down.
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Yet I remember wondering, in that period, how well this shift of attitude would survive another big effect of the rapidly burgeoning economy: the unfamiliar phenomenon of large-scale inward migration.
I recently went back to look at something I wrote about this in 1999: “As the economy has expanded beyond recognition over the last decade, most of the population has left behind the perception that the cake is of a finite size. Those in the economic mainstream have seen the cake grow before their eyes and have learned that a slice for someone else is not necessarily taken from their own mouths.
“For a significant section of the population, however, the cake still seems all too limited. For the long-term unemployed, their families, and the communities in which they are concentrated, nothing has happened to fundamentally alter the old perception that if someone else is rising, it must be at their expense. If anything, that perception has been strengthened by the evidence that many of those who gained most in recent years did in fact rise at the expense of others.
“When this mentality survives, immigrants are bound to be resented. The reality may be that immigration actually increases the size of the cake, that their energies, talents and resources fuel economic growth ... But in order to see this, you have to have stopped seeing the world as a place in which one person’s gain is another’s loss. And for parts of the Irish population, there has been no persuasive reason to stop seeing the world in that way.”
These fears were not wholly justified. For all the problems and tensions, communities went on to deal reasonably well with the challenges of large-scale inward migration because there were tangible improvements in working-class lives. Unemployment fell rapidly. Early school leaving declined.
In spite of dire failures to deal with child poverty and persistently high levels of social inequality, there was enough progress for most people to feel that the new Ireland that could attract migrants was a better place than the old one. My feeling that for significant parts of the population there had been no persuasive reason to stop seeing the world as a zero-sum game gradually became less tenable.
Yet I suppose what I was worrying about in 1999 was the possibility that the old habit of begrudgery would not disappear – it would simply be turned in a different direction. It had always been a warped form of Irish intimacy: the deepest and most heartfelt grudge was against those you knew best. The success of someone you grew up with was the greatest form of impertinence. But could it morph into a grudge against the stranger, the incomer, the Other?
For that to happen, what was needed was a great contradiction – the re-creation in times of rapid economic growth of a sense of scarcity. We had to somehow get back to a zero-sum game, to the belief that there was so little of everything to go around that your gain must be my loss. The grim achievement of misgovernment is precisely the restoration, even amid economic abundance, of the feeling of “little room” that feeds great hatred.
Racism and xenophobia are begrudgery writ large. They divide humanity into an Us and Them and then apply the logic that if They are doing well, it can only be at our expense. Once societies and identities are polarised in this way, the idea of mutual benefit is scuppered. Every gain must have an equal and opposite loss. In order for us to advance, it is necessary for them to retreat.
[ Quiet desperation: Why no one speaks up about racism in IrelandOpens in new window ]
We know all too well on this island where this logic leads – it is still the governing rationale of Northern Ireland. It’s a logic in which failure is tolerable so long as that other shower are failing worse.
If the South is not to go the same way, there has to be a different kind of story. The Republic has more resources than it ever dreamed of. But it feels like a place in which you have to compete for everything from a seat on the bus to a hospital appointment to a decent place to live. If it is to truly feck the begrudgers, it has to show everyone that more really is more.
