I remember being in a restaurant in Paris when an English family next to us, frustrated by the studied indifference of the waiter, ended up roaring at ever-higher decibel levels: “Want Coke and chips!” They had learned that if foreigners didn’t understand them then they just needed to shout louder.
But let’s not be condescending here: in Ireland we have elevated this lesson into our principal form of governance.
Governments in Ireland now have undreamed-of power. The State will spend about €150 billion this year – wealth beyond imagination even a decade ago. Yet along with this immense power comes a kind of learned helplessness, shaped by a conjunction of four different factors.
First, there’s an inherited fatalism. The history of the State has been one of relatively good periods followed by deep crisis. Good times are innately temporary. Most recently, of course, the hubris of the Celtic Tiger years was followed by the nemesis of the banking and property crash. The State itself failed – Ireland in effect lost its sovereignty.
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At some level, the political and administrative systems still expect failure: things will fall apart. This expectation creates a weirdly contradictory mindset, a strange mixture of conservatism and carelessness. Since in the long term we’ll all be back in the mire, why bother investing ambitiously in that long term? Spend what we have now because soon we won’t have it.
[ Fuel protests: Government to raid exchequer surplus for €505m support package ]
A system with this inbuilt pessimism could not imagine rapid demographic growth. Mass emigration and the consequent depopulation of the island did more than anything else to shape modern Ireland. It’s hard therefore to imagine the scale of inward migration and the sustained recovery of the population from the catastrophe of the Famine.
In the next decade, the island may well get back to the population numbers of 1840 – a kind of demographic death and resurrection that no other country has experienced in the same way. But if you can’t imagine this long-term reversal then you also can’t plan properly for it. It creeps up on the State like a strange happenstance.
Second, just as our demographic situation is not quite like anyone else’s, so our fiscal situation is also exceptional. There is a literal embarrassment of riches – we all know that a substantial chunk of the money with which the exchequer is bulging is not earned in the Irish economy. It is manna from multinational heaven. But for how long do God and the iPhone keep showering windfalls on the chosen people?
If you haven’t created so much of your wealth, you also feel helpless to control it. It is like the weather – subject to the vagaries of Atlantic systems that we can map, but are powerless to manage.
Third, there is ideology. The governing parties are centrist and pragmatic – and there are so many worse things to be in today’s world. But contemporary centrist pragmatism is still shaped by the neoliberal order: governments should not try to do things themselves but should liberate the market to do them instead.
This is a god that failed. It’s a hollowed-out belief system. But it lingers because it means that governments don’t have to do a lot of stuff. The chronic housing crisis is an obvious example of learned helplessness. Where the State used to build houses for working people, now it believes that only the private sector can do so. When this magic doesn’t work, the response is even more magical thinking.
The fourth factor is the collapse of the two-party system. When that system was thriving, it at least meant that there was a party in power (in Fine Gael’s case with Labour as junior partner). Now, there is no party in power any more.
Because Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael won’t merge (as they ought to), they are locked in a half-government. What they share is not power but office. There is no full-term taoiseach. Ministers know there will be big reshuffles. A lingering party tribalism inhibits a true sense of collective purpose.
Put all this together and you get a learned helplessness that would be dreary in a static country, but is quite dreadful in one whose society and economy are changing at a dizzying pace – and doing so in a world that is ever crazier.
In this condition, governments can’t answer the three most basic questions. Where do we want to go? What do we need to do if we’re to get there? And what choices (including the painful ones) must we make collectively to make those things possible? Without these answers, there is no big picture, no grand ambition, no large sense of possibility.
What we get instead is reactivity. Ireland is governed neither from the head nor the heart but from the jerking knee.
If governments can’t think about getting us through the decades, they think only about getting themselves through the weeks. Large projects that would transform our futures, such as eliminating child poverty or exploiting Europe’s greatest offshore wind capacity occupy much less head space than the need to respond somehow, anyhow, to the latest emergency.
I think this condition is actually getting worse. The Government now seems unable even to think a few weeks ahead. It is stuck behind the convoy of predictable events.
Everyone could see that Donald Trump’s mad war on Iran was going to create an energy crisis that in turn would cause huge social disaffection in all our societies. Everyone, that is, except the Government. It seems genuinely to have been taken aback that a protest movement could come so close to stripping away its authority in a matter of days.
When a government does nothing but react then every interest group knows that it too can be the unstoppable force that meets the very movable objects in Merrion Street.
A Government that can’t resist giving McDonald’s a huge tax break signals to everyone that it is a demand-led operation. With no common language of social purpose, only louder shouting will be heard. Which is too bad for those who have the weakest voices.
