The year just passed was an eventful one by any standards. From the establishment of the National Asset Management Agency to the passing of the Lisbon Treaty, from the Murphy report on child abuse in the Catholic archdiocese of Dublin to the Copenhagen conference on climate change, it set down some of the parameters for the future. Whereas a year ago the world’s economic system teetered on the edge of catastrophe, it is now seen to have escaped from another Great Depression. At home, the glass can now be seen to be half full (as the Government would wish) or half empty (as its critics insist) but at least there is a balance to be debated between optimism and pessimism instead of unrelieved gloom.
The worst may or may not be over for our prospects over the next couple of years. But we are learning to live with changed circumstances and hopefully picking through the lessons and seeing that going backwards is not an option. One of the factors to come through this year, though, is that all politics is local. It is true in Ireland but it is also true for the world at large as the failures of the Copenhagen conference demonstrated with every nation looking after its self-interest at the expense of the good of mankind.
The ultimate cost of pursuing narrow self-interest above all else was most strongly illustrated, perhaps, by the fallout from the Murphy report. The compendium of evasions and failures of the Catholic church authorities to deal properly with their abusive members and their conscious or unconscious desire to protect the institution above the rights of children has seriously undermined the churchs moral authority. Whether it can ever recover its authority in Ireland is a moot point: certainly it will never recover the political, social and cultural ascendancy it enjoyed throughout almost all of the 20th century.
Whatever replaces it, we need to be wary of falling into the same modes of intolerance and dogmatism that characterised the church triumphant. The general liberalism which is the dominant ethos today can sometimes be as intolerant and dogmatic as its predecessors. It seems it is often not enough to win an argument in Ireland; we also like to grind our opponents into the gutter and jump on their heads.
With Christianity on the back foot, what will take its place? One answer seems to be a form of pantheism, with the environmental movement slipping effortlessly into many of the traits and mindsets of traditional religion, reworking and modernising some of its oldest catchphrases – repent now: the end is nigh – and extolling the concept of sustainability as the new nirvana. Nature is more an old testament than a new testament God, implacable, unforgiving and uncaring, but its proponents came up against an equally implacable human instinct towards self-interest as countries turned the Copenhagen conference into an unmanageable round of horse-trading. To characterise environmentalism as something of a religion is not to dispute or deny the science that makes a persuasive case for changing our habits.
The localness of all politics was, as ever, evident in Ireland too. It has been a difficult year for many people with job losses, pay cuts, tax rises and, perhaps worst of all, uncertainty about the future. The natural instinct in such situations is always the same; to batten down the hatches, to hold what we have, to fight our own corner. That in turn leads to policies which have been shown, time and again, to fail, with protectionism on a national scale and domination by vested interests on a local scale. We have seen elements of the latter during the past year: the poor mouth is back with a vengeance with competitive victimhood common and frequent searches for some group or individuals to blame for all our woes.
The search for scapegoats to blame for the crisis and for answers to our current problems has led us into some curious corners. The search for a third banking force, last heard of in the early 1990s, is back on the political agenda. Bankers are blamed for causing the crisis by abandoning traditional lending policies and being too lax with their loans: at the same time we demand that they lighten up on current lending restrictions and return to old-fashioned banking practices, which ensure that few but the rich get much access to credit.
The demand for an inquiry into what happened and what made the problem worse in Ireland than elsewhere is understandable. Such an inquiry may be useful: inquiries, as the Murphy report has shown, can serve a good purpose by bringing together many disparate events and factors and providing an overall picture. As the tribunals of the past decade have shown as well, however, enquiries can have negative effects on the body politic by focusing attention on the past rather than on the present or the future. The Opposition parties, for instance, have spent much of the past decade fruitlessly waiting for a devastating tribunal disclosure which would propel them into office.
After a shaky start, the Fianna Fáil-Green government has made considerable strides in handling the crisis in its three budgets over the past 15 months. Collectively, they have struck a good balance, as the ESRI has concluded, but they are not likely to be saved from the retribution of voters come the next election. It is axiomatic that governments lose elections and that oppositions do not win them. It would be more than a pity though if the present Opposition parties do not use their time in waiting to consider their policies for government.
The most positive factor of the boom years was the sense of possibilities it opened up for us, encouraging and fuelling innovation, creating energy and imbuing the country with optimism after so many decades of pessimism and failure. All those features should not be lost: we may have to curb our ambitions in the short term but we should not abandon them.