I recently found a report I wrote from Germany during the 1988 European soccer championship: a mere 11 years ago, but it could be from another century and about another people. That report spoke of how little the Irish people congratulated themselves, and how endlessly self-critical we were; but now the Irish soccer team, and above all the Irish fans, had given us so much to be proud of.
Self-hatred back then was rife; the public morals of the country had been debauched by the loathsomely louche Charles Haughey. He did not invent the politics of economic suicide - that honour fell to the Fianna Fail government elected in 1977 - but he did refine it into a low art. Haugheyconomics saddled us with a debt exceeding Poland's; we became the laughing stock of Europe, and journalists came here to jeer.
Worst of all, we lacked the political will to terminate the career of this bamboozling, fraud: we didn't know the details of how he had corrupted the governance of this country, but we knew its broad outlines. Yet as mesmerised as a rabbit before a cobra, we did nothing; and in our impotent fury, loathed ourselves.
Financial rectitude
Oh for a bit of that self-loathing now. For we have grown smug beyond belief; the Swiss are a nation of hermit-nuns in comparison. For our economy was not transformed by an act of our own political will - quite the reverse: our right to economic self-government was almost confiscated ten years ago by the IMF. That threat finally caused this state to embrace the rigours of financial rectitude.
Nor did our political class have anything to do with the destruction of the career and reputation of Charles J Haughey. Left to its own devices, that class would have permitted him to enter retirement at his choosing, still uttering his bathetic farewell - "I have done the state some service". The career was in fact ended only when his former poodle Sean Doherty turned and bit him. And the destruction of his reputation we owe entirely to Margaret Heffernan, whom I handled unkindly a couple of years ago in another publication: and that I now regret. For our debt to her is enormous. She, now, has done the state some service. Her revelations lanced a boil; and what a putrid ocean of pus has erupted ever since.
Yet today, amid the fountaining purulence, as we hear of the banks engaging in criminal evasions of tax, of back-scratching land-rezonings, of a frenzied merry-go-round of brown-paper bags - all, essentially underwritten by an abjectly supine PAYE class - we still manage to fill the air with self-congratulatory inanities about the Celtic Tiger. Temple Bar is presented as the culinary centre of the universe, and our economic miracle is discussed as if Microsoft and Hewlitt Packard were Irish companies.
What is the greatest and most damnable truth about us? It is this: that one quarter of our population are functionally illiterate. In reality, this means some 50 per cent of working class people cannot read or write properly, and are doomed to life in ghettoes of witless lumpen-proletarian primitivism. Far from the existence of this class being a matter of shame, it is regarded as the raw material for winsome self-congratulation: ah yes, the real "Dubs" of Roddy Doyle's novels, and great characters, the lot of them. Begob.
Self-imposed ethos
There's no greater indictment of the social and economic priorities of our political life than that an educationally-deprived and economically unproductive caste of drones, with their zealously self-imposed ethos of conforming-with-failure dronedom, is so large and growing.
No other small, single-race, single-religion, easily-governed, culturally-homogenous state in Europe has such a vast and lawless underclass. And now it has been invented, how do we disinvent it? How can we undermine a culture which prizes educational non-achievement as a badge of identity?
Our political-class is incapable of managing even modest reforms of our outdated and Byzantinely irrelevant licensing laws - and by God the proposed reforms managed to be both minimalist and ridiculous - without the licensee-classes making monkeys of the government. How can those same characters even begin to bring about change in communities which triumph in philistinism, and where state-dependency, crime, drugs, terrorist-recruitment and single-motherhood-as-a-career-move are the drumbeat of daily life?
Altruism is weak
Hand-outs and larger dole won't help but smaller class sizes in smaller and better schools, teaching useful skills, will. So will dropping school Irish. So will more gardai. So too will reassessing the usefulness of pushing unmarried mothers up the housing list. And the motive for this? Not altruism: altruism is a poor engine for policy, for altruism is weak, unfocussed, inconstant. We should be tackling illiteracy and making non-achievers achieve out of self-interest; ours and theirs. Illiterates breed early and often, creating more illiterates even as family size throughout the rest of society is plummeting.
A Dail deputy or two should really saunter down to Westland Row and get the DART to Kilbarrack, where gardai nightly risk their lives and the economic miracle transforming the rest of the country might as well be occurring in Rio. It is another world: selfishly, we should realise that it is a world which, unreconstructed, might one day soon consume our safer, smugger world just down the tracks - and then by God shall we know the meaning of self-criticism.