We berate politicians and bankers for getting us into this mess, thus betraying a tilt towards collective amnesia
WE HAD a neighbour at home one time who, over the course of years, caused the six-foot hedge between our two gardens to lean precariously over on our side. Every time he would pass up or down the path running alongside the hedge, he would turn a single twig inwards. Eventually, the hedge was so tilted in our direction that our path became impassable.
I think of him sometimes nowadays listening to the discussion about the euro zone crisis.
Not long ago, we were a deeply smug people convinced of our place in the modern world, delighted with how we had managed the forces of progress to our maximum advantage.
Now, we berate politicians, civil servants and bankers for betraying our trust and destroying our fine plans. If only they had listened to the people, we would not have lost our economic sovereignty this time last year.
I wonder whether the young and uninitiated are buying into the new born-again radicalism that stalks the land.
Everyone now, it seems, knew all along that European monetary union was a disastrous idea, and voted against it at every available opportunity.
It is interesting to reflect on what this process reveals about how a whole people can come, over the course of years or months, to arrive at a view of the past that is utterly at variance with the facts. It doesn’t happen all at once, but in the knit and purl of things, a tug here and a tweak there, such as might go unnoticed from close quarters and soon blend into the accepted weave of history and fact.
I obtained a shimmering insight into the evolution of such collective amnesia the other evening, listening to Olivia O’Leary’s political diary on Drivetime. She was talking about the continuing crisis in the euro zone and tracing the loss of national sovereignty back to the Maastricht referendum of June 1992.
Her depiction of the situation deviated only slightly from the facts as I remembered them, but sufficiently so to create a certain impression of how we got where we are. She outlined succinctly the nature of the crisis as it has come to affect us: how we gave up the chief instruments of our economy, including control over interest rates and the capacity to devalue; how low interest rates, set for a struggling Germany and France, led to inflation, cheap credit and, inevitably, a consumer and a property boom here.
But what caught my attention was the tone of her delivery, which implied that all this had, at the time of the Maastricht referendum, been overwhelmingly obvious and widely flagged.
“Almost every economist I know,” she said, “voted against the Maastricht referendum, which laid the foundations for the euro.” I cannot argue with this sentence. But if the economists known to Olivia O’Leary are telling her they voted against Maastricht, then I can only regret that they did not make their voting intentions, and their reasons for them, known at the time. I remember only one economist who took a public position opposed to Maastricht: that was Raymond Crotty, and he was scorned and excoriated for his trouble.
The turnout in the Maastricht referendum was 57 per cent, with 69.1 per cent voting Yes – which means just one in six of those entitled to vote opposed the treaty. Since the outcome of the referendum was linked to the drawing down of the equivalent of about €10 billion in structural funds, the debate was over before it began. Of the main parties, only Democratic Left advocated a No vote. All the newspapers adopted a pro-Maastricht stance. A handful of columnists, myself included, urged a No vote, and were declared insane on that account.
Years later, after the money had been drawn down and spent, a new-found scepticism welled up in the soul of the electorate. During the Nice and Lisbon debates, arguments rejected in 1992 were advanced by born-again radicals who, back in 1992, had kept their scepticism to themselves. By then we had made our bed, and our best chance, given the choices we had made, was to hang together with our European “partners”, if only in the hope of avoiding the kind of separate hangings now in train.
As Olivia O’Leary continued her diary, I realised I was listening to an almost perfect refinement of the public “memory” of our collective journey to the present moment. By conflating the narratives of the Maastricht, Nice and Lisbon referendums, we have persuaded ourselves that, all the way along, we, the far-seeing people, sought to withstand the bullying and blandishments of the political establishment by resisting something we knew would end in tears.
But I have this niggling memory of standing on platforms in 1992 beside the late, great Raymond Crotty, trying to persuade people that voting Yes to Maastricht would be the most disastrous decision we would ever make. Not only do I not recall those platforms being as crowded as we are now led to believe, but I have this almost certain recollection that many of those now claiming they saw all this coming were the ones calling us mad.