Dummies in the shop window of a failing ideology

For years Ireland has been seen not as a nation or a society but as a model for other poor suckers to follow

IN THE romantic Ireland that’s dead and gone, it was a commonplace to imagine Ireland as a woman and to call her Kathleen Ní Houlihán. But nowadays we’d have to call her Naomi Campbell or Kate Moss.

For 20 years now, albeit in starkly different ways, Ireland has been imagined, not as a nation or a society, but as a model. It’s a habit of mind that has done us nothing but harm.

It started in the boom years. As a narrative, the story of Irish prosperity was more James Joyce than Hans Christian Anderson: it was very complicated. To understand it, you had to explain why Ireland was so underdeveloped in the first place and how apparently slow social change had created sudden economic possibilities. You had to chart a peculiar alignment of the planets, in which the gravitational pulls of Europe and America were in a rare and benign equilibrium.

It was much easier to adopt a simplistic explanation and to make Ireland a universal model for development. This was done because Ireland, on a very superficial reading, could be made to “prove” something that a very powerful right-wing ideology needed to prove: that cutting taxes and slashing regulation is the golden path to prosperity for all. The “Irish model” was born and then held up for poor suckers everywhere as the example they had to follow. (Hence Bertie in Nigeria.) It became an article of conservative faith: in the 2008 presidential debates in the US, John McCain was still citing Ireland as the model, even as the real Ireland was imploding.

If, like me, you’re an incorrigible optimist, you assume that when a habit of mind leads to disaster, it will be abandoned. In the harsh light of events, it was obvious that all the guff about the “Irish model” wasn’t innocent. It enabled a toxic self-delusion: if all those other people want to follow the “Irish model”, how could anything we’re doing be wrong? A complicated path to prosperity suggested a need to constantly think about where the next turns on the road might be. A simplistic model of tax cuts and incentives on the one side and deregulation on the other meant that all you had to do was to keep on keeping on.

The obvious idiocy of this way of thinking should have killed off “the Irish model”. Instead, it has acquired a whole new life. Its meaning is radically different, but the mentality is the same – and just as poisonous.

Now, of course, Ireland is not the model for prosperity in the globalised economy, it’s the model for so-called austerity in the euro zone. Ireland is the “role model” for other bailout countries, says the former ECB uber-hawk, Jürgen Stark. “Greece has a role model”, says the then ECB president Jean Claude Trichet, “and the role model is Ireland”.

The child on the poster has changed – we were Richie Rich, the richest kid in the world; now we’re Little Orphan Annie, tap-dancing through the Depression – but we’re still the poster child.

The process at work is unaltered. Once, right-wing orthodoxy required “proof” of something it wanted to believe and invented an Ireland to suit. Now, it has something else it wants to prove and is doing exactly the same thing. Instead of moving from delusion to reality, it has simply swapped delusions. And just as the boom-time delusion did real harm, so does its successor.

Firstly, it enables a wilful ignoring of what is actually happening in Ireland. Once it’s been decided that the State is the model for public austerity combined with the sanctity of private debt, it cannot be admitted that the model is patently not working. The reality of mass unemployment and a flat-lining domestic economy must be banished from the mind.

Secondly, the delusion enables Irish politicians to remain supine. The reality in which they are engaged is one of utter humiliation. They are reduced to operating Home Rule, with the ironic twist that it’s under Frankfurt, not Westminster. The “model” idea works as a defence mechanism. It turns them, imaginatively, from humiliated followers into bold leaders. We’re not being dragged by the nose, we’re blazing the trail.

Thirdly, the idea of an Irish model actually makes the ECB and European politicians less likely to face up to the injustice and unsustainability of the bank debts. The Government’s delusion is that you get rewarded for being the model. On the contrary, it is vital that the model goes on being the model by sticking precisely to the programme. Greece, being “bad”, can be allowed to default on some of its debts. Ireland, being perfectly good, must absolutely not be allowed any deviation.

Lastly, in this mentality, real, living, suffering Irish people are irrelevant. The cost to them of current policies is neither here nor there. Models don’t have choices – they strike poses on other people’s orders.

Humanity is irrelevant. We may imagine that we’re on the catwalk, but in this idea of Ireland as a model for austerity, we are actually the dummies in the shop window of a failing ideology.