EXACTLY 21 years ago, Ireland was in the throes of the presidential election campaign that ended in the election of our first female president. That campaign, nearly as colourful as the present one, provoked me to write my first book, Jiving at the Crossroads, reissued this week on the 20th anniversary of its original publication. To reflect on the contrasts between the two moments is to become aware again of a different and usually overlooked drumbeat deep in the mix of Irish life.
In a dynamic society, there is always an awareness, sometimes unconscious, of the dominant ideological backbeat, driving things forward. Sometimes – as back then – this becomes overwhelming: a deep, shared, repeated riff of expectation and certainty. At other times – as now – it dies down to the faintest bass arpeggio, as though begging a handclap to keep it going. It is this rhythm that politicians vie with one another to tap out on the national drumkit.
Jiving at the Crossroadswas a book about crossing the road – about looking in the mirror at the "blueshirt" mentality I had grown up with, and going across to gaze into the fanaticism of the other side.
In writing the book, I sought to delve beneath the surface moralism and tribal slogans to excavate some sense of what might be going on underneath. Combining personal reminiscence with epic tales from the national political stage, Jiving cast colossi such as Charles J Haughey and Seán Doherty as the ambiguous heroes of a story that was really about the relationship between my late father and me.
Superficially, the book jars with the present mood of repudiation and finger-pointing, and yet that disharmony emphasises its most valid point: what happens on the surface tends to be misleading as to the swirl of the undertows. The dominant discourse is adept at identifying villains, pointing fingers and venting on some transient sense of “good” and “evil”.
But, underneath, the culture remembers that these oppositions have always been present, though representing, at varying times, different obsessions and enmities. To understand the capriciousness of the Irish electorate, it is necessary to have some understanding of these undertows. Most of those who think out loud about Irish politics tend to do so in moral terms, emphasising the superficialities and affectations, while remaining oblivious of the undercurrents – or, worse, reading them on the basis of what people actually say.
Back then, it all seemed very straightforward. We were emerging – were we not? – from the primordial mists of tribalism, traditionalism, clientelism and a dozen other isms that had been repudiated with sufficient vehemence to suggest a clear agenda for progress. The promise was of “change”, a golden age of Irish life, probably heading in a leftward, liberal, egalitarian and secular direction. Everything would be different, we promised ourselves, once we shook off the binds of our tribal, traditional past.
Mary Robinson ticked the boxes of progress understandings imported from elsewhere. Having elected her, we banished from our thoughts any serious consideration of managing the shifting forward of our society on terms arising from any internal measure.
A woman president looked great on top of the tree. Soon afterwards, what looked like prosperity arrived both to vindicate and distract us. We have since seen war and peace, prosperity and bankruptcy, and experienced some jarring changes in the driving rhythms of this society. But perhaps the most visible factor lending coherence to the political life of this republic over those two decades is that since 1990 we have had a female head of State. On a superficial perusal, a series of revolutions appears to have occurred. Fianna Fáil lies in ruins; similarly the Irish Catholic Church.
The liberal/secular agenda, which provided the score for the 1980s, seemed to get implemented all of a rush, to the point where nowadays virtually everyone is not only self-describing as “liberal” but as simplistically and intolerantly so as to bear a striking resemblance to the conservative dinosaurs finally banished in 1990.
As for the much-chewed “national question”, the peace held against the odds, and now the meltdown in the Republic looks set to be capitalised upon by “republicans” with time on their hands and power in their sights.
But when we glance backwards, it is prosperity and its antithesis that stand side by side as the ominous totems of the past two decades, their shadows deepening and merging into one.
Both conditions have, in differing ways, rendered us more unthinking: in prosperity because we didn’t need to think, in its aftermath because we became incoherent with rage.
One of the most encouraging things emerging from the present election is that, in certain respects, we appear to have moved beyond seeking after tokens to portray our “progressiveness”. There was a worrying moment when it looked like we might cling to the idea of a “gay president” as a way of again distracting ourselves from reality, but that head-stagger seems to have passed.
It is interesting that the two female candidates languish near the bottom of the table. Perhaps we are growing up a little.
The Seán Gallagher phenomenon is interesting in this context. (Although of course by identifying the syndrome I risk frightening it back into itself and provoking a reassertion of the surface piety.)
Like Mary McAleese, he has some of those odd, indefinable characteristics that seem to knit a sense of the “global now” to elements of a remembered Irish personality. This may yet prove the most crucial factor in this election. Deeper down, and perhaps somewhat disconnected from Gallagher’s own intentions, I detect a subconscious desire to elect him – both because and in spite of his associations with Fianna Fáil.
His candidacy provides an X-ray of that duplicitous streak in the Irish mentality: outwardly the almost unanimous joining-in with the baying and repudiating of the tribal backstory; inwardly, in large numbers of us, the DNA-embedded attachment that dares not breathe its name. This syndrome, fundamentally, is what Jiving at the Crossroadstried to describe.
Pádraig Pearse famously rejected the idea that human progress and understanding are matters of linear growth, insisting that history and culture travel in circles not straight lines. Thus, developments that seem new are nearly always the recurrence of ancient phenomena that have been forgotten.
Harking back to that previous moment of acute self-awareness 21 years ago, it is possible to perceive the enduring truth in this observation. The future is always a dance mix of the past.
A new edition of John Waters's Jiving at the Crossroadsis being published tomorrow (Transworld Ireland)