Fintan O’Toole: Anything is possible now, we can renew Ireland

As Ireland was going into its revolutionary period, WB Yeats said the country was like “soft wax”. It would, he predicted, be given a shape in those years that it would hold for a century.

Well, here we are a century on, marking a decade of centenaries. The shape the island took in the period we are now commemorating does not hold anymore. The wax is soft again and we have to decide what stamp we want to put on it for the next century.

The immediate context for thinking more deeply about the need for a radical renewal is, of course, the pandemic. We have had a great shock to the system. We have been knocked out of our collective stride. Grim and grief-filled as the experience has been, it has also forced us to ask what path we want to be on.

But it is well to remember that, even if we had never had to deal with Covid-19, we would be forced to confront a series of huge challenges to the way we have been doing things. At least five major changes are under way. Any one of them would demand a response; the combination demands a profound rethink.

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We have drifted into a 'choice' that housing should be a commodity and an investment rather than a human necessity

The first change is the slowest but also in some ways the most astounding: the collapse of Catholic Ireland. It has been unfolding since the 1990s and we are still trying to deal with it. Controversies such as the mother and baby home report or the ownership of the new National Maternity Hospital are aftershocks. But beneath them is a genuinely seismic shift.

Put simply, the mental world in which the majority of Irish people lived – the “moral monopoly” created and sustained by the institutional Catholic Church – has vanished. But it was not just a religious culture. It shaped the State itself, both in its laws and its most basic systems of education, health and welfare.

What takes its place? How should we run those systems? What are the collective public values that should underlie public provision and public policy?

These are not abstract questions. There are bad answers that we have arrived at by default. We have drifted into a “choice” that housing should be a commodity and an investment rather than a human necessity. We have accepted the fact that access to healthcare should be deeply influenced, not by need, but by money.

These are not necessarily principles most Irish people would agree with. But they’re what we end up with when we abandon one set of public values without creating another.

The second big change is that the idea of using very low or effectively non-existent corporation tax as the primary driver of economic development has run out of fuel. It has had a good run. We’ve been at it more or less since 1958.

But it has been obvious for some years now that Ireland is too large a player in the foreign direct investment game to get away with depriving other countries of revenues. The massive cost to governments of the pandemic, and the consequent need to make the vastly wealthy multinationals pay their fair share of taxes, means that the rules of this game are changing rapidly.

But, as Danny McCoy of Ibec has been pointing out for some time now, the real question in relation to Ireland and the multinationals has also changed. It is no longer primarily about attraction. It is about retention.

And that’s not a matter of just honey-coating the tax system. It’s about much more complex things such as the physical, social and cultural infrastructure of the country – all of which are inadequate. It’s about housing and transport and education and the natural environment and the sense of Ireland as an exciting, creative space where people want, not just to invest, but to be.

Thirdly, there is the political culture. For most of the history of the State, Irish political culture was remarkably stable, given that it emerged from a revolution and a civil war whose legacies remained, in the Troubles, very much alive.

Party politics retained pretty much the same shape from the early 1930s until the aftermath of the fall of the Celtic Tiger. It was Fianna Fáil versus the rest, with the rest being centred on Fine Gael. That duopoly is gone – and it’s not coming back.

Ireland was never thoroughly converted to the Reagan-Thatcher faith, but what did take hold was the ideology that private companies are always the best at delivering public goods

One big question, though, is whether this transformation of the party system can lead to a transformation for the better of Irish democracy. There are huge opportunities for reform. The Senate is still an offensive absurdity that could be made into a proper second chamber. Local and regional government in Ireland is almost the weakest in the developed world. Why should Ireland not be the pioneer of new ways of involving citizens in decision-making through online technologies?

The other large issue for the political culture is that neoliberalism has demonstrably failed. Ireland was never thoroughly converted to the Reagan-Thatcher faith, but what did take hold was the ideology that private companies are always the best at delivering public goods.

This has had its most disastrous effects in housing, with the effective abandonment of the idea that the State and local authorities should build large numbers of homes. The economic and social effects have been terrible.

But we see it in other areas too. The pandemic has highlighted two very different kinds of problems: the need for rural broadband and the consignment of more and more older people to private nursing homes. Yet the national broadband scheme has been entrusted to a private company and we have no national plan for integrated social care.

There has to be a return to much more active systems of public provision. But that in turn demands vastly more effective systems of public project management and accountability for the use of public money than we have seen with, for example, the national children’s hospital.

Fourth, there is Brexit. Its consequences are only beginning to play out, but we can already see how profound they will be. This is not a blip. It is a historic event.

It has forced Ireland to reorientate itself more towards continental Europe. It has undermined the existing political architecture of the whole archipelago we inhabit. We cannot take it for granted that our nearest neighbour will always be an entity called the United Kingdom.

The consequences have to be confronted whether or not one wishes to see a united Ireland anytime soon. As Brexit has shown, these things are not merely in Irish hands – what happens on the other side of the Irish Sea is out of our control but affects us deeply. We are being forced to think about what a post-UK settlement might look like – but also what a genuinely pluralist Irishness might look like.

Finally, there is climate change. Even if nothing else was happening, the scale of the adjustments needed to decarbonise the economy and meet our international commitments would be daunting. Ireland has been an outlier in the worst way – one of the laggards of Europe – which means that we don’t just have to reach demanding targets, we have to do so from a very low base of achievement.

These five challenges create the context in which we have to think about Ireland after the pandemic. They mean that, even if we wanted to, there is no stable status quo ante for us to return to. The way things were was not some kind of safe ground. It was a rapidly shifting landscape.

What is useful, though, is to ask: what has the pandemic done for us? Has it changed the ways in which we might approach all the challenges that were already there?

It is probably a reasonable guess that the first phase of post-pandemic life will actually be rather nostalgic. We will, in all sorts of big and small ways, be trying to get home again. We will want to embrace the familiar, to cover ourselves in the comfort blankets of the old normalcy.

But that phase can’t last very long for all of the reasons just outlined. We will be confronted with a choice. We either go from the acute crisis management of the pandemic period back to the established culture of chronic crisis management, or we develop some kind of working consensus on the long-term responses to the five big challenges.

It may be a good start that the pandemic has shown us what the collective values of a secular republic might be. It did this in both negative and positive ways.

To disappear as a citizen is a kind of metaphoric death. Now we know that it can also be the literal kind too

Negatively, the early phase of the pandemic proved in a particularly awful way the truth of the old adage: out of sight, out of mind. All the evidence has shown that most older people, given a choice, do not want to live in congregated residential settings. For some there is no alternative, but many people could stay longer in their own homes with the right supports.

The disastrous death toll in residential settings – not just for older people but for people with disabilities and in direct provision – demonstrated the wisdom of keeping vulnerable people close to their own communities. But it also pointed to a larger lesson: nobody should be rendered invisible. To disappear as a citizen is a kind of metaphoric death. Now we know that it can also be the literal kind too.

On the positive side, the pandemic has reminded us of the value of public service. Huge numbers of people in the health service, in education, in central and local government, in the Garda and Defence Forces put themselves at risk and worked themselves to the bone. They need to be listened to, well led and valued as a great public resource. They need to be allowed to show the same vigour after the pandemic as during it.

Equally positive is the renewed sense of connection to place and the environment. No one would wish for the experience of confinement, but it has been a great intensifier. Even as our worlds shrunk, they also became enriched. We moved from the extensive to the intensive, becoming much more alert to every space we could occupy, whether it was a back garden or a public park, a few urban streets or a country road. Hundreds of thousands of us have experienced Ireland in a new way just by staying here for our holidays.

And, at the same time, we’ve been forced to think in new ways about the relationship between place and work. The working-at-home revolution has deep dangers – domestic life can be invaded by employers. But it also brings great opportunities.

It can make us rethink our urban spaces and take them back for a more varied civic and social life. It can also finally allow us to address the unsustainable imbalance between an overdeveloped Greater Dublin on the one side and undeveloped small towns and villages on the other.

We’ve also experienced the natural world – the birdsong, the budding of the trees, the lie of the land – more acutely. Given the way we have collectively allowed one of the most pristine environments in western Europe to deteriorate so rapidly in recent decades, this experience could be the basis for a change of mindset. If we are to create a sustainable island, we need one.

Most positively of all, there is a sense of possibility. Things that could not be done were suddenly not just imaginable but achievable. The question for us now is why we need a deadly plague to make us believe that.