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Fintan O’Toole: Ireland's extraordinary culture of mutual trust still exists amid pandemic

The State has issued a vast IOU drawn on the bank of public trust

‘If you think of the many and terrible ways in which trust has been abused and betrayed in Ireland over the last two decades, there is something precious in our willingness to keep doing so.’

Fintan O'Toole's face
Fintan O'Toole
Sat Jan 9 2021 - 06:00

In the summer of 1966, the Nobel Prize-winning German novelist Heinrich Böll was, as usual, in Achill, Co Mayo. From early May to the end of July, the entire banking system in Ireland shut down because bank officials went on strike.

Böll noted in his journal that this was “surely an insane situation, when, in a modern country with a modern economy, cheques must be accepted for weeks, for months, merely on trust . . . when a completely modern economy suddenly places itself in a position of barter and ‘Trust me, fellow countryman.”

Yet what intrigued Böll was the way things just carried on. “Logicians of Continental background would sagely predict a disaster, but this did not happen in Ireland . . . strangely enough, nothing ‘collapsed’, the situation turned into a kind of hilarious national sport.”

This was not just a Hibernophile’s romantic fantasy. During the bank strike of 1966 – and again during an even longer one in 1970 – the Irish economy functioned, in effect, on IOUs. Publicans and shopkeepers cashed cheques for customers, not knowing when they would be able to lodge them.

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To recall all of this may seem merely nostalgic. Nothing quite like it could happen now, not least because the whole idea of writing a cheque is antediluvian

Trading IOUs for hard cash became an organised endeavour. The Irish Times reported, for example, that the tinned food company Bachelors, in order to pay its £5,000 weekly wage bill, had redeployed five members of its staff full-time cashing cheques “in bits and pieces around the country”.

During the strike of 1970, in one of the main branches of Dunnes Stores, "up three flights of steps to the Accounts Department ventures a steady stream of people hoping to cash cheques. They range from a schoolteacher timidly producing his monthly salary cheque for £45 to the cashier of a manufacturing firm presenting a cheque for hundreds of pounds to change into cash for wage packets. 'They are mostly strangers to us, and we just have to play it by ear in deciding whether to accept a cheque', said an official."

When companies ran out of cheques from the banks, they started improvising their own. When the 1966 strike was over, banks reported that they had received (and would honour) “a large number of home-made cheques such as billheads and notepaper with threepenny stamps”.

The intriguing thing about these episodes is the level of trust in Irish society. People were handing over large amounts of cash, sometimes to known customers but sometimes to complete strangers, in return for IOUs.

And the fact that this entirely informal system worked in 1970 as it had done four years earlier suggests that the first experience had been reasonably good. There’s no doubt that some people got stung but they were too few to create any general sense of suspicion. That intangible thing, trust, kept an entire economy going.

To recall all of this may seem merely nostalgic. Nothing quite like it could happen now, not least because the whole idea of writing a cheque – never mind expecting a publican or shopkeeper to cash it for you – is antediluvian.

But this experience does raise a question that, as we endure a third lockdown, is no less vital: can we still draw on a culture of trust?

This is not a speculative abstraction. We’re at a point in the pandemic where reserves of patience are woefully depleted. What keeps us going is trust – in government, in science, above all in each other.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Ireland was both a more intimate and rural society than it is now, and a more monocultural one. It was also much more sexist. Böll’s “Trust me, fellow countryman” was pretty much literal – where control of money was concerned, Ireland was still very much a country of men.

This doesn’t make those long episodes of IOU economics less remarkable, but it does make them more understandable. We are programmed to trust “people like us”.

We have to trust each other – we make sacrifices on the condition that we are not being taken for mugs while other people continue to do whatever they like

The vast majority of those doing the trusting in that Ireland were white, male, middle-class (working-class people didn’t have bank accounts anyway) and, above all, Catholic. They reckoned they could look one another in the eye and make reliable judgments about each other.

What we’re enduring now is a very different kind of crisis in a very different kind of society. The crisis is different for two big reasons. One is that its “currency” is invisible and dangerous – what’s being passed around is not money but a potentially fatal virus. The other is that it hits at the very thing that leads to trust – physical closeness. That awful term “social distancing” suggests the erosion of mutuality and intimacy.

Irish society, meanwhile, is radically altered. It is much more urban, more diverse, more plural in almost every sense. The idea of “people like us” is a lot less monolithic. This is a very good thing, but it raises the question of whether the delicate web of informal trust gets weaker as diversity increases.

Something else is new too. If Facebook and Twitter had been around in 1966 or 1970, we can be sure that they would have throbbed with stories of cheats going around fooling and defrauding poor shopkeepers and publicans into cashing bogus cheques. In the cynical and spiteful world of social media, "trusting" is a synonym for "gullible".

And yet collective survival in this crisis lies within a triangle of trust. We have to trust Government and its advisers to make the right decisions.

News coverage and deviants

We have to trust science, especially when mass vaccination becomes possible.

We have to trust each other – we make sacrifices on the condition that we are not being taken for mugs while other people continue to do whatever they like.

So do we still have a culture of trust? The story so far suggests that, on the whole, we do. News coverage is naturally drawn to the deviants, the gougers and the blackguards. The minority of faux-libertarian objectors make a lot of noise.

Yet, as of last month, only 12 per cent of Irish people thought that Government responses to the pandemic have been too extreme. The consistent pattern throughout the crisis has been that far more people favour tougher restrictions than those in place at any given time than want a looser regime. Most of us still think, in other words, that our fellow citizens can be trusted to follow the rules, even if they are harsh.

There is nothing to cheer in the existence of the circumstances that force us to make these optimistic judgments. But, if you think of the many and terrible ways in which trust has been abused and betrayed in Ireland over the last two decades, there is something precious in our willingness to keep doing so.

It’s a huge asset and it must not be squandered. The State has issued a vast IOU, drawn on the bank of public trust: do the right thing and your confidence will be repaid. It really has to be.

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