THIS HAS been the strangest year, characterised by a lurching between half-baked optimism and weary resignation. It began with public rage and despair washing over the disintegration of the Fianna Fáil/Green government, morphing into surges of irrational expectation during and after the February election.
Perhaps some guilty sense of complicity in the perpetration of a perverse hoax against ourselves has hitherto saved us from reverting to our previous grumbling and recrimination.
But now we awake to the smell of coffee.
Although, in literal terms, there is probably no longer any entity of Ireland to be called “we”, it is in some ways instructive to reflect on the collective drift of things as resulting from a coherent single impetus. In seeking to describe the dominant wave of the past three years, you would perhaps identify a pattern of intense public rage, followed by radical speculation, followed by hoping and resolve – coming in the end to precisely nothing.
For three years, we listened, on virtually a 24/7 basis, to discussions about options encompassing every conceivable possibility. We moaned and groaned and foamed at the mouth. We went to the core of our economic condition and concluded that it arose from obvious and fundamental mistakes.
Judging from media-hosted discussions at least, it seemed many times that anything might happen – indeed might be about to happen any moment – as we discussed burning bondholders, withdrawing from the euro zone, refloating the punt and going it alone.
In this discussion, the most radical voices appeared to be the most listened-to and respected. The books we bought and presumably read were the ones pointing fingers of blame and offering the most sweeping proposals for a solution. And yet, here we are, gazing into the entrails of yet another mean and fiddle-farting budget designed to ingratiate our Government with its European masters while squeezing the working citizen a little closer to obliteration.
Perhaps things have not yet grown sufficiently bad for us to discover in ourselves the courage that history suggests lies somewhere deep in whatever remains of our collective consciousness. Or perhaps it comes down to the quality of our faith, by which I mean our capacity to envisage possibilities that are not yet present or visible. True change involves a leap into the unknown, and this is only possible if there exists both an overwhelming motivation and a shared belief in some greater force that cares and protects. In the absence of such a confluence, it seems, we cling to what we have, and yet remain puzzled as to why nothing ever changes.
And yet, there remains, underneath, this longing for something completely new, as we observed in the recent presidential election, when we gazed into the eyes of a previously uncontemplated figure and briefly toyed with the idea of electing him as our moral and symbolic leader. But then, sensing something – or sensing nothing – we lost courage. It is, I suppose, reassuring that, no matter how jaded or weary we become, we remain open to seduction by the possibilities of new beginnings. But always such possibilities are hijacked by the political time-servers, or twisted by the machinations of politics operating independently of the supposedly sovereign people.
One way or another, it seems that we are governed by, above all, inertia. The crucial moment in this year’s general election occurred before the campaign started, when a number of high-profile journalists, having feinted a radical alternative, decided not to proceed with the proposed new political movement named in advance as “Democracy Now”.
In the two years up to that moment, we had observed the growth of what might be called a crisis sensibility, whereby it became possible that the outrage being expressed in the extra-political context might be imported into the system. But the revolutionaries, having occupied the public square and monopolised the balcony, suddenly vacated the platform, casting us back upon the standard options. Ultimately, you have to conclude that they looked into our collective eyes and decided that we could not be trusted.
But what is fascinating is that we didn’t just half-heartedly turn from McWilliams/O’Toole to Kenny/Gilmore, but immediately began to invest in the party dinosaurs something of the same levels of hope and expectation, somehow convincing ourselves that the new Government – in truth a default option – would amount to a radical change. Now, it is as though we are unable to work out what has gone wrong, how our faith has again come to be “betrayed”.
If you contemplate together the outcomes of the general and presidential elections, you begin to perceive a pattern. The sudden surge towards Seán Gallagher, followed by the on-the-rebound embrace of Michael D, is exactly the same process that occurred in the general election. In both cases, we briefly contemplated kicking over the traces before clinging doggedly to nurse.
As we come to the end of another year of running hard on the spot, Democracy Now and Seán Gallagher are like the ghosts of some parallel version of ourselves – more reckless, more courageous, more heroic, madder, but ultimately truer to ourselves than the one that, once again, we have observed ourselves acting out for the world.