Old Blue i (from the archives)
Are the Irish becoming the hole in their own cultural doughnut?
(Originally published March 17th 2003, Irish Times)
Browsing a news website last week, I came across the unintentionally mordant headline: ‘Sinn Féin calls for harmonisation of mobile phone rates throughout 32 counties’. If you were wondering what happened to the nationalist struggle, the answer is possibly oscillating above that sentence.
A cheap shot, but with a grain of truth. We don’t talk much anymore about the National Question — issues of self-determination having been translated into questions of development, progress and money. And those who claimed to carry the flame of national aspiration have changed course without feeling any need to explain themselves. To be fair, we don’t expect explanations from our local ‘Republican Party’ (FF — retired), but the edgy silence from Sinn Féin — on the philosophical questions of national identity at least — an organisation only recently stood down from the final frontier of allegedly nationalist military endeavour, is more interesting. So long demonised as the mouthpiece of reactionary nationalist ideas, SF is today indistinguishable in its utterances from the Labour Party. While it continues to gain ground in this Republic as a friend of the disaffected, its social policy portfolio could be published without alteration as a series of editorials in this newspaper. The possibility becomes ever more plausible that the Provisionals were never authentic bearers of the nationalist standard, but merely provincial faction-fighters with a parochial grievance, elevated beyond its local merits by virtue of being clothed in the drapes of nationalist struggle and identity. That local squabble having been addressed — however imperfectly — SF has tucked in its green shirt-tails and set to fumbling in the greasy till.
It is odd, on this St Patrick’s day, to reflect that the issues that consumed us for generations have been buried for years now without many noticing. Five years after the defusing of Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution, there is now no significant political entity on the island articulating a consistent vision of reunification and/or the realisation of the Irish nation.
Sinn Féin’s seeming disengagement from the national question is but symptomatic of a wider societal evasion. During the Tiger years, issues of self-realisation and the putative reintegration of the national territory went underground, only partly due to their being consigned to the historical sin-bin by the Belfast Agreement. The chief reason is that we suddenly became rich. Money distracts, but also acts as a deep freeze for less liquid aspirations, storing up life to be lived later. At the same time, and paradoxically, money creates the illusion that discussion of less material aspiration is rendered irrelevant by virtue of reaching your destination without recourse to more elaborate fantasies or ideas.
The absence of an identity, or even a discussion about this absence, is why today, our allegedly national feastday, is incapable of reaching beyond kitsch and Celtic overkill. We wouldn’t recognise ourselves in any other description. The idea has become ingrained that identity is something of concern only to ideologues, and nationhood the preserve of bombmakers and assassins. But without an identity, a ‘people’, like an individual, is doomed to waste away in the world. The pursuit of some definition, even a rolling, paradoxical and temporary definition, is a necessary and moral enterprise.
Consider that our allegedly ground-breaking economy comprises mainly a cuckoo economy lured here by low taxes from a (hitherto!) benevolent foreign state. Consider that virtually the only widely approved expression of national sentiment relates nowadays to a game that was all but banned here until a generation ago because it was ‘foreign’. The success of the national soccer team under Jack Charlton in the late-1980s and early ‘90s, reveals itself in retrospect as a portent of the economic miracle of the decade that followed. But the warm fuzzy feelings evoked by both phenomena are misplaced, since both successes were managed by foreigners, and involved non-indigenous products.
Intriguingly, also, the discussion of national identity has disappeared underground at a time when, as never before, its questions have become relevant — as, for the first time in several centuries, Ireland deals with a significant influx of new ‘peoples’. In this context, in so far as there is a communal view on the matter, it is that the abandonment of discussion of Irish nationhood is a moral and polite response to the phenomenon of immigration. But in what sense is it encouraging to those who come here hoping to put down their own cultural roots to find themselves in a country which denies its own primary colours?
Has Ireland become, after all, in the dark prophetic warning of Thomas Davis, no more than a sand bank ‘thrown up by some recent caprice of earth’: a land-locked space upon which people move without any particular claim to a connection with one another? Is it now a place where all cultures are welcome but none is the host; where it has not merely been decided that discussion of national identity is a fruitless project, but that this fruitlessness is a good thing? Thirteen years from celebrating our part-liberation, have the Irish people become the hole in the cultural doughnut?