The Age of Anomie

A US study of social breakdown due to the wrong kinds of development and ‘progress’, with Ireland its ‘lab rat’, vindicates warnings in my 1997 book, 'An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Ireland'.

Reaping the Whirlwind of  ‘Progress’ 

When we hear talk of ‘the culture wars’, even those of us who take what is called the ‘conservative’ side tend to think purely of factional disagreements that have more to do with ideological attachment, religious affiliation and personal disposition than any objective context in reality. We think of the ‘sides’ — ‘liberals’, ’progressives’, ‘leftists’, versus ‘conservatives’, ‘right-wingers’, ‘traditionalists’ — and reflexively tend to see these descriptions as badges of alliance to something closer to tribes than to different analyses of future possibilities for human society. In part, this has to do with the orchestrated constriction of public debate and discussion over the past decade in particular — i.e. since social media tightened its grip and caused the eruption of Wokeism into every aspect and crevice of public (and increasingly private) life.

For this and other reasons, we rarely any longer remember, in these contexts, that what we are talking about is the very future of the human species — that behind the labels there are real differences of outlook that relate primarily to different options for values and action, each one having enormous implications for the future quality of life on Earth, and the effective running of our societies. The ‘war’ part of ‘culture war’ has become dominant, with the ‘game’ concerning which side is to be the ultimate winner tending to be seen in terms that elevate personal outlooks — ‘tolerance’ and ‘openness’, opposed to ‘xenophobia’ and ‘insularism’, for example — rather than sensible questions about what works and what does not work, what imposes gratuitous damage on society and what objectively improves it, or at least minimises the possibility of lasting damage. Reflectiveness and good sense, even arguing the relative benefits and risks of various options, are no longer part of the process of discussion; they have been eliminated in favour of zealotry and personal animus, and it is easy to see that this has all been part of some kind of plan. When we look to the other side of the battle lines, we see various indicators, emblems and dispositions by which we identify members of our ‘opponents', whom we have been programmed to resist and attack; but we rarely any longer see the issues at the heart of our mutual disagreement for what they really are: different perspectives on the way human freedom acts to benefit or damage human existence in communities.

In a sense, these conditions are indicative of the fact that totalitarianism has already arrived — that ‘nihilisation of the past’ that Václav Havel wrote about, by which a society begins to forget that it once had options, that there used to exist possibilities for alternative ways of being, each with merits and demerits that would be drawn out in public discussion. Now, the sole issue is the acceptance or rejection of a singular option for collective being. Without our having noticed it, we have been ‘moved past the sale’, so that we no longer — ‘conservatives’ any more than ‘progressives’ — deliberate whether we should buy the shiny new vehicle on the showroom floor, but are caught up in a frenzied debate about whether it should be black or white or rainbow striped. Each new phase of the discussion appears to be initiated as though it were already a fait accompli, with the purpose of the ‘debate’ being simply to batter the holdouts into silence. A Man from Mars, briefly surveying this ‘discussion’, would most likely decide, for example, that the reasons for objecting to acts of physical self-mutilation by teenage children reside solely in some kind of arcane dogmatic obscurantism, or that removing all locks, bolts, fortifications and even hinges from one’s home amounts to some kind of virtue that betokens ‘compassion’.  It is as though, as whole societies, we have ‘forgotten’ the things that, in our families and communities we take for granted: that human existence is precarious, that dangers to our lives and our children’s lives lie around every corner, and that the future will be what we make of it, rather than some utopian inevitability that arises when we dissolve our anxieties and trust in the ‘science’ of ideology, and get out of its way.

As it bears down upon my own country, Ireland, all this has emanated not from the desiring or imagination of the Irish people, but as the outworking of the application of entirely imported prescriptions, latched on to by a political class incapable of formulating any ideas of its own, and driven forward by a mixture of greed and the propulsion deriving from the alienation and disenchantment it has fostered. Recent developments — Woke, Covid, the climate-change lie, the Ukraine war and its opening of another mass migration front to add to an already untenable situation —  have created now the conditions where all of these errors and the consequences can be buried under a mess of debris and thus rendered impervious to future examination on their own terms. The destruction begun a generation ago will fade into insignificance by comparison with the collapse that will arise from attempts to cover it up — a bit like the way bank robbers might torch their stolen getaway car.

This article is about how these forces have come to bear on Ireland, over the past four decades or so. But it is about the forces rather than about their specific expression in a particular place. The recent history of Ireland is at its core, but as an exemplar of something universal and profoundly related to the place the West in general has arrived to. It is really about the concepts of modernity and progress, and the effect they generate as collateral products of their own emanations.

This article is grounded in part in a comprehensive recent study of these questions by the Philadelphia-based think-tank, The Neumann Forum, which has taken Ireland as its laboratory animal and used it to cast a magnifier on the phenomena of modernity, materialist progress  and ‘progressivism’ to examine the actual processes at play, the true effects of these, the hidden costs and consequences, and the ultimate disaster that ensues when no meaningful discussion is permitted as to the options. This new and very significant piece of international research — published in the Summer of 2022 — demonstrates a profound connection between policies of foreign direct investment, accompanied by the spread of liberal ideology, and the moral and psychological dissolution of societies.

It may be observed by way of objection that the Neumann Forum is an organisation with a Catholic ethos — pledging itself to ‘coalescing faithful and dedicated Catholics and engaging them through initiatives aimed at defending and preserving the Catholic faith’ — and therefore likely to be biased in its outlooks and approaches. Such an assertion may convey some prima facie legitimacy, but, as with everything, we must judge by the fruits. Are the likely biases an open book? Does the methodology appear to be solid? How does the adumbrated evidence compare with what we already know? Are the conclusions consistent with reality? I believe the Neumann study passes these tests with ease. Of course, the basis of such an accusation — Catholic bias — against either the Neumann Forum or, indeed, myself, would be rather progressive-typically misplaced, since the basis of Catholic teaching on the relevant matters is anthropological and reason-based rather than in any sense dogmatic. Whatever else you may say about it, you have to agree that the Catholic Church, in its social teachings, has shown itself to be a fount of accumulated knowledge and wisdom about the human structure in reality.

I also, in this article, reprise some of my own work, going back to the 1990s, when I was a columnist and sometime reporter, writing about the topics arising in the Neumann study. During the period covered by the study — essentially the past four decades — I was present in the ‘laboratory’ throughout, and had a responsibility to pay attention to things and write about them, and did so in a manner that allows now for verification and comparative reflection. For most of the relevant period, I left behind me a trail of commentary on the issues germane to the Neumann Forum study that can be placed against it for the purposes of comparison and contrast.

For the record, I rarely wrote about these matters in a manner directly connectable to Catholicism. Although reared a Catholic, my own conclusions owed far more to common sense and vigilant observation than they did to Catholic theology or teaching.

The rub, where such accusations are concerned, resides in the fact that my assessments and predictions, deriving chiefly from my work in the 1990s, accord almost precisely with the retrospective analysis and conclusions of the Neumann Forum study.  This is readily demonstrable by reference to a book I published in early 1997 — more or less at the very start of what is called the Celtic Tiger period — which included reports and analyses regarding virtually all of the topics raised in the Neuman study. That book amounted to a coalescing of the arguments I had been making, under headings of economics, culture, spirituality and politics, about the state and direction of my country at that moment, for the beginning of the 1990s. The book was titled An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Ireland, which would later inspire internet sages to accuse me of immodesty. In fact, the book was published as part of a random series of ‘Intelligent Guides to . . .  (History, Philosophy, Modern Ireland, et cetera)’ issued in that period by my then publishers, Duckworths. In fact, the ‘intelligent person’ part was intended to flatter the prospective reader, but in retrospect I have to concede, in all necessary modesty, that it refers more plausibly to the author.

That book was really a précis of the body of work I had done as a journalist and commentator between 1990, when I joined the Irish Times, and the beginning of 1997, when the Celtic Tiger shifted into third gear. It is important to stress that the analysis I offered at that time was widely dismissed and ridiculed — by ‘conservatives’ as much as what I called ‘pseudo-liberals’.  This was, I believe, because of the conditions described at the start of this article, whereby the ‘discussion’ had already degenerated into a faction-fight in which the notion of ‘progress’ itself — and in a singular direction — had already been implicitly accepted by almost everyone: The future was ‘there’ — out in front —  and the only question was whether we should enter it or not.  My overall hypothesis — that the policies and processes of ‘modernity’, ‘progressiveness’, et cetera, as well as the chosen methods of industrial development and modes of ideology relied upon, would prove disastrous for Ireland — was regarded as, at best, counterintuitive and deeply eccentric, and more often as outdated, stupid or insane. My name became a kind of instant snigger-trigger among economists of the time, who were actually quite appalled that someone could question the very basis of ‘development’. Similarly with other categories of commentator, who regarded me as a reactionary and an ‘ignorant culchie’ (rustic). I was told recurringly that we ‘cannot go back’ by people who could hear what I was saying only in the terms of their own prejudices, which I contradicted.

My point in engaging in the present exercise is only in part a pitch for vindication; more important is that the concordance between my on-the-spot analyses in the 1990s were almost entirely predictive of the findings of the Neumann Forum study, from which they were separated by a quarter of a century of Irish political, economic and cultural foolishness. My chief purpose here, then, is to demonstrate that these outcomes were predictable, that they were predicted, and that those predictions were ridiculed and ignored.

The Neumann Forum study is titled Foreign Direct Investment, Liberal Economic Development, and the Proliferation of Socio-Political Pathology, and employs Ireland since 1990 as its central case study, concluding that, under a range of indicators, what we have been terming ‘progress’ has resulted in a massive proliferation of ‘socio-political pathology’. It provides persuasive evidence that, before deploying its neoliberal development strategy of the post-1960s period, Ireland was one of the most homogenous and stable countries on the planet.

The study proceeds to examine ‘in granular detail’ the impact that changes have had on Irish culture, accelerated greatly by waves of foreign direct investment (FDI) in the 1990s and 2000s. Its findings are mostly negative. ‘While Ireland’s economic development has been extremely impressive’, it states, ‘Ireland has declined markedly in every other quality-of-life metric.’

Accordingly, the researchers claim that they have established beyond doubt ‘that liberalism is an inherently destabilising system of ideas and policies’. It can create great wealth, but this wealth is often a poisoned chalice, bringing with it social dysfunction, crime, drug deaths, suicide, and ‘a remarkable level of political destabilisation.’ In short, using recent Irish experience as their guinea pig, the researchers claim that ‘it is an open question whether liberalism is compatible with republican and democratic government — a mode of government [liberalism] purports to be part of.’

With remarkable acuity, the researchers note:

Much of the contemporary Irish liberal political project centres on tearing apart and rewriting the Irish Constitution to eliminate any trace of its origins. By understanding all of this, the reader will better appreciate the enormous historical significance of our basing this study on Ireland. But we did not cherry-pick the example. Ireland is, for any number of reasons, simply the perfect case study for a new integralist sociology and political economy.

The research shows that, as Ireland abandoned its traditional Catholic mores to become a more modern liberal society, the favoured ‘industrial’ policy of FDI — what I call ‘renting out the shop’ — while narrowing or eliminating the previous wealth gap between Ireland and its European neighbours, did so at an enormous cost which is being paid in anomie (mutualised alienation of the population), addiction, depression, suicide and deaths of despair, homicide, collapsing fertility, and eventually a pronounced form of democratic breakdown.

The researchers found that, in the period of the Celtic Tiger (approx 1997-2008), ‘dramatic political fragmentation occurred, with Ireland moving from being a stable parliamentary democracy with a system of two or three parties, to being a country where nearly half of voters elect fringe and independent representatives and where coalitions are increasingly fractious.

‘This disintegration means that parties who should oppose one another are forming homogenous and fragile coalitions. These coalitions, in turn, render the democratic process largely meaningless, as voters end up with the same coalition governments no matter how they vote.’ These changes, the study observes, have been paralleled by a decline in religious belief and observance, a fact that is undeniable.

In 1997, in the opening section of An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Ireland, I made these observations about the impending ‘miracle’ of the Celtic Tiger:

The early manifestations of the miracle were evident in occasional reports of movements in various indicators. From about the middle of 1996, virtually every day's newspaper carried news of an improvement in at least one statistic bearing witness to the increasing health of the Irish economy. In 1995, it was rumoured, the Irish economy had expanded by 10 per cent. Every day brought a new reason to be upbeat and cheerful. Employment was growing at a rate of 3 per cent per annum. The economy was creating jobs at the rate of 1,000 per week. House values were increasing at up to 20 per cent per annum. Inflation was being maintained at less than 2 per cent. Ireland's output- per-head had reached the level of the EU average, as against 64 per cent of the EU average a decade earlier. In the ten years to 1996, the number of people at work in the Irish economy grew by 22 per cent, although the population itself had grown by just one-tenth of that figure in the same period.

Then, at last, came the final confirmation. The Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) Medium-term Review for 1997-2003, published in the spring of 1997, predicted that the coming decade would be 'a period of exceptionally rapid economic growth and improving living standards, the benefits of which can be widely shared'. The unbelieving Irish public was told that economic growth, measured as Gross National Product (GNP) would rise by an average of 5.5 per cent in each of the next five years; that, by the year 2005, Irish living standards would reach the EU average; that unemployment would fall, from its current rate of 12 per cent, to 8.5 per cent in the year 2003, and to 7 per cent by 2005; that government borrowing would be eliminated within three years,and that the level of debt as a proportion of GNP would fall from 88 per cent to 55 per cent by 2003. Irish living standards could be expected to double in the coming two decades, exceeding those of the United Kingdom by 2005. Within a couple of weeks, these pious predictions were confirmed by an report of the World Economic Forum, which placed Ireland at number 16 in its competitiveness league. The Miracle of the Celtic Tiger was being talked about in every corner of the land.

When I joined the Irish Times in 1990, one of the first projects I undertook was a series of articles looking at the sudden surge in suicides, especially noticeably among young men. The series was a response to a contagion of suicides among young men in the Waterford region, and was commissioned by the then Features Editor, Caroline Walsh, who two decades later was to take her own life by drowning in Dun Laoghaire harbour. This is part of the dark, unacknowledged, underbelly of Irish progressivism.

Suicide is the most consistent and reliable indicator of anomie, a connection first made some 125 years ago by Emile Durkheim in his book, On Suicide. Durkheim diagnosed the condition of anomie as a way of understanding something about societies where the normative regulation of relationships by rules and values has collapsed, resulting in individual feelings of despair, isolation and meaninglessness which surface in the form of various social disorders. Each society is different from others, but, year-on-year, each repeats approximately the same pattern. From this he deduced that the social element of suicide holds the key to understanding the health of a society, with individual circumstances in specific suicides being pretexts for  something that occurs for unacknowledged reasons at an unconscious level. Individuals, by uniting, form new psychic beings,   which have distinctive ways of thinking and feeling. Society is not the sum of its parts, but something else. The suicidal individual’s sadness, Durkheim wrote, ‘comes from outside, not, however, from this or that incident in his life, but from the group to which he belongs’. What it boils down to is that every suicide, every homicide, every street hassle, tracks a general condition, which may otherwise remain invisible. Durkheim defined this collective condition as ‘the malady of infinite aspiration’ — wanting more and more of what fails to answer the fundamental questions of existence.

The Neumann report describes the acute change that took place in Ireland in this context from the 1980s onwards:

The suicide rates comparison is stark. In the 1950s Ireland had an incredibly low and stable suicide rate, around 25% of the rate in the United Kingdom. This extremely low suicide rate suggests a very large degree of social integration in Ireland and conversely a very low level of anomie.

In the 1970s, when the cultural changes imported from abroad started to become ingrained in Irish society, the suicide rate started to rise dramatically. By the mid-1980s, Ireland caught up with the United Kingdom. Then something remarkable occurred: as the social and economic foundations were laid down for Ireland’s rapid economic development, the country’s suicide rate far outpaced that of the United Kingdom. Since then, the suicide rate has returned somewhat to levels comparable to the rate in the United Kingdom . . . .

The Neumann study notes that, when Irish society was dominated by the Catholic Church, the Republic of Ireland was ‘an extremely peaceful place’.

At that time, Ireland was probably one of the least violent societies in the world. Indeed, it was perhaps one of the least violent societies in human history.

During the 2000s, Ireland’s homicide rate fell in the higher bracket of most (non-Eastern) European countries. Like the suicide rate, the Irish homicide rate has started to normalise recently.

Overall, the evidence shows that when the dominance of the Catholic Church in Ireland waned, social pathologies increased markedly. During the period of Church dominance, Ireland was likely one of the most peaceful, least violent, most integrated, and most lacking in anomie societies that has ever existed. When Church influence waned, Irish rates of social pathology crept up to mirror the rates seen in other secular European countries — and even surpassed them in some cases. We also see that many of these social pathologies became even worse during the rapid economic development of the 1990s and 2000s, before settling down to these more normal European levels.

In An Intelligent Person’s Guide, 25 years ago, I wrote:

In 1996, I took part in a television discussion about crime with a sociologist and an economist from the ESRI [Economic and Social Research Institute, a state-controlled instrument of economic analysis]. Rather, I had been told the discussion was to be about crime. To my surprise, the ESRI representative began immediately to talk about recent revelations about the physical abuse of children in a Dublin orphanage during the 1950s, details of which had been made public by one of the victims, now an adult. My intention had been to simply point out that crime was irrefutably on the increase in Ireland. But suddenly I found myself in the thick of a debate about whether Ireland in 1996 was better or worse than Ireland in the 1950s. The logic of the ESRI man's argument was that any deterioration in the quality of people's lives resulting from an increase in crime could be offset against the fact that, at least, our young people were no longer subject to corporal punishment in Irish schools and other institutions. This was a classic instance of how anyone who attempts to make what in truth will be rather obvious, unexceptional and objectively uncontroversial observations about the dark underbelly of progress are drawn into forms of argument in which they are forced either to seem to be defending the indefensible or, if they wish to avoid this, to accept the analysis of the modernisers.

In this way, any criticism of the modernising project is discouraged and contained. What was clear, of course, from the subtext of the ESRI man's argument, was that the modernisers are fully aware that their project has deeply injurious consequences for Irish society, to the extent that they will embark on pre-emptive defences of this project even when the context for such an argument is not apparent. Being drawn into what I thought was an irrelevant argument about the relative quality of life in two decades separated by three more gave me pause for thought about what precisely we are doing when we point out the shortcomings of Modern Ireland. We are not, as we might sometimes believe, simply offering criticisms with a view to making things better. We are, in fact, fundamentally questioning an ideology which depends for its plausibility on the effective management of reality and of the public's capacity to describe it. I would be the first to admit that the notion of comparing 1996 with 1959 would never have occurred to me, had I not been prompted by the obvious desire of the modernisers to pre-empt any criticisms of life in the 1990s by discrediting them in advance as the product of a reactionary romanticism. In confronting the modernising tendency, it should never be forgotten that we are dealing with people who are fully aware of the historical and social context in which their project occurs, and of the weight, and indeed the plausibility, of possible objections to it. Their own neurotic attachment to the very time they seek to demonise ensures that any criticism hits them squarely on their rawest nerve. But when there is the remotest danger of their project being questioned in a fundamental manner, they fall back on what is, in truth, their only real defence: that the visible signs of change show an improvement on what went before. Thus, any attempt to articulate some quibble with any aspect of present-day living, which might be interpreted by any one listener in a manner as to make that person consider the possibility that things are not, in fact, unequivocally better than they were, is nipped in the bud, even when this was not the intention behind the criticism.

When the demonisation-of-Ireland-Past approach fails to silence dissent, they invariably opt for the ‘well-its-better-than-other-developed-countries’ ploy. For example, in discussions about crime, they will invariably come up with some figure or other purporting to illustrate that, even if Ireland's crime rate is growing, it is still not as bad as 'other developed countries'. If you listen in a particular way, they appear to be suggesting that, the better to qualify as truly modern, Ireland should be aspiring to even higher crime figures. . . . The truth is that, in most categories, crime in Ireland has more or less doubled with each decade since the 1950s. To compare consecutive years in any one period is of dubious benefit, for the simple reason that fluctuations are inevitable over a short-run timeframe. But it is worth noting that, in the dying days of the pre-modern Ireland of 1959, the Garda Commissioner felt moved to express his regret at an 8 per cent increase in indictable crimes, while nowadays efforts are being made to throw buckets of cold water over statistics which show a far more alarming long-term trend. . . . Any way you want to measure it, Ireland is now a more dangerous place than it was in 1959 — three times more dangerous for the citizen, and five times more dangerous for the citizen's property. . . . A continuation of this pattern of increase into the new century, and particularly in the context of dramatic increases in prosperity combined with growing inequality, will almost certainly ensure that Irish society is set to become a most unpleasant place indeed.

The Neumann study notes that the data concerning Ireland’s consumption of alcohol is somewhat ambiguous.

Despite the Irish reputation for very high alcohol consumption, the cross- sectional statistics on this are mixed. Comparative World Health Organisation (WHO) data do put Ireland as one of the leading per-capita consumers of alcohol in the world, ranking eighth. Interestingly, however, Luxembourg and Germany have higher annual alcohol consumption per capita than Ireland (WHO, 2018). Yet Ireland has a relatively low prevalence of alcoholism and death from alcohol-related causes.

Between 1963 and 2018, alcohol consumption in Ireland increased 76%. Like the rates of homicide and suicide, this figure was even higher in the 1990s. The alcohol consumption data fit with the data on alcohol-related deaths. While Ireland has fewer liver cirrhosis deaths than do most other countries in Europe, the percentage change in liver cirrhosis deaths in Ireland between 1980 and 2010 is amongst the highest in the world (Mokdad et al., 2014).

On the complex and often misread conundrum of alcohol abuse in Ireland, I wrote in 1997:

There had been a time when the myth of the drunken Irish was unfair, at least to those Irish who remained at home. The caricature of the Irish as hard drinkers emanated almost entirely from Irish immigrant communities in Britain and the United States, where the image had more than a little truth to it. In a brilliant analysis of the prevalence of mental illnesses among the ex-patriate Irish in Britain, Liam Greenslade argued that high levels of schizophrenia, depression and alcoholism among first-generation Irish people there had to do with homesickness and estrangement, their need to fill in the gap between themselves and the surrounding society, from which they were divided by a deep sense of alienation. Alcohol played such an important part in their lives, he wrote, because it served as an analgesic: 'it dulls the pain, of toil, of homesickness, of estrangement, of loss’. Noting that, where statistical data exist, the evidence is that the Irish ‘drink less and are more likely to abstain from drink than other national groups', Greenslade describes the pattern of drinking among emigrants as a pathological response to their situation, 'a substitute for community rather than a component of it’.

This pattern occurred at home as well, albeit in less unambiguous circumstances. The figures suggested one thing, the reality another. As a 1996 Irish Department of Health document on alcohol policy noted, there is evidence that ‘the description of the Irish as a particularly alcohol-prone race is a myth. Indeed it is doubtful whether Ireland ever occupied a prominent role with regard to alcohol use or misuse'. But actually, judging from the Department’s own figures, they might have been more accurate in stating that it used to be a myth. In 1994, Irish people spent a total of £2.46 billion on alcohol, or an average of close to £1,000 per adult member of the population. This amounted to a consumption rate of 11.23 litres of pure alcohol per head of population aged 15 years and over. This figure is arrived at by calculating the total number of litres of pure alcohol consumed in the 12 months period and dividing it by the adult population. However, because this calculation does not factor out the non-drinkers, it must be remembered that it is an average figure which seriously understates the reality. Because of the tradition of temperance since the post-Famine period, Ireland has always had a high proportion of non-drinkers. . . .

In 1960, per capita consumption of alcohol in Ireland was 4.88 litres. In 37 years we have virtually tripled our consumption. Undoubtedly a significant factor has been an increase in the number of female drinkers, but, given the relatively low consumption-rate of females, this comes nowhere near accounting for such a dramatic rise in consumption. The main increases occurred during the 1960s and 1970s, with a peak of almost 10 litres in 1979, followed by a decline in the 1980s and a sharp rise from 1987 onwards to the present record level. It is interesting to note that this graph follows precisely the same track as the rises and falls in crime over the same period.

The main tipple of the Irish is beer — including stout, the national drink — which accounts for two-thirds of all alcohol consumed. The consumption of wine has increased five-fold since 1960, but this is not a significant element, having started from a low base figure.

Internationally, the Department of Health figures place Ireland eleventh of 15 EU countries in 1993. But this, as the department itself suggests, is misleading. Since figures are compiled on a crude per capita basis, and Ireland has both the highest proportion of young people and the highest proportion of non-drinkers, this figure amounts to a serious delusion. When it is taken into account that 27 per cent of Ireland's population is under the age of fourteen, Ireland shifts up to eighth place in the table. And if the adult abstainers were to be properly accounted for, it is likely that Ireland would jump to the top of the league.

According to the Neumann study, the FDI policies pursued by Irish governments for more than half a century have contributed radically to the growth of these pathologies. Using regression analysis to measure the effects of FDI on individual counties, the researchers discovered that counties which had attracted more of this development had indeed suffered higher degrees of social atomisation, measurable under headings like crime, suicide and drug abuse. They also detected a strong connection between FDI, declining religious observance, and ‘liberal’ attitudes as expressed in recent referendums on gay marriage and abortion.

The researchers ran a linear regression on the percentage of the population employed in FDI-generated jobs in each county versus the percentage of that population that identified as one of the Christian denominations. They found a very strong negative relationship between FDI employment and the percentage of the population identifying as Christian. To firm up these results, they undertook two further tests. First, they broke down the regression into urban and rural counties to ensure that the results were not simply picking up the fact that urban centres tend to be less religious and more likely to attract FDI. They also took steps to ensure that the results were not being distorted by the relative ages of the population. (Because counties with large FDI deployments have better job opportunities, they may attract younger people seeking work.) Even allowing for the age factor, they found that FDI employment yielded strong results for loss of religious belief and practice.

The researchers analysed the results from the 2015 ‘marriage equality’ referendum, in which the Irish electorate voted by a margin of 62 to 38 in favour of overturning the constitutional definition of marriage, assuming that a higher percentage of people voting in favour of the amendment indicated a higher concentration of culturally liberal attitudes in a given county. Again, they found that FDI employment yielded strong results for the ‘liberal’ responses. The researchers concluded that FDI inflows and changes in religious belief — themselves linked — have driven changes in Irish cultural attitudes, ‘as proxied by people’s tendency to vote in favour of liberal social issues at referenda.’

They also found that  increased culturally liberal attitudes predict political fragmentation.

[T]he culture of companies engaged in FDI is passed onto the population. This transmission occurs through employment, so we can expect this effect to appear in the workplace. Put simply, the more people are employed by foreign firms, the more people are exposed to the aspirations and ideals espoused by those firms.

We have seen that FDI seems to have an enormous impact on cultural and political outcomes. This finding suggests that something in the nature of FDI gives rise to anomie and cultural dislocation. It seems likely that this is related to foreign attitudes flowing in along with FDI. Where American companies have landed in Ireland, American cultural attitudes have disproportionately prevailed. This is intuitively reasonable: we should expect that corporations will bring their values with them, both through their company culture but also through their management structures.

All this is precisely as some of us have been warning about for many years. The FDI policy, in other words, may be the key to the ‘de-Irelanding’ of Ireland.

In An Intelligent Person’s Guide, I wrote:

It is a symptom of all post-colonial societies that they lack the capacity for personal enterprise which is so essential if reconstruction is to be carried out from within. They remain to a high degree disposed to become dependent on external assistance. In addition, they tend to have a poor view of their own ability to pull themselves up by their own devices, and so tend to look to what they can sell rather than what they can do or what they can be or what they can become. And, when you examine the history of Modern Ireland, what you will perceive, overwhelmingly, is a series of sell-outs, a catalogue of deals done with what might have been regarded as the essential qualities of the nation’s being. Irish sovereignty, the quality of the Irish environment, Ireland’s moral status as a non-imperial power, even the society's relationship with its past — all of these were converted into tradable resources, to be bartered and sold in return for survival and prosperity.

Like every elite in every post-colonial society, the new Irish ascendancy was utterly incapable of creating a positive programme of development from within. Its facility with wealth being confined to consumption, it had nothing to offer either the society or its economy other than a process of recolonisation. Setting itself at the head of the society, it unconsciously defined its role as that of mediator between Ireland and the outside world in the trading-off of resources. Unable to imagine any way of transforming the undeveloping native economy from within, it resolved to again place the country at the mercy of external forces in order to preserve its own hegemony and prosperity. . . .

As a response to the economic stagnation of the fifties, and the relative failure of mainstream industry to redress the balance in the sixties, the Irish state has since then pursued a relentless policy of encouraging foreign-owned multinationals to establish high-skilled labour-intensive, strong growth potential industries, which in the main have turned out to be in the chemical and electronics sectors.

The bait was in the fact that relatively high Irish labour costs would be offset by other factors: the availability of a well-developed infrastructure, an expanding technologically literate workforce and what was termed the ‘assimilative capacity’ of the Irish environment. This last point was of no small significance. Economic theorists hold that the quality of the environment and its ‘assimilative capacity’ can be viewed as a ‘natural factor endowment’ in the process of international resource allocation. This is to say that the capacity of the landscape to absorb industrial waste should be a critical factor in deciding where to locate. Relevant factors include: high social tolerance to pollution, lack of pollution-control regulations, ‘self-cleansing’ natural systems and the unused absorption capacity of the landscape. By this logic, Modern Ireland had a whole hand of aces — the virginal fields of the Irish countryside —  with which to lure the foreign multinationals, once the population could be persuaded to let go of its irrational respect for the land. For American -owned pharmaceutical corporations in particular, on the run from tightening environmental legislation at home in the seventies, Ireland was a promised land. The trend of such industries relocating in underdeveloped countries during this period has in retrospect all the appearance of a carefully devised strategy — with the aim at the time, perhaps, of rolling back the tide of legislation in the United States by operating öpenly and freely in less restrictive climates. American environmentalists were soon warning of the emergence of ‘foreign pollution havens’ in underdeveloped countries prepared to barter their ‘natural factor endowment’ in return for desperately needed employment.

This form of industrial policy has represented more than one type of sell-out. The Telesis Report on Irish industry, published in February 1982, sharply criticised the thrust of such policy up to then on the basis of its poor return of economic investment by the state. Running in the face of the conventional wisdom of the time, the report found that the 1970s pattern of dependence on foreign investment in the form of chemical and electronic industries had not been an overall success. Contrary to the claims of the Industrial Development Authority, the foreign sector was failing to provide even a third of the jobs which it had promised, failing to feed back into the national economy and represented a drain on resources which might be better utilised in developing a stronger native sector. The report was misfortunate in reaching publication during the most unstable period in recent political history, and was finally shelved during the Coalition government of 1982-1987.

By 1985, there were over 850 subsidiaries of foreign multinationals operating in Ireland, accounting for more than one-third of the entire manufacturing workforce. Because of transfer-pricing and repatriation of profits, however, these companies were not making a contribution to economic growth commensurate with their slice of economic activity. American industry was able to make profit levels in Ireland three times its worldwide batting average — around twice the return possible in Britain or Japan, and three to four times that possible on continental Europe.These factors, together with the most favourable tax regime in Europe, meant that, in most cases, American multinationals operating out of Ireland were able to recoup their investment in under two years. They did this by repatriating profits in vast amounts: £1,346million in 1986, an estimated £4 billion by 1995.

A quarter of a century later, the Neumann study concluded:

FDI appears to be driving social and cultural attitudes in a profound way. FDI inflows effectively predict how religious a given county will be and how culturally liberal the voters in that county will be. This finding suggests that FDI inflows are having a profound impact on Irish cultural and political life.

The research also found that culturally liberal attitudes are a predictor of political fragmentation.

Naturally, atomised liberal political subjects find burdensome the constitutional constraints on their behaviour handed down by previous generations. But as with democracy itself, these forces left unchecked could easily erode the very foundations of the constitutional republican state. If constitutional rights change every few years, at what point must citizens assume that they cannot depend on said constitutional rights?

On reflection, this finding is not all that surprising. Cultural liberalism is rooted in an aggressive individualism and distrust of culturally binding forces. The ideal liberal cultural subject is, by definition, an atomised individual who defines him- or herself not by reference to the collective, but by his or her own subjective thoughts and feelings. It is therefore not surprising that these increasing attitudes in a population lead people to increasingly vote in a way that does not benefit collective parties who represent a broad array of different people; rather they turn to idiosyncratic parties and individual politicians promoting niche causes. Once more, reflection makes obvious that these forces, if left unchecked, could prove detrimental to the functioning of a multiparty democracy.

And later:

It is very interesting that counties with more liberal cultural attitudes also show a tendency toward lower birth rates. The topic of demographics has become important in recent years, as fertility rates have fallen below replacement-rate levels in many developed countries. These results suggest that cultural liberalism may have not only an indirect impact, but also a direct one.

The report’s summing-up is pretty unequivocal:

The findings of this study are clear. There is every reason to think that FDI inflows, merged with incipient social and cultural changes, lead to the dissolution and degradation of communal life in a country. FDI inflows may produce rising wealth; but left to themselves, they lead to a general deterioration of non-economic life. These trends seem to impact every facet of non-economic life, from crime to drug addiction to suicide, and all the way up to political destabilisation.

While many of the social and cultural changes are very long-term changes that are difficult to link statistically to the FDI inflows, others can be shown to have immediate quantitative relationships. Some of these results were a surprise to us, as we thought they would not be detectable. The fact that they are detectable shows just how powerful economic forces can be — especially when merged with incipient cultural changes.

In my overall analysis of these factors in An Intelligent Person’s Guide, I wrote:

In Modern Ireland, what we call 'progress' is perhaps more accurately stated as ‘change', albeit change in accordance with a subliminal agenda. The figures and predictions with which we are so regularly bombarded are really measurements of gross economic activity, which is all they were supposed to be in the first place. The real problem is that, for reasons which have much to do with ideology and vested interests, these ostensibly neutral forms of measurement have been accorded a significance which they neither claim nor deserve. Thus, instead of being simply casual barometers of the general scale of economic activity, they have been elevated to the status of scoreboard, employed to convey not just levels of exchange of money for goods and services but the general well-being of the society.

The everyday use and interchange of terms like ‘growth’ and ‘progress’  indicates where the true problem lies. Business interests, which include media interests, have both motive and opportunity to promote GNP and GDP as the most important economic statistics. In truth, all such figures really tell us is the extent to which things have become different from before, regardless of whether the elements of change are virtuous or otherwise. And in a society in which there is growing divergence between these figures and the reality of people’s lives, it is arguable that what they actually measure is damage. It is a bit like a gardener deciding that the success of his garden should be measured according to calculations which accorded the same value to pissy-beds as to parsnips.

And later:

At the centre of the ideology of Modern Ireland is a core meaning which has to do with a particular notion of progress. Fundamentally this core notion is deeply materialistic, for it has equated improvement of the Irish way of life with economic growth only. This very criticism although occasionally made by clerics, left-wingers or the generally disgruntled, has almost no credibility on account of the inability of those making it to influence anything. It is heard only as an expression of begrudgery, or an appeal for compassion, and the system is equally impermeable to both.

This ideology has now supplanted all others, including the ideology of Christianity which had prevailed for more than a thousand years. That this has been done while yet there remains a high degree of public perplexity with regard to the decline of Catholicism, and even a view externally that Ireland is still a relatively Christian country, is a remarkable achievement. This has been achieved by dint of a confluence of convenience between the aspirations of the modernisers and the desire of the Church to conceal the evidence of its own demise.

Thus, those seeking information about the ‘miracle’ of Modern Ireland are presented with an analysis of Irish society which maintains that ‘traditional’ ideas have been supplanted at no moral cost: The changes which have occurred to allow for the creation of Modern Ireland are unequivocally positive, while the decline of previous belief systems is itself a symptom of that same progress.

Concluding the book, I wrote:

Modern Ireland has a hankering for something else, that deep down we are still aware of: some common channel in which joy, wealth and well-being can be achieved collectively, accompanying an awareness that individualism is not capable of giving the Irish people what they think they want. It suggests that what we are missing is some form of magic in our lives, a need which the creation of our modern econonation may have done more to hinder than to help. And it brings to mind, too, the observations about freedom and nationhood made by Padraic Pearse, that freedom is a spiritual necessity and the nation ‘of God’. One of the most amazing things about the progress of the Irish soccer team through various international competitions in the 1990s was the extent to which it licensed a certain form of what often looked like nationalistic fervour, characterised in particular by the unabashed waving of tricolour flags. This is something which, in most other domains was close to being culturally forbidden, but here, in the context of what used to be known as a ‘foreign game', it was suddenly acceptable to let it all hang out.

A succinct way of putting it would be to say that Irish people long for magic. In a world of such rapid technological change, we live at a moment when reality is beginning to exceed the possibilities of our past attempts to imagine it. It is certain that, for all the trauma of Irish history, no generation in Ireland ever faced the future with such fear as the present one. No generation has postponed so much of its pain, in the deep freeze of its mortgage accounts and other credit facilities, into a more uncertain future. No generation had such reason to fear for the future ability of its own children to survive and be happy. But this we will not admit. Our natural fear of the future is camouflaged by a disingenuous focusing on the flaws of the past, and so we trap ourselves in an elongated present, because at least, we imagine, the present is something we have control over.

But we have not. Never before has there been such ignorance about the mechanisms governing the things which sustain life. One of the bizarre paradoxes of the modernisation process was that, in attacking the concept of   ́self-sufficiency’, it has made people even more dependent on themselves, and less able to call on something beyond themselves at moments of pressure or crisis. In this sense, self-sufficiency, had never been that at all, but a reliance on something above and beyond the resources of the mere individual. The old beliefs had not been superstitions, but life-saving humilities.

Without such qualities, we are trapped in a perverse loneliness disguised as prosperity. This is where we find our angers and our fear and this is why we are so much in the grip of addictions which do nothing to satisfy our cravings. If the term still had any meaning, you might say that what Ireland should be seeking is a spiritual renewal.

What we need, in a word, is a miracle.