celtic tiger, irish climate

University of St. Thomas (Center for Irish Studies)

Celtic Tiger, Irish ClimateAuthor(s): Thomas McCarthySource: New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 115-120Published by: University of St. Thomas (Center for Irish Studies)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20557430 .

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Thomas McCarthy

Celtic Tiger, Irish Climate

It is now late spring in the year 1997. We begin the long, happy slide toward sum

mer and the annual ritual of celebrating ourselves with workshops and sum

mer schools. This year we feel lucky to have made it out of the winter. February was a cruel month, breeding storm after storm out of the far from dead Atlantic.

Cork City in the South has suffered the brunt of these storms. My neighbors in

Montenotte, a hilly eighteenth-century suburb, emerged each February morn

ing with a look of fear on their dear faces. I have picked my way through shat

tered slates, dislodged dustbins, expired shrubs, and choked storm drains. The

citizens in "the flat of the city" had an easier winter, apart from a few days of Lee

flood water.

Despite the weeks of beautiful sunshine in April, I think of this as one of the

stormiest winters of my twenty-year sojourn in Cork. Winter has served to re

mind me, yet again, that rain is a weak metaphor for the Irish experience. Rain

is too soft. In the past two decades our Irish character has moved from one of

soft rain to one of hard weather. We live in an island now that is well rigged for

heavy weather cruising.

Yes, we have changed. I am old enough to remember an Ireland of the late

1950s. I remember the smells of the houses?especially the laborer's cottages of

Twig Bog Lane and Barrack Street in Cappoquin, County Waterford. I was five

years old in 1959?throwing sods of wet turf in the half-door of an old woman's

house in Twig Bog, and letting my older brother take the blame. The small town

of my childhood had hardly changed since the Great War. In fact, it had not

changed substantially since the Great Famine. Society had stood still. A kind of

vapor of indolence hung over the small shops, the kind of indolence that has

been captured so well in novels like The Quiet Man or The Country Girls, or even

in Cork City novels like The Threshold of Quiet or Bird Alone. Sociology never

quite captures what Ireland was like. To know Ireland, you have to use the more

precise sciences of fiction and poetry. It is seventeen years now since many of us attended The Sense of Ireland

Festival in London. I notice that some arts organization in the South is hosting a Sense of Cork Week this summer. We have a tendency to cling to old labels.

115




How reassuring they are. One might have hoped that, after seventeen years, a

new kind of expression would be used. Perhaps we don't want new labels, be

cause we fear the offer of a new experience. If we go for a new form of words, the Celtic Tiger might devour us! And so we recycle the familiar words, hoping

thereby to recapture the excitement of an old feeling. How long will the "Celtic

Tiger" label survive, I wonder. At any moment I expect someone on the radio

to say that A Sense of the Celtic Tiger Festival has been organized for Prague or

Paris, Boise or Boston. We are that shameless.

But let me get back to London, in 1980, and to that row of laborer's cottages in Cappoquin, in 1959. After I read poems at the Poetry Society, there was a re

ception at the Irish Club. I was soon cornered by a middle-aged man holding a

pint of Guinness. "Yoosir, so you're the Capperkin pote," he said, very annoyed. He had an interesting accent, half-Waterford, half-Kilburn, like many of my rel

atives. "Tell may, do de fockin' Nuns and de fockin' Major still fockin' run de

town a Capperkin? Do dey?" It was more than a question. An educated person would call it "rhetorical."

On that night in 1980,1 was conscious only that the man was pure-blind drunk.

I dislike drunks. My uncle was a drunk. My father was a drunk until he became

teetotal. I've cleaned up after drunks. But I could see rage in the question. It reg istered with me. It was an essay in sociology.

This man was an exile from my hometown, one of the hundreds of thou

sands who had fled the sinking ship of Eire in the postwar years. The Celtic world

he knew was a dead cow rather than a wild tiger. The Cappoquin he fled was a

depressed, former garrison town, poor and congested since the mid-nineteenth

century. The "Nuns and the Major" was a hate euphemism for the town's two

dominant presences: The Convent of Mercy and Cappoquin House, home of

the Keane baronets. At that moment in the London Irish Club, I could feel these

two different Irelands. Here was just one schism in our cultural consciousness.

In terms of class origins, that exile and I were brothers?absolutely one being. But something had happened in less than a generation to make us remember

Cappoquin in utterly different ways. What had happened was the first Celtic surge?Ireland of the Sixties, with

its better social welfare system and its free education. I didn't have to leave Cap

poquin Station at the age of thirteen like my cousin John, who left for Coven

try in 1963.1 was able to spend five years in the local Convent Secondary School

among nuns whom I absolutely adored, and who adored me in return. And then

university, a rare treat for a working-class boy. The drunk man who had stood

over me so unsteadily in the Irish Club had never had a chance to look twice at

his own native land. At twenty-six in 1980,1 had already had a first, a second, even a third look at Cappoquin and my native country.

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For someone born poor in Ireland, even from a warm Fianna Fail neigh borhood, a university education was as useful and spiritual as a long prison sen

tence. University gave me some "time out" to think about myself and my back

ground. University College, Cork, in the Seventies as a revisionist paradise. Many of my friends were following Conor Cruise O'Brien into the Labour Party. I

didn't quite "go over" to the side of the thinking middle class, but poems I wrote

then?"State Funeral" and "Last Days in the Party"?show a sufficient distance

from Fianna Fail values to be almost Seventies Labour lyrics. I see these lyrics now as efforts to impress the imaginary keeper at the prison

gate. There was no prison. There was no keeper. But the belief that there were

forces arrayed against me was a powerful kind of faith. It is the kind of belief

that makes forty percent of Irish people vote for Fianna Fail?the Party of Ori

gins?instead of Labour?the Party of Policies. I am interested in the voices of

origins, atavistic, irrational, overwhelming. And for that reason, I listened to my

Cappoquin exile, his rage, and his loaded breath. He wasn't interested in my

poem about Miche?l MacLiamm?ir at Cappoquin, or in the fact that Cappo

quin was named by Joyce as the home town of Molly Bloom's would-be Gibral

tar lover.

What my Irish exile wanted was to hear a litany of the names he hated so

that he could expectorate his sense of betrayal and grind it into the floor of the

Irish Club. I failed him as I failed all the angry fathers in my life. But I cannot

forget him. The pain of exile must be worse than the frustration of living in

the Irish Republic. The success of the Irish economy today comes of the volun

tary self-exile of surplus laborers over a long period?and not just laborers, but

doctors, technicians, even educated children from?God forbid!?respectable families.

So, when I hear the expression "Celtic Tiger," I don't reach for my revolver.

I reach for my handkerchief. I weep. I weep at the birth of yet another neat clich?

of Irishness that will prevent outsiders from knowing us. Like the United States

or Canada, Ireland is a tentative compromise of interests. The welfare state that

educated me is slowly being withdrawn from the working-class terraces. The

tax code is simplified so that the rich can keep more of their money, while wel

fare legislation becomes more difficult to understand. It is not yet a sin to have

no job, but we are getting there. Privatization is on the agenda. The social good of mighty companies like Bus ?ireann or Bord na Mona has been removed from

the balance sheet. In a marvelous twist, the D?il has ceded authority for its cit

izens' well-being to the European Commission, having just recently wrenched

such authority from the church hierarchy. Perhaps we never wanted national

independence in the first place. Perhaps that is the nub of our nature, and it has

driven our national and international policy for two decades.

117




And then, today, a surprise phone call. My brother Michael wants me to

come back to my native town for a committee meeting. This will be a meeting to discuss the editing and publication of a book to mark the millennium in Cap

poquin?a book, therefore, to haul together all the strands of Cappoquin mem

ory. Is such a book possible? I mean, is it possible to publish a nonfiction book

that would say everything about the past of an Irish parish? My brother tells me

that the meeting will be attended by all those who write things down: the parish

priest, a highly educated man, and the school teachers, those scriveners of every Irish townland, as well as Cappoquin's most famous son, Dr. Michael Olden,

now parish priest of Clonmel, but formerly president of Maynooth. Absent will be that drunk man of the London Irish Club, that Senator of the

Exiled, who left nothing behind him in Cappoquin but a society that oppressed him and an economy without promise. And who will represent the exile? Should

I represent him? Should we light a candle in the window of the committee room,

like President Robinson, who was the first powerful person since Bishop Lucey of Cork to give a damn about the jettisoned poor of the country? Or should the

memory of the sp?ilp?n fanachy of the wandering Irish laborer?like the mem

ory of the mill workers of New Hampshire or the fishermen of Minnesota's

North Shore?be allowed to run its course and die of irrelevance?

So, we return to the vital questions of remembrance and the "Celtic Tiger." Has too much memory weakened us? Should we open the umbrella of the new

electronics factory between us and our discomforting past? Isn't this what we

have hoped for and planned for with astonishing confidence?

There is definitely a feeling abroad that the past has somehow weakened Ire

land. Or that our War of Independence was somehow a misreading of the past that led to erroneous creation of a new state. Our position is like that of post

Gorbachev Russians: our past is an embarrassment. What we must do is extend

our present into the past so that everything is altered to fit in. Everything must

be made to dovetail into the needs of our present. We must intern all Roman

tic nationalism, all Irish-centered radicalism in the cage of Ethnic or Irish Stud

ies. Inspired by Tone, Connolly, Pearse, revolutionary Irishness now lies outside

the Pale of civilized discourse, rather like the IRA characters in a Tom Clancy thriller.

The quest has rarely been asked: to whose advantage have we revised our

history? Who has this weakened; who has this made strong? It is true that, since

1969 or 1970, we have come to live in a continuous present that began with the

new Northern"Troubles" and the Arms Trial and continues with political vio

lence and the teaching of revisionist history. The teaching of history involves a

strong socialization process, but this has not often been properly interrogated

by our sociologists or historians.

118




The past of Ireland belongs, alas, to its educated middle class. I sometimes

think that the orientation created by our War of Independence was so rural and

so Catholic that it actually ran counter to our interests, our material interests.

Unlike the East Belfast Unionist, for a Southern Irish person nothing of vital in

terest is ever at stake when history is discussed. The Southern Irish get angry about history only when it alienates an English friend or customer. Then you can see the sparks fly. Ironically, Paudeen's fingers in the greasy till are revisionist

fingers. In many ways, the kind of vision propagated by the old Fianna Fail?a

free, Gaelic, self-sufficient Ireland?was always only that?a vision, a mirage.

When tested by power, by elected office, by cabinet responsibility, the vision was

found to be unreal. Not only do we live an in a interdependent world, we also

live in an interdependent Ireland. Unionists, who live in mortal fear of our

dreams, really do exist and really do object strongly. Not to know this is to be

perpetually without power in the real sense.

Yes, there has been a change in memory. The software of our past has been

rebundled to suit the present task of Irishness. The idea of prosperity has over

whelmed the idea of nationhood. All the exiles who left our shores contribute

now to the propaganda of prosperity, just as the exiles in the old IRB, Clann na

Gael, and AOH once sharpened and deepened our sense of nationhood.

The "Celtic Tiger" is our great new invention. It will stifle social envy and

unrest with the same thoroughness as the old idea of nationhood. But it can

also get us into trouble. At a recent meeting of European ministers, for exam

ple, the ugly face of continental envy began to show itself. Danish and Belgian ministers grumbled that Ireland had breached European Union guidelines in

attracting inward investment. Somebody was very sore about the establishment

of a new facility for Boston Scientific in Galway. In Ireland, we consider the Eu

ropean reaction to be slightly daft. After all, the German company Siemens A.G.

had decided to site a huge wafer fabrication facility in the north of England, and

just after Britain had rejected European Union statutes on working conditions.

Much bitterness was felt about that decision, and especially in Cork, where

Siemens executives had looked at the harbor area.

Another aspect of this rivalry for jobs between European countries?an

aspect that has never been much discussed here?is the negative impact that

the European Union has had on Irish jobs. For example, from my house in Mon

tenotte I can look across the River Lee at a site where three thousand men once

worked in highly paid employment. All of these jobs were lost as a result of the

opening of Ireland's borders to European trade. There's not space enough to list

all the footwear factories, bakeries, flour mills, tire manufacturing facilities that

have closed in Cork City as the direct result of Ireland's open economy since we

joined the European Union. The fact that we raised our little tiger from the ruins

of these factories has been lost on many of our European partners.

U9




Most of the people?mainly men?who lost jobs in the 1970s and 1980s never worked again in Ireland. Just today I spoke to one of them. As a public li

brarian in Cork, I've been with these people since the day they lost their jobs. I

remember this man's wasted middle age; today, he is an old-age pensioner. He

laughed when I mentioned our "Celtic Tiger." "Another shaggin' smoke-screen,"

he joked. He lives in a corporation housing estate on Cork's north side. He has

four children: two boys, two girls. His eldest child, a son, landed job as a cleri

cal officer in the Dublin Civil Service ten years ago. That amazing stroke of luck

was one of those miracles of de Maupassant proportions that sometimes fall

upon a working-class family. Things must have looked hopeful ten years ago. His youngest child is now twenty-three, but she has never had a job, though she

is well educated, with diplomas in word processing and office procedures. The

other son and daughter are on the dole. So, that family, whose breadwinner

became redundant in 1977, has a second-generation unemployment rate of sev

enty-five percent. What is unusual about that man's family is that one member

of it has actually got a permanent job. This is why the "Celtic Tiger" label is such a dishonest one. Ireland is much

more than that?fluid, tantalizing, varied, hopeful and despairing, uplifting and

depressing all at the same time. Like any other country, we have myths that ori

ent our character and even determine our responses to social and political events. Even so, we are probably unique in that the greater part of our serious

intellectual life takes place outside the jurisdiction of the state. Influential out

siders speak about us, tell us how we should live, even correct us when we tell

them how we live. Imagine if all the English and American journals were pub lished in Ireland, or if all the influential publishers like Faber and Oxford Uni

versity Press or Knopf and Farrar Straus and Giroux were based in Dublin or

Cork? Seventy percent of everything Ireland manufactures has to be sold out

side of Ireland. I should think that the same proportion of Irish thought is edited

and consumed abroad as well.

What does this mean for our daily life in Ireland, and for a writer like my self who lives here year-round? Every idea I have about my country isn't con

ceived for the seminar or lecture circuit, but, rather as part of a way of life, as a

justification for living here. As Beckett says, "I can't go on, I must go on." To live

in one's own place is a constant struggle, between the local and the international,

between the parabolic and the modernist. A native land is more than a seminar

or a clever phrase. All I can say for certain is that the same present continues?

from the Arms Trial of 1970 to the McCracken Tribunal of 1997.

<^? MAY, 1997

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celtic tiger, irish climate

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