Reihan points me to Christopher Caldwell's remarkable profile of Ireland in crisis. Here's the overture [emphases are my own]:
More than any other country over the past two decades--more even than China--Ireland has given up its traditional culture for the global economy. In a quarter century, it went from being a little, poverty-stricken, priest-ridden agricultural backwater to a swingin', low-tax, wide-open, unregulated global-economy entrepôt. Last year, on paper, it was the seventh-richest country, per capita, in the world, ahead of the United States and trailing only a few oil exporters and tax havens. In the decade up to 2007, Ireland's GDP increased 350 percent. House prices quintupled.At the same time, Ireland abandoned the "backward" parts of its culture. Partly through a string of sex scandals in the 1990s, but largely through its hostility to consumerism, the Catholic Church was discredited, and the culture built on it faded. (One small illustration: There are placards on public garbage cans all over Dublin bearing the catchy but not very Christian sentiment "Litter is disgusting--so are those responsible.") Ireland is not prudish anymore, either. A couple decades ago, 1 in 60 Irish babies were born out of wedlock; today 1 in 3 are. The country has some of the most liberal gay-rights and environmental laws in Europe. Nor is Ireland provincial. Its economy draws immigrants. There is a whole wall of books at the Waterstone's on Dawson Street in Dublin marked "Polskie Ksiazki." Dublin has numerous mosques. Tiny Waterford (pop. 45,775) has an African Women's Forum, not to mention two "adult stores" (in case you're ever in Waterford and need to buy an adult).
This is all very exciting for the Irish, but there is nothing particularly Irish about it. Irish identity has often been--explicitly and officially--a matter of protecting citizens from both the temptations of modernity and the vicissitudes of prosperity. In 1927 a Manchester Guardian journalist asked Eamon de Valera, the father of the modern Irish state, whether he understood that closing Ireland off from trade, the better to protect its culture, would mean a lower standard of living. De Valera replied,
You say "lower" when you ought to say a less costly standard of living. I think it quite possible that a less costly standard of living is desirable and that it would prove, in fact, to be a higher standard of living. I am not satisfied that the standard of living and the mode of living in Western Europe is a right or proper one.De Valera's Irish Republic was organized around the idea that money doesn't matter that much. This may have been a noble aspiration, it may have been sanctimony and foolishness, but there was at the very least something bold and, as Yeats would say, indomitable about it. Next to De Valera's uncompromising Christian renunciation, those two something-for-nothing ideologies, modern capitalism and modern socialism, are practically indistinguishable. Over the last 20 years, Ireland found riches a good substitute for its traditional culture. But now the country has been harder hit by the financial downturn than any country in Western Europe. We may be about to discover what happens when a traditionally poor country returns to poverty without its culture.
The piece was generally excellent, but to my mind, disappointing. It's focused tightly on the economic bubble in Ireland; I'm more interested in learning how and why Ireland dumped its traditional culture, and how it might get it back, or at least the best of it. I am reticent to comment at all on whether or not Ireland's good old days were really all that good, as I know very little about Ireland (alas for me; one of these days I'm going to make it over), and I take Alex Massie's point about the stupidity of romanticizing Irish poverty. Still, surely there are readers of this blog -- Brian Kaller? Hello? -- who are Irish, or who know enough about Ireland's distant and near past to help the rest of us understand what's happened to Ireland, and what's happening. Please?
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Re: Well, of those examples, the only one that is not problematic is Norway, which was defined by its language, and had boundaries that it had previously as an independent kingdom.
Norwegian is mutually intelligible with Danish, and both are very nearly mutually intelligible with Swedish. If the medieval Union of Kalmar (uniting all three kingdoms) had become permanent we would probably consider them three dialects of the same language now. As for Norway's early medieval status as an independent kingdom, true, but hardly definitive. What of the kingdom of Leon? What of Mercia? What of the Duchies of Burgundy and Acquitaine? Medieval Europe had lots of sovereign and quasi-sovereign states that later were absorbed by their neighbors. Norway is one of a very few instances where the absorption did not become permanent-- in this case mainly because the Congress of Vienna decided to punish Denmark for helping Napoleon and ripped Norway from it and gave it to an unenthusiastic Sweden instead.
"Well, I'm English, so obviously I'm concerned about the status of the UK. By ancestry, I'm partly Irish, not Scottish at all, to my knowledge, although I love Scotland, live not far away, and respect its honourable nationalism. The importance to me personally is, I suppose, that as a leftish student 25 years ago, Irish nationalism was de rigueur, but I became astonished by promiscuous, pro-gay lefties supporting a state that at that time did not even permit condoms."
TR: So basically "yes I'm ideologically invested in this theory." So okay then.
As someone who actually is Irish and actually does live here I was intrigued to read your confident analysis of what has "gone wrong" here. But I think the claim we have lost our "traditional culture" is total nonsense.
A row of books in Polish in Waterstones booksellers doesn't imply that Ireland's literary tradition has completely collapsed, nor do the presence of two small mosques in Dublin. In fact, those seem like racist claims to me, made in support of a political (rather than spiritual) objective. As for the adult bookstores, most Irish people haven't visited them, or objected to them either, frankly. Your article gives the impression that we're now somehow overrun with porn and orgiastic indulgence. As if.
It's also deeply patronizing that you suggest that the Irish people once were and still should be protected from "the vicissitudes of prosperity." That's an appalling way to say they were once poor and kept in ignorance by their betters. It was the vicissitudes of poverty, not prosperity, that once ruled. Hopefully they never will again.
Next you will be saying the Ann Summers shop on O'Connell street isn't a sign of the coming apocalypse.
As an Irish person from Ireland I think it's easy to look from the outside in and judge, but you need to do some more research
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