From darkness into light
We could look back on this as the year in which we finally put 10 years of anger, self-pity and blame behind us, writes Brendan O’Connor
NINE months ago, in a different time, in a different country, Simon Coveney told me in an interview about how he was walking across St Stephen’s Green one day when a man came up to him and spat in his face and said something like, “I hate you and I hate what your government is doing to this country.” It was one of the things that crystallised in Coveney’s mind that there was something very corrosive about the divisions and the anger in Irish society and that made him decide he wanted to bring people together again. And this was a central part of the pitch he made to become leader of Fine Gael.
Of course Simon Coveney didn’t become leader of Fine Gael, but you can’t help thinking that even in that nine months, much of the corrosiveness has disappeared out of Irish life. After 10 years of bitterness, anger, blame, recrimination and a kind of senseless, scattergun resentment, 2017 could be remembered as the year we came out of the darkness and into the light somewhat. People are still angry, but they are angry about specific issues. It is not anger as a policy, it is an anger that is focused on trying to get certain things changed. And in fact it’s working. Obviously it is not good enough that there are over 8,000 people homeless and the situation is not being fixed quickly enough. But it is being fixed. Compassion aside, there is huge political capital at stake here and the Government has been embarrassed enough by this to put huge energy into sorting it out. They acknowledge it’s not happening quickly enough, but they are throwing resources at it and you’d have to think they intend to have it under control by the time an election comes. The anger of those who were fiddled out of tracker mortgages has been responded to also and the pressure is on the banks to deal with that quickly too.
What there isn’t any more is an all-pervasive unfocused anger at the Government. It doesn’t feel like a time for spitting in the faces of politicians or even trapping them in their cars. It feels like we have moved on finally, to a more normal anger at the Government.
Because for a while there it was abnormal. And we had our reasons. But it’s hard to know how helpful it was. The kind of generalised nihilistic rage against everything that characterised political discussion in this country for a while was not really healthy.
In her recent book, In The Darkroom, ostensibly the story of her transgender father, feminist author Susan Faludi explored various layers of her dad’s identity and their meaning, from the sexual to the religious to the nationalistic. One of the layers of identity she looked at is Hungarian/Magyar national identity — in some ways it sounded a bit like our own.
A Socialist Hungarian MEP tells Faludi that if you understand the Hungarian anthem, you understand the Hungarian soul. The concluding verse translates thus: Pity, Oh God, The Hungarian Who is tossed by waves of danger Extend over him your guarding arm On his misery’s seas. Long torn by ill fate Bring upon him a joyous year This people has suffered for Past and Future.
The politician points out that other countries have anthems that express the determination of their people, while the Hungarian anthem is sad, defensive and self-pitying. And indeed it sounds like something from a Monty Python sketch. The Hungarians would make a good case for being the most oppressed people ever. The Treaty of Trianon, which cut back the size of Hungary after World War I, is still a major obsession for many Hungarians 100 years on, and it is this sense of grievance, and self-pity, this sense of being hard done by, that fed the alarming rise in neo-Nazi-ism and anti-semitism, even among the governing parties in Hungary this decade.
We Irish can tend to fall into that trap of being the most oppressed people ever too. We still ruminate in songs and stories about 800 years of oppression, the Famine, and other ancient wrongs. And while we are justified in this, self-pity isn’t always helpful, and can, as we see in Hungary, become incredibly toxic.
The latter part of the last decade gave us plenty of reason to feel hard done by and resentful. We were rightfully angry that we were made to pay the speculative debts of others, that we bailed out bondholders who had taken their chances with their eyes wide open, that ordinary people paid the price for the economic crash, while the well off seemed to get off scot free, even those who had, on paper, lost hundreds of millions. There was no Nama for the rest of us. Public services were perceived to have suffered too and we worried that our children and their children would still be paying the debts of gamblers and builders. The country was sold off cheap to vulture funds because Irish people, who had bought it right up to the top of the market, had no money left for the bargains when they came.
You couldn’t blame us for feeling bitter, and for blaming everybody, from Fianna Fail to the ECB, the IMF, Europe in general, and even the Labour party, who had to break all their promises and breach their principles to help get things back on track.
But there comes a point where blame and anger and bitterness and self-pity can lock you in a kind of toxic loop, rather like post-traumatic stress disorder, where you just can’t move on, and you can waste your life with bitterness and recrimination. Yes, it’s healthy to demand justice, it’s healthy to be livid when the people who ruined the place walk away with fat pensions and no sanctions. It’s healthy to feel outraged when vultures profit on the ruination of this country.
But it only gets you so far, and there comes a point where we need to let these obsessions go, stop feeling sorry for ourselves, take agency and responsibility, and fight to rebuild the place. And the Irish psyche is more robust this way. We are pragmatic and we do move on,
And 2017 feels like the year we were finally able to let it go and look to the future.
The continuing and dramatic fall in unemployment is probably a huge factor in all this. Less time for ruminating if you have to get up for work in the morning. The general growth in the economy is helping too. Even the rises in property prices, while causing problems for those trying to get on the property ladder, are also lifting tens of thousands of people out of negative equity.
While many people in this country still have huge problems, financial and otherwise, and while health and homelessness remain major issues for the Government to tackle, there is no doubt that hundreds of thousands of people now feel they have a stake in the country again, and that changes everything.
And perhaps too, we needed a clean break from the politicians of the past. Perhaps Leo and his bright young men and women feel like a new broom, a new era, time to move on.
And perhaps Leo’s philosophy of aspiration rather than dependence and self-pity is helping too. Even the agency Leo has taken in dealing with the UK has felt empowering for a country that has tended to see Britain as an abusive parent or bullying older sibling.
Subtle things change the mood around the place, and let’s face it, we needed the mood changed. And maybe 2018 is the first year of the rest of our lives.