It’s past time for noble rhetoric. We need to know specifics of our Ukraine solidarity

WHAT are we prepared to do to fulfil the evocative exhortation of Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau? Trudeau – not generally my favourite orator – brilliantly said in Brussels on Thursday, at an extraordinary gathering of G7, Nato and EU leaders that ‘we must ensure that the decision to invade a sovereign country must be seen to be a strategic failure with ruinous costs’.

But in reality, who will bear those costs?

As the Industrial Revolution roared from the 18th Century into the 19th Century, masses of people moved from the land into the cities.

There was no revolution of the industrial kind here. Since we still lived under sinister British penal laws, substantial mercantile development was impossible. Still, the Irish did benefit from the Western world’s industrialisation, for we moved into the cities too. The British factories and the American explosion of innovation in New York, Boston and later Detroit absorbed the Irish masses. From 1820 to 1930, the US Library of Congress estimates 4.5 million left Ireland for the US. Many more went to British factory cities.

Following in the wake of mass migration there quickly came a flood of literature, song and lament for the lost rural idyll. This ghost still haunts our culture.

THE dream of the wild colonial boy’s return to Kerry was fine for a song at the piano in a bar in Queens but it rarely happened. That mythical returning émigré is, in apocryphal Kerry lore, said to have looked out at a spectacularly barren landscape and said to his still in situ brother that it was a fine view.

‘It’s a fine view but you can’t ate it,’ came the reply.

During the Industrial Revolution journalist Charles Dickens, surrounded by child workers, wrote novels about the factories and workhouses, painting word pictures so vivid that we all know what Dickensian means. And human skills were soon superseded. As early as 1829 the historian Thomas Carlyle wrote that ‘on every hand the living artisan is driven from his workshop to make room for a speedier inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver and falls into iron fingers that apply it faster.’

The cities were hells of low wages, exploitation and early death, we are told.

And yet, I recently heard Professor Emma Griffin making a searingly blunt point. However bad the cities were, there was no return to the land. For in London or New York, the even minimally better chance of a meal appearing on your family’s table or, as the Victorian era forged on, having a few extra quid for the train to a football match at the end of the week kept you there.

That thought echos in my mind when I hear our own Climate Minister Eamon Ryan repeatedly saying, during this month-long war, that the best way we can punish Vladimir Putin is to stop buying and using Russia’s oil and gas.

The facts are that very little of Ireland’s direct supply of oil and gas comes from Russia. That is, like Ryan’s increasingly detached worldview, not getting to the heart of the matter.

A joint Western strategy to give fewer daily billions to Putin for his oil will increase the cost of energy. And it will increase and increase. In the days after the war was first declared, consumer prices across the single currency area surged by 5.8%. Eurozone energy prices climbed by a whopping 31.7% between January and March according to Eurostat – the EU’s official statistics agency.

In early March Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney said that Europe was likely to suffer economically due to sanctions on Russia ‘but that’s a sacrifice the EU is willing to make’.

I again ask the question, who is to make the ‘sacrifice’ and what is it to be? What are you willing to pay?

These are not smug, facetious questions. For I can see into the minds of Eamon Ryan and Simon Coveney no more than I (or the Western world) can read the twisted, warmonger thoughts of Vladimir Putin.

But based on precedent we can speculate on what Green minister Eamon Ryan is thinking. One imagines that he walks or cycles around his Dublin Bay South heartland looking at his neighbours’ Fiachra and Davnet’s three BMWs on their pebble driveway. Surely they can swap them for electric cars?

Simon Coveney, chauffeur-driven for the last 11years and having access to a wealthy family trust fund, may well see sacrifice on cutting down on his State car journeys.

BUT sacrifice for most ordinary people is not possible. Since the war began on February 24, the energy supply companies have increased prices here. In Ireland, according to the Central Statistics Office, 70% of households use oil or gas to heat their homes. In border counties, 66.6% of households use that old driver of 20th-century conflict, black gold, or oil, to heat their homes. Yet in progressive Dublin, 68% of households use natural gas.

By January, with war only threatening, the cost of electricity in Ireland had increased 22%; natural gas increased 28% and home heating oil is at 52%. It has been estimated that the cost of heating a home could soar by yet another €270. Petrol and diesel for cars has hit €2 and could reach an astounding €3.

This will all be a hardship for upper-income families, many are already struggling to meet all bills. But for the 660,000 in poverty in Ireland, this is a life and death struggle.

And in rural Ireland, where there isn’t even the creaking public transport that is available in cities, cars must be used to get to and from work, school, kids’ football matches, the shop and the social centres.

An African immigrant living in Millsteet was asked on radio what she thought of crowds of Ukrainian refugees coming to the town. She said that’s good, but try getting to Cork for a hospital appointment.

And how will we house the estimated 200,000 refugees that are to seek sanctuary in Ireland? I asked Tánaiste Leo Varadkar at Dublin Airport last weekend whether this was the opportunity to do something dramatic in housing that hadn’t been done before. He answered, in that blunt yet endearing fashion of his, that if there was something innovative and dramatic we could have done ‘we’d have done it already’.

Here’s something dramatic: we can cast aside the bureaucratic somnolence that has complacently gripped Government and build one of those cities that revolutionised the world. Manchester sprang from a village 200 years ago. New York from a swampy settlement.

We could do justice to the Ukrainians who have put their trust in us. We could properly house the 25% of children in Ireland who already live in poverty.

The industrial revolution was not just about the socialist trope of making rapacious capitalist bosses richer. People, Irish people, moved from a barely subsisting agricultural life to a city life. In the great heaving cities of the industrial revolution disposable incomes for what the US constitution called ‘the pursuit of happiness’ for the first time became available to the masses and not just the few.

Those living outside cities, of course, benefited too.

Education and medical provision and eventually social welfare came to the masses. Life expectancy soared, like prices do today.

The fall of the Soviet Empire at the end of the 20th Century delivered a peace dividend, where billions spent by Western European countries on defence during the Cold War, could go into healthcare and education. That ongoing dividend, whatever the result of the war in Ukraine, can no longer be relied upon. Noble rhetoric has its place but the Government must start dealing with specifics and must start putting reality into pledges.

Or there will be many more victims of Putin’s brutality.