Event…Crossings: a return
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Ireland: The challenge of failure. Fintan O’Toole
Fintan O’Toole, over at Open Democracy, telling it how it is and how it might be.
The Irish government’s request to the European Union and the International Monetary Fund for a financial bailout to rescue its broken economy reflects a far deeper decay in the country’s political culture and institutions. This is the very moment to begin to transform them, says Fintan O’Toole.
The long-threatened arrival of the IMF bogeymen was a major loss for Ireland as a proud, independent nation. But this should not blind us to the opportunity to reinvent and restore our sovereignty.
On the News at One on 18 November, the RTÉ reporter Brian Dowling mentioned that one of his colleagues had called the department of finance that morning to ask where the talks between Irish officials and representatives of the European Union and the International Monetary Fund were taking place and who exactly was attending. He was told: “You really have to ring the IMF.” The international bankers, it seems, were already in charge – even of the job of telling the Irish people who is in charge.
The arrival of the IMF was a case of long threatening come at last. Those three letters have been the secular equivalent of the fires of hell: the ultimate warning against resistance to the government’s strategy of making the rescue of the banks the overwhelming national priority.
The bogeymen are now in the building, but their coming has been foreshown so often that it seems both inevitable and anti-climactic. Watching the furtive shots of the disappointingly avuncular-looking Ajai Chopra, whose IMF team had come to scrutinise our books and negotiate our fate, it was hard not to think of TS Eliot’s line from The Hollow Men: “This is the way the world ends: Not with a bang but a whimper.”
Or, in our case, with a drone. Instead of drums and trumpets, our little apocalypsewas played out against the background noise of the taoiseach and the minister for finance murmuring evasive and mechanical denials. When the world’s media tuned to a Dáil speech by Brian Cowen on 16 November that was expected to address the crisis, they heard only robotic assurances that there was no “impending sense of crisis” and impenetrable Cowenspeak about the “front-loading of consolidation”.
If anything, indeed, the only thing the government managed to communicate in the course of the week was its own terrifying irrelevance. With Brian Cowen assuring us that Ireland is “fully funded” and Brian Lenihan claiming as late as 17 November that the Irish banks had “no funding difficulties”, the effect was merely to present Irish self- government to the world as a comic distraction from the real business at hand.
The two Brians painted themselves as the most deluded optimists since Comical Alistood before the cameras in Baghdad and insisted with a straight face that the Iraqi army was crushing the Americans, even as the latter’s tanks appeared on the horizon.
The new motto of the state seemed to be drawn from the Roman satirist Juvenal’s summation of autocratic folly: Hoc volo, sic jubeo, sit pro ratione voluntas. Or: This is what I want, I insist on it. Let my will stand as a reason.
(this part republished under Creative Commons licence)
Vancouver is place where it is not easy to find work. I constantly meet people from other places in Canada (and the world and Vancouver for that matter) who report this experience of Vancouver. I was in a bookshop recently in Victoria, where there was a very helpful woman working who told me how she’d recently moved to Vancouver for a period of time, tried to find work and encountered not just a difficult time, but rudeness and attitude in her job search. She had returned to Victoria and her job. Last week it was a woman from Ontario, who said she’d had enough and was going home, where she could find opportunities. She had gone to school for graphic design and graduated and worked in domestic service type work.
Concurrent to the difficulty of finding work is a pious attitude towards unemployment and the unemployed. The system that exists EI freezes a great number of people out, and you can only access certain training programs if you’ve been on EI. Welfare rates are inhumane and you must undertake what can only be described as some kind of cattle trial before you can even consider applying. The idea being to shake any scrap of dignity you may have to dust and hope you’ll go home destroyed and live under a bush rather than return to face more of it.
Where does it leave people?
It leaves people bearing an unnecessary and additional sense of shame and failure, when the fact of the matter is this is a difficult place to find work! You watch people unwind on facebook as their job search produces nothing for sometimes months, years even. The pious attitude surrounding unemployment certainly does little to help these bright, capable people. This sense of piety also produces a risk averse work force, so people may tend to stay put.
It’s easy to forget how brutal unemployment can be when you haven’t been touched by it in a very long time. It’s easy to feel smug and satisfied and fuel the piety.
But hark we are living in the midst of a property bubble here that will eventually burst and we never think that’s going to happen do we? The other strange thing about the sense of isolation that exists around the unemployed is the history of this city shows difficult recessions, so it’s odd that this has not informed a more healthy attitude. Except in this province there’s always such a sense of fracture and distance and disinterest. If it’s not happening on my doorstep … seems to be a prevalent attitude.
My recent reading of strike pamphlets from the 1930’s supports this. There was incredible isolation in the relief camps. The particular book I was reading the writer constantly referred to the “stiffs” coming from the city to face an awful labour, and that word did not seem to be travelling back of how brutal their experience was. It was anguishing to read the young man’s descriptions.
2 hot waterbottles x 22 boilings.
3 press conferences (1 live, 1 pretending to be live, the other after the fact)
The Week in Politics, Vincent Browne, Scannal, Olivia O’Leary radio 4 doc, Vincent Browne crisis special, The Week in Politics crisis special
Bailout bulletins by Skype.
Bailout bulletins by email.
Bailout beverage by night with stateless beauty.
Discussion over the gentle nature of heifers, in a pub in Vancouver — empty but for 2 single men and a massive screen with football.
We enter and they put on the Blues radio channel.
Today caught headline goat thefts are on the rise in the Lower Mainland.
Worth a watch: Vincent Browne nailing Cowen and discussion that followed after bail out was admitted.
The implications of the bail out for the poor in Ireland are terrifying. Sovereignty was about the only thing protecting them and with that gone it’s open season on social welfare, old age pensions, health, minimum wage, education, students and so on. Before the boom it might surprise people to know that there was a small sense of social conscience from the govt (regardless of political affiliation since I lived there under both Fianna Fail and Fianna Gael govts). There was some understanding of what being poor actually meant and what was a living wage, even a basic one. I’ve a hard time imagining that decisions taken by a non-elected body, who have no experience of living in the country and whose only goal is the recuperation of their billions will have any consideration for these people and what they live with.
Carl O’Brien had a series of moving articles about suicide in The Irish Times this week. Each day another story was told. What came through in all of them was how ill-equipped the mental health system was to help any of these individuals. There was no effective front line response whatsoever when their loved ones sought support for the individual who went on to die by suicide. That was the mental health system under the boom times, add the undoubted savage cuts that are coming to this system and the increase in the suicide rate as people crumble under the stress they’re living with and what will we have then?
This morning at 8.19am, a laughing Dingle came across the radiowaves from Luxy.
Number of times expletives were exchanged = often.
Number of times expletives were used in sentences related to the bailout = incalculable.
Number of kettles known to have been boiled in different time zones during the conversation = 3
Parallels
Listening to Jack and Jimmy Coen on flute and guitar, tea in the pot as the snow melts outside the window. Pas mal, except an exit must, alas, be made.
Last night we had the glorious pleasure of minding Macdara the “wain” as they say in Donegal. He’s besotted with my son and even though he’s all of six or seven months old cackles laughing at him. My boyo recorded the babog laughing on a Garageband track, which later he played back to him when he became a bit restless over his teething. It was astonishing to see a baby demonstrate emotional memory, for the little dote settled down and laughed and laughed again each time he heard himself laughing on the track and heard the words and sounds that made him laugh the first time. Very touching indeed.
Also touching was the sight of a second bookmark in my own small man’s novel. What’s this? Says I. Oh he explained another boy in his class had borrowed his book to read during recess, so this was the other boy’s bookmark of where he’d read to …. Who says boys don’t read?!