between the lines | by jack cashill

pointed perspectives and penetrating punditry

The Unexpected - and Uneasy - Irish Rising

I am driving south down the N-18 towards Shannon, and I am staring hard at this goofy horse. The horse rides casually in front of me in a trailer, doing about 35 in a 60-mph zone. I have been staring at him for about five minutes now waiting an opportunity to pass on this, Ireland's main north-south route on the West Coast, a two-laner. It took me about 20 minutes in queue to reach the point where I could smile at old Trigger here, and if I'm less irritated than the average driver, it's only because I'm a tourist, not a commuter, and this ain't my daily grind on the local equivalent of I-35.

One expects to see horses on highways in Ireland. Sheep, too. In rural Connemara, I had to come to a full stop on a national highway to avoid hitting a small flock of them. What one does not expect to see are so many cars. Indeed, cars have become the obvious symbol of the current "rising," the greatest in Irish history, an economic insurgency of such magnitude that the world has rarely ever seen its equal. I do not exaggerate. When last I visited Ireland at length, in 1993, the country had slipped into a serious funk. The situation climaxed in Galway, where I lived, an otherwise cheerful town of about 50,000 people, when Digital threatened to shut its plant.

"Every stone in the road knew for months," said a Galwegian friend of the impending shutdown, but somehow the newly formed government seemed not to. When the government did scurry into action, their comings and goings made headline news for a week across Ireland. But to no avail. Digital's Scottish plant was to be spared the blow, and the Irish plant would take it on the chin: 800 jobs lost. "Terrible, terrible crushing news," said Gay Byrne, Ireland's Johnny Carson, when he announced the closing live on his usually amiable chat show.

There was no other subject of debate in Ireland that week, in Galway that year. Yet except for the occasional pub socialist, almost no one blamed the Americans. "There is absolutely nothing in it for us to deplore the behavior of the multi-nationals," stated an unusually definitive editorial of the Digital threat in the Irish Independent. A bit more poetic was the Archbishop of Tuam. "The multinationals giveth," said the prelate with just a hint of irony, "and the multinationals taketh away."

Still, just months after giving Labor its greatest vote in memory, many citizens nationwide began to rethink the government's socialist drift. On the talk shows that week, callers publicly challenged shibboleths that were rarely ever voiced, let alone questioned: a "massive black economy" spurred on by a VAT as high as 21%; a six percent differential between Ireland and Britain on business "social contributions"; the correlation between a generous dole and 16% unemployment; the tax burden on workers; the dogged interference of Irish unions; the relatively higher cost of Irish wages; in sum, the "unattractiveness of employing anyone" as one Irish business man put it.

To their credit, the Irish weren't inclined to dwell even on a catastrophe. In their cultural memory, "hard times" did not mean the downsizing of a computer plant. It meant dying by the roadside of hunger. Big difference. So the Irish did not retreat from the world. They engaged it more aggressively, and they got real, real lucky. But luck is the Irishman's fate, is it not?

In 1993, when Digital shut its plant, there were - hang on - five web sites in the whole world. Today, there are some 50 million. The phrase e-commerce had yet to enter the lexicon. That was still four years away. Although the Irish did not know it - heck, Bill Gates did not know it - the Information Age was about to flower. If the multinationals were looking for an eager and able work force that could speak, write and process information in the world's commercial language, one that the British had imposed upon their colonies and that the Americans had infiltrated elsewhere, what better place than Ireland, a potential "dotcom paradise." Not bad digs for a foreign posting either. Beats the hell out of Singapore.

And so Ireland has been transformed in ways that the Irish can barely comprehend. To put it in a local perspective, imagine leaving metro KC and coming back to find KCK morphed into Roeland Park or even Prairie Village. In just seven years, the unemployment rate has dropped from 16% to nearly 4%. The rate of growth in the GDP pushes 7% per annum, the highest in the industrialized world. For the first time in history, the Irish per capita income has passed the British, an amazing feat by local standards.

A people that have historically felt at home among third worlders, now hob nob confidently with the first. Everyone is buying new cars. And with all the economic action in the South, in the Republic, there's really nothing left to fight about in the North.

But today, Ireland is proof that money does not buy happiness. In every sense, the Irish are finding it very difficult to accommodate both the horse in his trailer and the anxious commuter at whom he smiles. The nation's rural character digs its heels in against the forces of urbanization. The nation's sense of itself as tribe wars both with the forced internationalism of the European Union and with the individualistic ethos necessary for success. The nation's strong Catholic heritage resists the materialism that success brings.

To be sure, the international liberal establishment has done wonders to subvert the island's resistance. The Irish elite - with the help the EU, the UN, CNN and MTV - has successfully taught the young that religion is for fools, patriotism is for scoundrels, and that condoms are for everyone. As a result, 30% of Irish children are now born out of wedlock, the attendant pathologies like street crime and domestic abuse have begun to swell, and no one can say anything about the causes as that would be judgmental. Still, liberal imperialism offers the Irish no foundation on which to build economic success or rebuild national character. American-style conservatism, which might, has no medium of communication. The Irish don't even know it exists. As to Europe, culturally, it's more confused than Ireland, and economically, it is less successful.

The Irish, I suspect, will have to sort out their own problems in their own way as they have for millennia. A country that can survive the potato famine should be able to survive prosperity. Indeed, to most Irish, the latter seems as temporal as the former and possibly even more mysterious.

The views expressed in this column are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Ingram's Magazine.