Two weeks ago my colleague John McGuirk penned an interesting contribution to the mini debate that had broken out over a new study concerning the potential costs of Irish unification. He made the point that “money doesn’t matter in this equation.”
That was also the case at the time of the “giant leap into the economic dark” that constituted the breaking away of the greater part of this country from the United Kingdom just over a century ago.
He also referred to the fact that the annual notional cost of €400 billion over 20 years that outraged certain people and was held to be a clinching Euclidian proof against the very concept of unification is smaller than the current annual spend on the shambolic health service.
The thing is, as John referenced former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, if Irish unity is a worthy aspiration then adding the “halfpence to the pence” in the manner of Yeats’ post nationalist greasy till fumblers accounts for little.
Or vice versa. If the only thing that matters is the national balance sheet and the Golden Calf of The Economy, then national unity is just as irrelevant as social cohesion, family, community, cultural integrity and all the other boring metrics that reck little in the scheme of turning Ireland into a deracinated industrial estate and financial centre.
It might be called a lack of vision. Which is what the technocratic rulers of Ireland and what passes for its mostly state-papped intelligentsia stands for. Lack of vision is the vision because anything visionary in the sense that it once meant to the intellectual progenitors of the foundation of the Irish state is downright dangerous.
There is admittedly, or used to be at any rate, a rationale to the technocratic “vision” of the EEC/European Union/European Community. It was based on the well-grounded belief that if another large-scale European war was to be avoided – and such wars had been almost generational events going back to the 1500s – then it was best to replace national tensions with economic and political cooperation.
That made eminent sense with regard to Germany, France, and Italy. Only later did the practical economic co-operation evolve into the idea that any meaningful concept of a nation was maybe best supplanted by a supranational concept of “Europe.”
Hence our own rotating Taoiseach Micheál Martin’s reference to the “backward-looking idea of sovereignty.” No harm to him, but it would not be difficult to find examples of members of the Irish Catholic elite who said not dissimilar things in the late 19th or early 20th century when mocking the “advanced nationalists” who forged the national intellectual, political and military revolution out of which came his own party, Fianna Fáil.
The trouble with the EU federalist idea is that it strives towards, and indeed is well on the way to cementing, a centralised entity that bears all the characteristics of a state. Except that it is a multinational state, and such entities tend to have a poor history and a poor outcome. That is a discussion for another day perhaps. Nor is such a super supra national state a sine qua non for peaceful cooperation between nations.
John, in his piece, also mentioned Brexit in the context of maybe jumping into Irish unity without considering the full implications. The Brits – as in the British electorate and especially its white English plebeian constituent – are greatly mocked in a sense of schadenfreude now by Europhiles, not least our own, for having had the temerity to opt for a “backward-looking idea of sovereignty.”
Brexit was a break from worshipping at the feet of the Golden Calf of a sovereign EU commission that knows best for everyone, just as the British ruling class once, hubristically, believed it knew best for the Paddies and the Pathans. Ironically this was fine by the Anglophile antecedents of our Europhiles, who are not even different people in some instances.
But to go back to vision. While the technocratic anti-vision is solely measured by GDP growth, employment statistics, interest rates, inflation and other such riveting and inspiring concepts, it is backed by a pseudo intellectualism. Our universities are full of Chairs and Faculties devoted to its propagation.
For the logistics of turning Europe and Ireland into an industrial estate and financial centre requires not only that there are no fiscal or legal or sovereign impediments to the “free movement of capital and labour” but that there is an ideological weltanschauung – worldview – that will make that not only seem normal and in everyone’s best economic interest, but to be the best thing ever really.
If what was once good for General Motors was good for America, then by God what is best for Microsoft/Goldman Sachs/Ernst and Young and the lads who get the accommodation contracts is good for Ireland. You cannot inspire people with that of course, not even no matter how much the corporations rainbow hue their websites and Equality Diversify and Inclusion their operations, and bung a few bob to the NGOs.
It won’t work. You need the punters to buy into the “vision.” Which is where the “useful idiots” enter the frame. These are the ones who peddle the notion that massive current transformation of the Irish state and society and all that means in negative terms, including economically, is part of a glorious experiment in multiculturalism and diversity that is sure to end well.
This is not even halfway plausible when examined in the light of other European societies, and we are already well ahead of the curve in terms of the demographics that are manifesting themselves in less than positive ways on the “mainland.”
Something that has yet to be fully manifested here in the sort of social anomie and dysfunction that liberal states with a not dissimilar starting point to our own, like Denmark, are now desperately attempting to address with the benefit of knowing what the consequences are. Some of them are rather unsportingly and unEuropeanly nodding and winking towards Ireland as an alternative for asylum and economic migratory purposes.
If only our own pseudo elite of intellectual lightweights was so quick to adopt the example of Scandinavian left liberals in their current inhospitality to the Wretched of the Earth as they were in citing them when pursuing their objectives of legalising abortion. There might be something to said then of their urbane and cosmopolitan critical faculties which laid low the shibboleths of “backward reactionary Catholic nationalism.”
Don’t hold your breath. On our own side, if there is one, we need more than a new parish pumpism to combat all of this. We might do worse than casting back to the vision of our own founders rather than the founding fathers of a “Europe” that in a generation or two will bear little relation to the one envisaged by the Monnets and the rest.