There surely cannot be many stories which sum up the state of the Irish nation at present than the news yesterday – carried by RTE, of course – that Limerick City finally has its own rainbow road crossing:
The council said the installation is designed to express with pride how Limerick is an inclusive place to live, work and call home https://t.co/56WPsS7R3k
— RTÉ News (@rtenews) February 16, 2022
There are, perhaps, fewer more apt statements about modern Ireland than that: Limerick is an “inclusive” place now, exemplified by a multi-coloured road crossing.
Never mind that house prices in Limerick – already well out of the reach of a young person – are projected to increase a further 10% this year. Never mind that in parts of the city, anti-social behaviour is a massive problem. Never mind that a massive wealth gap has emerged between the propertied, middle aged, and middle class, and the children that they are increasingly not having. Limerick has a rainbow road crossing now, marking it out as a progressive haven.
At some point, perhaps soon, perhaps later, Ireland’s younger voters will realise that this is a country with increasingly nothing to offer them except for rainbows, and symbolism. Ireland’s politicians, after all, have long since abandoned the idea that votes should be won by fixing real problems, and decided instead to keep younger voters engaged by tackling cultural, and largely vague, and unsolvable problems. No, they cannot make homes affordable: But they sure can launch a national conversation about misogyny. No, they can’t do much about the rise in inflation, but they sure can introduce gender quotas for corporate boards that 99% of people will never sit on anyway. No, they can’t tackle rising social isolation, but they sure can paint a rainbow in the middle of the road. Or put one on a flag. Or announce yet another pride week, or pride month, or pride decade.
There is nothing inherently wrong, of course, with Pride. Gay people are as entitled to celebrate their culture as anybody else. The issue is that it’s become a sort of substitute national religion. For our ruling class, the tricolour of the Republic is less attractive, as a unifying symbol, than the rainbow flag. After all: The Tricolour represents the whole people, and even some undesirables – Sinn Fein, the “far right”, and so on – claim it as their own. The only people who fly the rainbow flag, by contrast, are the good, and the progressive, and the decent, and the enlightened. It reflects the cultural ascension of our ruling class much more effectively than anything so gauche as nationalism: The rainbow flag symbolises belonging to something more than the nation itself – an international community of progressivism and goodness. That’s why they love it so much, and that’s why it’s flown with even more fervour by straight, white, progressive, middle-class types than it is by the gay community themselves.
If you feel excluded and alienated by the rainbow flag flying everywhere, then you are entirely missing the point: You are supposed to feel alienated and excluded. That is the whole point. The rainbow flag is as much, in the hands of Ireland’s ruling class, about who they are not as who they are. They are not you. They have ascended to a superior plane of existence than you, with your unspoken, perhaps even unrealised, backwards looking bigotry.
But it’s all very empty, isn’t it? Because, at the end of the day, like every other flag, it is… just a flag. And, to quote John Hume, you can’t eat a flag. You can’t buy a house with one either. Or keep a street safe with one. Or tackle misogyny with one.
Ireland is a cold place for the young. Even the young and the progressive. The truth of the matter is that for somebody leaving one of Ireland’s many universities these days with a degree in women’s studies, or whatever, the rainbow flag is about all that the Irish state can offer. It cannot offer stable rent or a good paying job or, increasingly, a satisfying romantic relationship, or a social life, or any of the things your parents took for granted. It can hand you, at most, a feeling of cultural superiority, and a sense that the country is purer than others.
That’s one reason for the recent explosion in Irish cultural nationalism. It’s not that Ireland is a better place to be a young person than the UK, or the United States, or Australia, or Canada, or any of the hundred other places Irish people have been emigrating to for generations. All of our advancements and enlightenments have been, instead, cultural: We are not better than the UK because our houses are cheaper and our wages higher, but because they elected Boris Johnson and we did not. We are not better than the United States because our streets are safer, but because they have Republicans, and we do not. Irish civic nationalism these days is all about our perceived cultural enlightenment, because, well, it’s all we have.
And so, some will cheer the rainbow flag on a Limerick street. And some, without foundation, will claim that this article is about my being “triggered”, or they might even try to insinuate a hostility to gay people. Neither is true. It’s just all so boring, and empty. You can’t eat a flag – but by God, the Irish establishment is doing its level best to convince our young people that they can.