Hard Times

The news lately has remained so bad you could laugh for crying. As tax revenues have dried up, the country's most ambitious schemes for the future have shut down one-by-one. Manufacturing plants keep closing; urban redevelopment schemes and support for the arts, road works, and soaring bridges all dematerializing. The six public libraries in my ancestral County Monaghan were told they could buy no new books in 2009, none. In the more prosperous county of Galway, the book budget was cut by only 85 percent. Our local butcher began selling trays of hearts and tongues. Porridge reappeared on breakfast menus.

In February, the police raided Anglo Irish Bank, where a "Golden Circle" of directors had helped themselves to millions of euros in sneaky interest-free "loans" in order to purchase a huge chunk of the bank for their own delectation. Not that this bunch were good at maths: they had also extended loans of more than 500 million euros each to fifteen property developers who now had virtually nothing left between them. The day of the bank raid, February 24, 2009, the Irish stock market fell for the eleventh straight session. The Irish Examiner reported:

Dealers said investors at home and abroad were selling Ireland across the board. "We get on our clients in the US and we are trying to sell stocks in Kerry Group or Paddy Power and they are just blanking you," one Dublin based trader said. "They are saying 'Irish? We don't want to know.'" Another trader said: "It's as if the Celtic Tiger never happened."

By the next morning, the entire appreciation of Irish equities over the fourteen years of the boom disappeared into thin air. Everyone could feel the sky falling, and the populace retreated into their well-honed art of doom-saying. An international survey suddenly ranked the Irish, crowned the happiest people on earth in 2004, the most pessimistic of all Western nationalities.

With the coming of summer, the national mood grew more puzzling. As if by some unspoken agreement, people suddenly seemed to stop talking about the appalling economic news -- which remained more relentlessly dire than that of almost any country in the developed world. You'd pick up the newspaper and hear another dozen reports as to how the sky was falling in. Housing Prices in New Collapse! Foreign Travel Down 40 Percent as Tour Operators Die! Ireland's Debt Worst in EU!

"Flights Over Island Twisting Upside Down, Passengers Falling Out Into Mid-Sky and Saying They Will Never Come Back. Radioactive Gaels Gone Mad on Ground," my friend Ray Lloyd presented his own headlines in the pub the other day. Then he scoffed: "Fuck, we've been here before."

Tourists who come to Ireland marvel at the culture's ceaseless talking. But to understand the place more deeply you have to understand its silences and they can be almost fathomless, creepy doors leading to almost a national cavern of the unsaid. Changing the subject without warning, exiting a conversation for an unexplained walk, going vacant or dreamy or latching into song in the middle of someone else's sentences, these are all ancient Irish tricks. That people have stopped discussing the news meant something, make no mistake. Perhaps the collective psyche has retreated into older habits of stoicism and detachment or perhaps what the romantic poet John Keats described as Negative Capability. "That," he explained, "is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." I dunno -- today's headlines bring more dreary tidings: fees for every time you turn on the water tap, a new property tax, end to the celebrated Artists' Tax Exemption that has brought so many writers and artists to live (or remain) in Ireland... Is this canoe going backwards?