Contemporary Ireland has been neither here nor there. Its position was calculated by a repeated process of triangulation in which the three sides are America, Britain and Europe. The precise shape of this triangle was always changeable but the broad geometry has been constant. Ireland was not a centre – it was a centroid, the point where the medians of a triangle intersect.
And now it isn’t any more. The triangle of America, Britain and Europe is in imminent danger of becoming a straight line. Are we about to become simply European?
There is, famously, no word in Irish for “yes” or “no”. Our majority culture is evasive. We’re very good at equivocation and ambiguity, at slipping through the cracks between hard choices and rigid definitions. This is both our strength and our weakness. It’s why we’re so good at fiction and so bad at planning.
Ireland is improv. We were an unscripted reality show long before the genre was invented. We had to be. The deep histories of colonisation and mass emigration forced us to be amphibious creatures, able to survive on the dry land of empire or the rough seas of exile. We loved our homeland most from a safe distance. And the burden of being (in the phrase that Derek Scally used for the title of his terrific book) The Best Catholics in the World made us expertly and exquisitely hypocritical.
Ireland’s delightful love triangle is ending in a nasty divorce
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There is therefore some logic in the way that, when we eventually managed to create a successful state, it too was an evasive entity. It remained (though we don’t like to acknowledge this) closely intertwined with Britain, not least through the sharing of a common popular culture. It became in economic terms the 51st state of the union, a home from home for American multinational capital. And it vindicated its national independence by acquiring an equal seat at the European table.
But the real genius of this arrangement is that each point on this triangle could also negate the other. We became really and truly not British when American investment freed us from economic dependency on Cathleen ni Houlihan’s other island. We were not subsumed into the informal American empire because we were good Europeans, loyal members of an ever-expanding European Union. We were in but not quite of the EU because we were also part of something called “the Anglo-American world” – not just linguistically but economically and ideologically.
Ireland thus became a kind of erratic moon, able somehow to orbit three planets at the same time. In a people less well trained in the arts of ducking and diving, this might have induced a cognitive dissonance. But it has been no bother to us. It is the mental space in which we live. We instinctively understood the uncertainty principle long before Heisenberg formulated it.
It is striking that the grand narrative of Micheál Martin’s visit to the Oval Office was the familiar theme of evasion. Phew. We got away with it again
The advantage of being so slippery was that we couldn’t get caught. We slipped away from general European obligations to impose fair taxes on capital so that corporations could repay their debts to the societies that enabled them to function. We slipped away from the obligations of our military neutrality – the duty to defend ourselves and at the very least to patrol our vast territorial waters. More positively, we also slipped away from the implied obligations of our position as the unofficial 51st state, managing with impressive dexterity to stay out of America’s murderously stupid forever wars without becoming enemies of Uncle Sam.
None of this is necessarily ignoble. My favourite among Charles Dickens’s teeming mass of characters is the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist, “as roistering and swaggering a young gentleman as ever stood four feet six”. He’s the little fellah with nothing going for him except his wits and his nimbleness and he really ought to have been Irish. We are the Artful Dodgers of the globalised world.
But even the Dodger, for all his artistry, gets caught in the end. And so have we. Our triple somersault is falling flat on its face. Our delightful love triangle is ending in a nasty divorce.
The first of our three vertices to fall away was the British one. It is ironic that this happened just at the moment when the relationship was more stable and positive than it had ever been. The joint enterprise of the peace process in Northern Ireland and years of working closely together in the EU had rubbed the hard edges off a difficult history. Until the Brexiteers decided to make us collateral damage in their exultant orgy of self-harm.
And now a second vertex of the triangle has exploded. The American relationship has turned toxic. It is striking that the grand narrative of Micheál Martin’s visit to the Oval Office was the familiar theme of evasion. Phew. We got away with it again. We dodged that bullet.
But this was a mere retreat into familiar habits of mind. Donald Trump, as he always does, created a false sense of security and then delivered a sucker punch: Conor McGregor as the representative of the Ireland he wants to see. The message was clear: if Ireland is to be safe from America’s wrath it will only be because it has reshaped itself as a Maga mini-me of hatred and misogyny.
We can’t triangulate any more. The era when we could play different ideas of Irish belonging off against each other is over. We really are where we are – which is to say in a Europe that is having rapidly to redefine its own place in the world under the pressure of a hostile US on the one side and a murderous Russia on the other.
It’s not, after all, the worst place to be. It has its own existential struggle with neofascism within its borders, but it has a fighting chance of victory in that struggle. It still has the possibility to stand up for science and rationality, to defend international law and human rights, to limit climate chaos and to rein in feral capitalism. Ireland’s place is in that fight.
