Lyle Lovett has a very funny song called If I Had a Boat: “If I had a boat/ I’d go out on the ocean/ And if I had a pony/ I’d ride him on my boat.” But Lovett’s dreamer has nothing on Ireland. Never mind riding a pony on a boat – has he ever tried riding two horses on a surfboard?
It was Irishman Oscar Wilde who wrote that “the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality we must see it on the tight rope. When the verities become acrobats, we can judge them.” Our path to hypermodernity has been the way of paradoxes and it has led us to the contradiction of a rich country in which ever more of the population is too poor to be properly housed.
The acrobatics of the Irish economic miracle are way beyond anything at Cirque du Soleil. On the one hand we’ve surfed the tidal wave of globalisation. Global GDP per capita increased almost fivefold between 1984 and 2024, driven by the digital and biotechnological revolutions, China’s turn to state capitalism and the fall of the Soviet empire.
Ireland rode that wave from the early 1990s onwards. It did not do so flawlessly. It got carried away, did stupid tricks and almost drowned in its great banking and property crisis of 2008-2012. But overall, Ireland is arguably the single biggest winner – certainly among small European nations – of this era.
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But we have also ridden two horses at the same time, the American bronco and the European thoroughbred. There was a brief controversy 25 years ago when Mary Harney suggested that Ireland was spiritually closer to Boston to the Berlin. But the reality has been that we mastered the art of bilocation, being – economically and culturally – the most American bit of Europe and the European edge of America. We were able, accordingly, to take full advantage of both American technological dynamism and of European solidarity, regulation and social rights.
It was this doubleness that kept us afloat when the euro zone crisis so nearly sank us after 2008. Our own folly was compounded by the initially disastrous responses of the EU and the European Central Bank. But American multinational capital kept rolling in. It counteracted some of the madness of austerity and enabled Ireland to recover reasonably quickly from its self-inflicted calamity. To mix metaphors, we fell off the European tightrope but were caught by an American safety net.
This was no simple story of triumph snatched from historical adversity. But there’s no denying the impressive nature of the feat. Even stripping out the delusions of leprechaun economics, Ireland’s real per capita gross national income (now designated as GNI*) has increased 143 per cent in the last 30 years. That star after the GNI really does shine brightly.
And this isn’t just about abstract numbers. It’s about eight years of extra life. Irish life expectancy at the start of this phase of globalisation in 1990 was 75. It’s now 83. The definition of an Irish lifetime has been transformed. For all our justified frustrations, that is a kind of miracle.
But we also live with paradoxes. Ours is a state that regards as its foundational moment the 1916 Rising, which is itself encapsulated in a paradox: the triumph of failure. Perhaps we are now grappling with a reverse paradox: the failure of triumph.
We are now, most probably, at the end of acrobatics. The wave of globalisation we have managed to surf is receding. As Singaporean prime minister Lawrence Wong put it in April, “We are in the midst of a messy transition globally. To what, nobody can tell.”
The wave that carried us so far swept away many communities in richer countries. Ireland (unlike Northern Ireland) was saved from the worst effects of deindustrialisation simply because it was relatively poorly industrialised in the first place – another paradox: the blessings of underdevelopment.
But elsewhere the bitterness of loss has festered into the politics of the great backlash. Brexit and Donald Trump are only the most obvious anglophone manifestations of the resurgence of ethnonationalism and the crisis of globalisation.
And as for our equestrian circus act, the two horses are now galloping in different directions. Trump makes little secret of his disdain for the EU, which he regards as America’s number one “foe”. The tectonic plates of transatlantic alliance are shifting and Ireland is right on the fault line. It is not a good crack.
We have thus reached the point where paradoxes start to congeal into mere contradictions. We want to uphold one of the great achievements of globalisation – the idea that human rights are universal and indivisible. But we’re terrified of how American corporations (under pressure from Trump) might react if we impose very modest sanctions on Israel.
We know that large-scale inward migration has been part and parcel of our successful adaptation to post-1990 globalisation. But now the Government, responding to the rise of reactionary anti-globalisation, has announced that there are “too many” migrants. Yet it cannot say how many is too many or which categories of migrants – nurses, doctors, IT specialists, international students, care workers, meat packers – should be turned away. It can’t do so because we are caught in our own Catch 22. In order to create the infrastructure to manage a growing population, we have to grow the population by importing more workers to build the infrastructure.
[ State’s population could hit 7.6m in four decades, department estimatesOpens in new window ]
It’s like the kids’ song about the old lady who swallowed the fly. In order to build the Dublin metro we need to bring in 8,000 construction workers. In order to house the 8,000 construction workers we need to import thousands more construction workers to build the places for them to live in. In order to house those workers ...
[ Ireland’s ticking time bomb: our changing demographicsOpens in new window ]
The surfer has to come back on to dry land eventually. The tightrope walker has to come down to earth. The failure of triumph is that we have not created solid social ground with adequate infrastructure under it and decent housing on top of it.
