Sunday 1 November 2009

Review of Ship of Fools, by Fintan O'Toole



The last few months have seen the emergence of a sub-genre of books on Irish political life, probably best referred to as post-boom literature. Shane Ross on the bankers, Pat Leahy on Fianna Fail, and Matt Cooper on power and its abuse over the last decade are probably the three most prominent (although, to my mind, the most interesting study along these lines came out almost two years ahead of these: John Dillon's brief pamphlet Platonism and the World Crisis). Now Fintan O'Toole, columnist with the Irish Times has brought out his own contribution, Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger.

Throughout the boom years, O'Toole has consistently questioned the assumptions that underlay the Celtic Tiger, prompting any number of run-ins with the economists and journalists who acted almost as cheer-leaders for the property bubble. As the brief biography on the inside cover says, his 'name was almost a term of abuse among the politicians who presided over the economic debacle of recent years'. His columns stressed again and again the contradictions, hypocrisy, incompetence and often the sheer heartlessness of those who have held power in Ireland during the last decade or so. In 2003 he published After the Ball, a closely argued, annotated and statistic-filled discussion of what would be the legacy of the Celtic Tiger. Ship of Fools draws largely the same conclusions but does so in a much more rhetorical style. The book's nine chapters read like extended versions of O'Toole's newspaper columns, a series of polemics on the various elements that contributed to the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger, incompetent and often corrupt politicians, greedy bankers and developers, untroubled by professional ethics, not to mention a largely complacent media which by and large failed to ask any searching questions during the good times and often excoriated those that did.

O'Toole's analysis tends to follow the emerging consensus that the Celtic tiger can be divided into two phases. firstly, a 'Good Boom' in the later 1990s, based on investment from the US and EU, which saw Irish living standards rise from their historically low levels to among the highest in the developed world. This was followed, from about 2001, by a 'Bad Boom', a disastrous property bubble, fed by developers, banks, their friends in government, and by a public which allowed itself to be gulled into believing that the boom times would indeed become 'even boomier'.

O'Toole examines in turn the role played by politicians, bankers, civil servants (the Financial Regulator and the Central Bank in particular come in for a thoroughly deserved kicking) and property developers in the events of the Celtic Tiger years. He emphasises the continuity between what had gone on in Ireland before the late 1990s and what occurred during the period of the boom, so that the same Central Bank which had turned a blind eye to the large scale tax evasion schemes on non-resident and bank accounts and the Ansbacher conspiracy, continued not to notice widespread financial misbehaviour (to put is mildly) in the IFSC. Similarly, the much too close relationship between political parties, especially Fianna Fail, and builders and property developers, which was exposed in the mid-1990s, has continued unabated to the present. These years have seen the emergence and consolidation of a new aristocracy, an oligarchy of businessmen and politicians, which runs Ireland for its own benefit, which embraces the more convenient aspects of American capitalism (a big yes to a winner takes all society, low taxes and social spending; but an equally big no to on actually paying the taxes you owe, obeying such regulations as exist, or any kind of extensive charitable giving).

He describes with relish the excesses of this new gentry and the way it aped the ways of its Anglo-Irish predecessors, buying up their country houses, not to mention high profile chunks of London real estate. His account of Sean Dunne's wedding, along with that of Georgina Ahern, are particularly purple passages. He might also have have gone on to note how, lower down the scale, this phenomenon manifested itself in the widespread popularity of things which had once been the property of the higher middle classes such as second homes, designer labels, skiing holidays, and slightly odd preference for Italian food. It might also explain the rise and rise of rugby, the archetypal Celtic Tiger sport. He is also good on the hereditary nature of the higher professions (despite doctors making up 5% of the general population, their offspring make up 32% of first year medical students), although the hereditary principle could be extended to most other areas of Irish life, from business to politics to long term unemployment. he is also good on the scandalous underinvestment in education and specifically in IT during the boom. he describes the lack of computers and technology in general form Irish schools and even universities (this is something to which Cu Chuimne can testify from personal experience. In fourteen years in Irish schools, I only saw computers once, two aged BBC Micros which sat unused at the back of the room in sixth class). This failure to invest in education is part of a much larger squandering of the opportunity presented by fifteen years of increasing prosperity. Ireland entered the boom with an appallingly poor public service, especially in the realm of health care, largely as a result of the deep spending cuts imposed in the 1980s mend the damage done to the public finances by a previous bout of fiscal idiocy from 1977 to 1982. It appears now, that as we emerge from the boom, after years when the exchequer itself was surprised by the revenue flooding into it, our public services are no better off. Instead they face a new round of cuts deeper again than those of twenty years ago proposed, in a grim irony, by Prof. Colm McCarthy, author of the cuts of the 1980s and now recalled to the task, like an economising Cincinnatus from his plough, to help dig the country out of its most recent mess.

One of the strongest passages of the book, as was to be expected, is O'Toole's discussion of the cultural aspects of the boom. His discussion of the boy band and chick lit phenomenons are witty and acute and Fintan seems to have actually read P.S. I Love You, which arguably shows an impressive dedication to his research (I would have loved to be at the checkout when he paid for that particular tome, I wonder did he also buy a copy of the NYRB or the like to cover it it?). He has an especially interesting insight into the Irish dancing shows which roamed the world for the best part of a decade. Riverdance, he argues, was a product of The Good Boom, a combination of traditional and international elements which surprised us with its success. Lord of the Dance, on the other hand, belongs to the subsequent period of decadence, overblown, sleazy and peddling a mocked-up, commercialised version of Irish history. One oversight here, however, is surely the absence of any reference to Paul Howard's Ross O'Carroll-Kelly books, which brilliantly pinpointed many ludicrous aspects of Irish society during the boom and which must be among the best pieces of satire to be produced in this country in decades.

The one big weakness in Ship of Fools is its treatment of the role of the Irish people in all this. After all, despite the economic and political oligarchies highlighted by O'Toole and others, Ireland is still a parliamentary democracy and the citizens who make up its electorate have an active role to play in determining the direction it takes. However, the majority of the Irish electorate seems to have joined in the general holiday from responsibility that characterised the Celtic Tiger years. Fianna fail won three elections between 1997 and 2007 and it's not as though the party didn't have form when it comes to blowing economic success, Dermot Keogh's verdict on the Lynch and Haughy governments of the 1970s and 1980s ('The younger generation were the losers as a government rolled the dice and forfeited the family silver') is equally applicable to their successors nearly thirty years later. The first two of these election triumphs were won in the midst of the revelations around Charles Haughey and the scandals around planning in Dublin, in which members of the Fianna Fail parliamentary Party, and indeed its front bench, were deeply implicated. The most recent was attained in spite of all the evidence of a decade of misrule, in spite of the mounting proof that tough times, for which no provision was being taken, might be ahead, and in spite of the emerging details of the alternative reality that was Bertie Ahern's personal finances. O'Toole, along, it must be said, with pretty much all the other analysts of the boom, tends to skirt around this topic, even when confronted with evidence, such as the ubiquity of bogus non-resident bank accounts to avoid DIRT in the 1980s, that the same reluctance to pay one's fair share of taxes and absence of any kind of public morality for which he attacks in the rich and powerful, seems to be exist at all levels of Irish society. Furthermore, there seems to be a marked inability on the part of the electorate to hold politicians to account even when they are shown to have misbehaved, which after all is the basic role of the electorate in a parliamentary democracy. Colonial oppression etc., on which most of these authors fall back, seems to me to be an inadequate explanation as to why disgraced politicians such as Michael Lowry, Beverly Cooper Flynn, or at local level, Michael Clarke and Michael Fahy, can be returned again and again by the same electorate they have betrayed. Nor can this be dismissed, as some commentators seem to have done, as an exclusively rural phenomenon. After all, it has hard to come up with a more typically 'Dublin' figure than Bertie Ahern (or so he would have us believe), yet in spite of all that has happened over the last few years, support for him in his fastness of Drumcondra seems as high as ever and he can even give interviews in which he muses about running for President. It seems that, for the most part, the commuter stuck in an interminable traffic jam between the town in which they work and their extortionately priced, poorly built house, struggling to raise a family in a country with inadequate and expensive systems of heath care, education, and childcare, does not make the connection between all this and the incompetent, often corrupt, decisions taken by the politicians they themselves elect. The electorate may now be eagerly anticipating the next general election and a chance to pay Fianna Fail back for all this (vingince bejasus!), but it's at least five years too late. This disconnection, this failure on the part of the electorate to act as a check on the excesses of a party in government and to punish politicians' bad behaviour and poor decisions at the polls must have worrying implications for the future of Irish democracy.


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