Tyranny of Liberalism - an Irish Response
Tim O'Sullivan
It is now two years since you sent me a copy of your article/talk Tyranny of Liberalism http://www.israelsh amir.net/ English/Eng7. htm and you suggested I write about my reaction to it from the point of view of one with an Irish historical inheritance. Between one thing and another I left writing the response to one side and more or less forgot about it. This has had the advantage that I can now write a response as the Irish experiment with neo-Liberalism stands over a frightening economic abyss.
There is one fault I find with the original article of two years ago. It is an important one. Essentially the article reflects on the contemporary ideology of the US, which we might call neo-Liberalism. It is the ideology which came to the fore under Thatcher and Reagan. The article does not distinguish properly between liberalism per se and the neo-Liberalism of today which many, such as myself, regard as sham liberalism; a form of oligarchic political control which observes only the outward appearance of genuine liberalism.
The values of essential liberalism; freedom of expression, freedom of information, of assembly, freedom of choice, real open discussion unencumbered by bullying, representative government,; are wonderful and necessary values.
Unfortunately what we have today, especially in the US, is a perverse and grotesque negation of these ideals. Moneyed forces have found ways to turn ‘liberal democracy’ into a dictatorship of the rich. A cabal of the fabulously wealthy controls a media which bamboozles and bewilders the masses. When, despite this, democracy occasionally may begin to work the secret state steps in to accomplish the necessary assassination, be it figurative or literal.
There is a world of a difference between contemporary neo-Liberalism as it works in practice and liberalism as it could work if the necessary checks and balances existed to prevent it degenerating into perversity. American liberalism works from a design drawn up two hundred yeas go. That design does not work in the contemporary world. A new design needs to be drawn up which can be functional in the modern era.
The Republic of Ireland is a historical anomaly. If you were to read a synopsis of the history of the country without the use of names you would imagine a history of part of Asia was being described. Liberalism appeared in Ireland in the early 19th century. Daniel O’Connell, the pioneering political agitator for the rights of Irish Catholics was a liberal, in the classical meaning of the term. Irish Catholics followed his lead in that they supported the separation of Church and State in the United Kingdom in which they were an impoverished minority. When most of the island of Ireland became independent in 1922, the new state had no official religion. When Mr de Valera wrote up and had approved a new constitution in 1937 there was no official religion defined though the Catholic Church was recognised as possessing a “special position”. This rather vague “special position” was abolished in 1972, as it was considered to contribute to the hostility the Protestants of Northern Ireland felt towards the state.
The Irish state was always from a legal point of view a liberal secular one. The nationalists who founded the state often had a love/hate relationship with Catholicism and found the idea of an official religion distasteful. Yet the Irish state was one in which in practice, as opposed to theory, the Catholic Church held such great sway that one had the sensation of living in a form of theocracy. Up to a decade ago Sunday Mass attendance in Ireland was perhaps the highest in the world. The Church wielded great influence over education and the health service. The managers of primary schools were usually local Catholic clergy. Most hospitals were managed by orders of nuns. If a politician were accused of being anti-clerical and he could not find a credible defence his political career was at an end. The Catholic religious were numerous and powerful and formed a type of moral and cultural aristocracy. There were numerous Priest academics. The Priests also acted as a type of ideological police force. The power of the clergy stemmed not from the state’s constitutional but from cultural roots going back centuries. When the political Gaelic Irish world collapsed in the 17th century the aristocrats consciously handed power over to the clergy as the custodians of political and moral authority.
As the traditional clan system atrophied gradually more and more legitimate authority was seen to reside in the Catholic clergy. Priests were educated. They had links with a Catholic world beyond Ireland’s shores. The Church gave the impoverished and degraded native Irish a sense of worthiness and even superiority a propos the English and Scottish colonists. The British state also saw the importance of the Catholic Church in political affairs in Ireland. From the late 18th century it courted the Church and even subsidised the building of the national seminary in Maynooth in the 1790s. Both state and Church felt threatened by the ideas of the French revolution. The British saw the value of the Church as an instrument for the maintenance of political order. An MP once remarked at Westminster that a Parish Priest in Ireland was worth “a squadron of Dragoons”.
At the arrival of the 20th century the Catholic clergy for most people in Ireland represented the most legitimate form of authority in society. While the British state represented authority it did not necessarily represent legitimate authority. Irish Nationalist politicians in practice, at this time, had little real power. We can say that the Catholic Church in Ireland in the early 20th Century filled a void and provided society with a form of legitimate authority.
The power of the Church did not mean that the Catholic Irish were extraordinarily spiritual or religious. It was rather that the Church fulfilled roles that in other societies were fulfilled by political institutions, politicians, a civic culture, aristocracies, monarchs, a public intelligencia etc. The power of the Catholic Church in Ireland was more a reflection of sociological rather than spiritual realities.
The constitutionally liberal yet practically theocratic state that emerged in the 1920s began to change in the 1950s.
The (rather timid) efforts at producing an indigenous industrial revolution were floundering in the 1950s. Progress was slow. Young people were emigrating en mass, especially to England, to find work. A solution emerged in the form of inviting manufacturing companies from across the world to set up plants in Ireland, where they would enjoy generous grants and tax breaks. The economy expanded rapidly in the 1960s thanks to this policy. There were serious economic hiccups in the 1970s and 1980s however by the late 1980s economic progress was beginning to show a steady positive dynamic.
New affluence brought travel and contact with other ways of seeing the world. Education expanded. Thought became more cosmopolitan. Television arrived in the early 1960s. Access to British channels was possible via cable TV for most households from the 1970s. The new national TV channel RTE fostered an outlook critical of established religious and politically nationalist attitudes.
The 1980s and 1990s saw the “culture wars” between the “liberal agenda” and “conservative Catholicism” at their most heated. The “Liberals”, so called, were really secularists and the “Catholic conservatives” were essentially clericalists. In 1983 a government in which the secularist Labour party was a minority partner changed the law so that contraceptives became freely available. In 1996 divorce was legalised.
Meanwhile from the 1960s to the 1980s the power of the Catholic Church slowly ebbed. The numbers entering convents and seminaries declined steadily. More and more people took their ideas and values from the mass media. The newspapers in Ireland were and are in the hands of secularist Irish Catholics except for the prestigious Protestant owned Irish Times. British papers are widely read here also. The press took the side of the secularists.
In 1985 a new political party emerged from the dominant Fianna Fáil party called the Progressive Democrats. The
Mid-wife for the arrival of this new party was the CIA offshoot; the National Endowment for Democracy. The party would stand for unbridled free-market capitalism and secularism. It would also seek to promote openness, transparency and integrity in public life. It was not without genuine idealism.
This party would find itself in government with different combinations of parties for most of the succeeding 20 years. Though always a small party it was to have great influence. It promoted tax cutting and the ideology of the market. Meanwhile US hi-tech manufacturing companies poured into the state in the 1990s. The result was the dramatic economic expansion known as the “Celtic Tiger”. In 1998 Ireland agreed to adapt the Euro currency. Thus the government surrendered control of monetary policy to the European Central Bank.
For the next eight years an ever wilder property bubble sucked in hopes, money and resources. Irish banks were enabled to borrow in Euro at low interest rates and lend on to Irish property speculators at a higher rate.
Immigrants arrived from all parts of the globe to work in construction or in any number of other careers. The government coffers sucked in tax revenues and government employment expanded at a rate of 15,000 per annum. New immigrants created more demand for housing and more housing demand fuelled the property speculation which in turn created more demand for immigrant labour. The government depended for a significant proportion of tax revenue from taxes on construction. Then in 2007 more houses where built than there were buyers for them. The housing market fell off a cliff…
Now as house prices fall the Irish property bubble, the most spectacular property bubble in the world of recent times, has burst. Our Celtic Tiger has become a Septic Tiger. As government no longer receives so much tax revenue from construction of new houses it has to borrow for day to day purposes. It is no longer able to pay its way. Commentators suggest severe pay cuts for the vast army of government employees as an effort to bring state revenues and expenditure into line.
As the British pound has been rapidly losing value on the foreign exchange markets in recent months Irish goods and services are no longer competitive on price in Britain, the most important export market. We are cursed to live in interesting. We wait nervously before the abyss.
Neo-Liberalism has been the presiding ideology of the Irish state for the past decade and even before that. Much that has happened has been due to weaknesses and immaturity of the political culture rather than due to any ideology as such. Neo-Liberalism has just made a bad situation worse. Some weeks ago the Progressive Democrat party was wound up.
Such reckless and irresponsible economic behaviour that occurred is harder to imagine had the Catholic clergy retained its once unchallengeable authority. In such a hypothetical situation clerics, one imagines, might have demanded and got curbs on lending and speculation based on the demands of the Churches social teachings.
The Irish escaped from the Catholic clergy and fell into the hands of the neo-Liberals and have ended up cruelly neo-Conned.
Regards
Tim O’Sullivan
