Ship of Fools (23 page)

This mechanism was at work in relation to corruption. Charles Haughey understood this with a clarity approaching genius. Instead of hiding the vast wealth for which an innocent explanation was impossible, he flaunted it, relying on the capacity of the public at large both to know that he must be corrupt and somehow to confine this knowledge to a dark corner of the brain where it remained inert and irrelevant. His success strengthened the workings of the unknown knowns - when his gargantuan appetite for other people's money was formally and undeniably revealed, it was necessary for the large swathe of the population that supported him to believe that it had not known about it all along. With this habit of mind so well ingrained it was possible to vote for a fraudster while believing that this was not an act of collusion but merely, for example, an expression of sympathy with a man who was good to his Mammy.

Gradually in this way, the Irish power of double-think became less charming and playful and more like George Orwell's definition of the word he invented in his novel
Ninteen Eighty-Four:
‘The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them . . . To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and
then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies.'

Again, the consequences of this way of thinking were not abstract. The greatest unknown known of all was the fact that property prices were artificial and unsustainable. This was known both from history and from common sense. Economists and regulators knew it from studies and statistics. Ordinary punters knew through the operation of basic intelligence. It simply made no sense that a three-bedroomed semi in a Dublin suburb was ‘worth' €1 million or that an apartment in Cork had the same value as a chateau on the Loire. Yet these realities were also unknown.

One contributor to the sense of displacement was undoubtedly the slow death of Catholic Ireland. The institutional Catholic Church had dominated both the public identity and the personal values of a majority of the population from the middle of the nineteenth century until the institution itself began to implode in the 1990s. The gradual rise of urban, secular and Anglo-American cultural norms on the one side and the revelation of horrific crimes of child abuse on the other broke that dominance. What the sociologist Tom Inglis called the ‘moral monopoly' of the Church was ended.

For social conservatives, the loss of religious faith is an adequate explanation for the confusions of Irish life in the Celtic Tiger years and for the amorality that ran through them. But this explanation does not bear much scrutiny. In the first place, the Church was not a beacon of moral certitude - it was a deeply corrupt institution that tortured and enslaved children in its industrial schools and that placed the need to
protect its own reputation by covering up child abuse ahead of the safety of vulnerable children. And secondly, the great nexus of amorality, Fianna Fáil, was arguably never more closely aligned with the Church than it was under Bertie Ahern. It was Ahern who passionately denounced as ‘aggressive secularism' any attempt to debate the Church's continued control of the education and health systems. It was he who attempted to enshrine Catholic teaching on abortion in the constitution. Above all, it was he who used over €1 billion of public money to save the Church from the legal and financial consequences of its tolerance for child abuse when he agreed a deal to indemnify the religious orders against being sued. The institutional Church was not edged out by the governing culture of the Celtic Tiger - it was closely allied to it.

The real effect of the loss of Church authority was that there was no deeply rooted civic morality to take its place. The Irish had been taught for generations to identity morality with religion, and a very narrow kind of religion at that. Morality was about what happened in bedrooms, not in boardrooms. It was about the body, not the body politic. Masturbation was a much more serious sin than tax evasion. In a mindset where homosexuality was much worse than cooking the books, it was okay to be bent as long as you were straight. This nineteenth-century ethic was not pushed aside by the creation of a coherent and deeply rooted civic, democratic and social morality. It mostly collapsed under its own weight of hypocrisy. The familiar code of values, the language in which right and wrong could be discussed, lost its meaning before Irish society had fully learned to speak any other tongue.

One of the few areas of Irish life that had any continuing sense of integrity was artistic creativity. But here, too, there
were no easy ways to get one's bearings. The last big economic and cultural shift, the opening up of the country to foreign investment in the late 1950s, had been played out with remarkable potency in the theatre, as a brilliant generation of playwrights (Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, Thomas Kilroy, John B. Keane) created vivid dramas of a society torn between past and future. This was possible because there was a single governing narrative - the conflict between tradition and modernity, between the local and the global, between the values of a rural, Catholic society and the aspirations of the young for personal freedom, emotional satisfaction and material abundance.

The problem with the world of the Celtic Tiger was that there wasn't a single big narrative that could be shaped into a clear conflict. The personal choices thrown up by social change were rather less heroic: agonising about whether to stay in a small village in Donegal or to emigrate to Philadelphia is rather more dramatic than wondering whether to buy a holiday home in Bulgaria or Florida. The sense of conflicted spaces (going into exile or staying at home) that shaped so much of the Irish artistic imagination in the twentieth century was not easy to generate for a generation that treated Ryanair like its bus service and did its Christmas shopping in New York. It is not for nothing that conflict (as opposed to bickering) virtually disappeared from Irish drama in the Celtic Tiger years and that monologue replaced dialogue as the preferred form for the younger writers.

A particular problem was that Ireland did not have a tradition of large-scale social realism. Irish history and society had been too angular, too discontinuous, for a realistic literature to thrive. Indeed, the glory of Irish writing had long been the distorting strangeness of the ‘cracked looking glass'
that did not so much reflect society as rearrange it into dreamily disconnected shapes. In the Celtic Tiger years, however, there were times when the country could have done with a kind of art that was forensically descriptive of contemporary Irish society, ordering its chaos into a recognisable whole. There were occasional triumphs of Irish realism on screen, like Lenny Abrahamson and Mark O'Halloran's superb conjuring of unofficial and invisible lives in
Adam and Paul
,
Prosperity
and
Garage
, or Eugene O'Brien and Declan Recks's micro-studies of Midlands anomie in
Pure Mule
. It was also true that the emergence of the Irish crime novel in such small masterpieces as Gene Kerrigan's
Little Criminals
and
Dark Times in the City
suggested that international genres like the thriller might be more useful in depicting a globalised culture than the more specifically Irish traditions proved to be. But no one in any form could manage the kind of realist epic that would give a multi-layered and shifting society a sense of where it was and how it got there.

It may have been, in fact, that the disruptions of time and space in boomtime Ireland were simply too complex to be dealt with in the same work. On the whole, Irish literature was far better at dealing with time than with space. It had relatively easy access to a framework - the extended family - in which time unfolds naturally. The great familial myths of Sebastian Barry or Marina Carr, or the more intense and intimate worlds of, say, Anne Enright's
The Gathering
, were very powerful correctives to the sense of a continuous, timeless present tense that dominated the boom years. They reminded people that the past doesn't just go away.

On the other hand, the rarer engagements with the fractured sense of space (Tom Murphy's
The House
, say, or Colm
Tóibín's novel
Brooklyn
) dealt with the idea of living in two places at the same time, but did so by projecting themselves backwards to an era long before the Celtic Tiger was even imaginable. On the whole, it was easier to deal with that unruly beast either by confining it within the cage of familial intimacies or by seeking the possibility of narrative order in older, more distant settings.

There was also the paradox that the most thoroughly globalised brand of Irish culture in the boom years was also the most conservative. Aspects of Irish culture were commodified as never before in boybands, popular women's fiction and Irish dancing shows. At least the first two of those, however, tended to be peculiarly archaic. The Boyzones and Westlifes were little more than the Irish showbands of the 1960s, scrubbed up, slicked down and without the cumbersome need to play instruments or be particularly good at music. The popular fiction writers who sold vast numbers of books in shiny covers around the world were of very mixed quality, but in broad terms their work derived (at worst) from jazzed-up Mills and Boon and (at best) from the Irish short-story tradition of the 1930s. In both cases, the trick was to package and market aspects of pre-Celtic Tiger Irish culture as globalised commodities, not to actually respond in any real way to contemporary Ireland.

One of the real markers of this was sex. It is a lavish understatement to say that Irish sexual mores changed in the 1990s. Yet, while the end of the Franco era in Spain, which produced a surge of sexual energy in a previously repressed Catholic country, gave the world Pedro Almódovar and Penélope Cruz, the breaking of Ireland's sexual Berlin wall gave the world Boyzone. What the boybands and much of the chicklit shared was a strangely antiseptic, coy sexuality.
They were, after all, sometimes overlapping worlds: in Cecelia Ahern's
P.S. I Love You
, the heroine dreams of listening to ‘the soothing sounds of her favourite Westlife CD'. The same heroine has a ‘neat little chest' instead of breasts, and on being given a present by a friend giggles, ‘It's a battery operated . . . oh my God! Ciara! You naughty girl!'

The dance shows, however, did, in an odd way, respond to the changing nature of the Celtic Tiger - they got infinitely worse.
Riverdance
, which created the genre and became the most commercially successful Irish cultural export of all time, was actually a highly sophisticated piece of work. It created and enacted a myth that really did capture something about the way Irish people hoped to see themselves in the 1990s. It took a traditional and rather despised form - Irish dancing - and injected it with the steroids of sex, speed, Irish-American optimism and fake tan. But it was a genuine synthesis of traditional forms and music (composed and performed by people who really understood and valued it) on the one hand and Broadway pizzazz on the other.

And its narrative was actually the nearest thing the first phase of the Celtic Tiger created to a myth of itself. It played out a story of globalisation (Irish dancing evolving in the mists of time, being taken to America by emigrants, fusing with other cultures, and then, by implication, returning on the winged feet of Michael Flatley and Jean Butler) that was also a comforting narrative of cyclical continuity. What was coming to Ireland now was simply what had left it before. Life in a multicultural society wasn't a threat to tradition, but an enhancement of it. Along with the spectacle and the showbiz,
Riverdance
was a statement about how it was possible to be Irish in the twenty-first century.

If
Riverdance
was the great mythic spectacle of the first
phase of the Irish boom, before it became a bubble, the characteristic spectacle of the second part, appropriately enough, was Michael Flatley's 2005 show
The Celtic Tiger
. In its precisely calibrated mixture of stupidity and lavishness, it was the perfect show for a society that had more money than sense.

The Celtic Tiger
broadly replayed the narrative of
Riverdance
, from the Celtic mists of time to American emigration to cultural fusion to triumphant transatlantic return. But this time it was not a broad metaphor for the globalisation of Irish culture, but quite specifically the unfolding in dance, song and spectacle of the Celtic Tiger itself. The tiger was now the prime emblem of Ireland - two huge, Disneyfied tiger faces flanked the screens and one of the climactic dances featured slinky women in tiger-striped costumes crawling, pawing and rubbing themselves in ecstasy (house prices must have been up again) as if they were escapees from a porn remake of
Cats
.

The extravagant ludicrousness of
The Celtic Tiger
did not make it any less authentic an expression of its subject matter. Indeed it probably made it more so. One of the fascinations of the show was its high kitsch presentation of Irish history as a pure pastiche in which whole eras melt into each other. Thus, it began with Flatley dressed presumably as a Celtic warrior but actually as a cross between a particularly louche Roman general (Caligula playing at soldiers perhaps) and Elvis Presley in Las Vegas. All Irish history is sweet - up to a point. Devout monks dervish-dance with lurid temptresses, with nary a word about the corruptions of the flesh. Horny-headed Vikings dance chastely with Irish maidens. An Irish Garden of Eden blossoms.

But then the chorus line of Brits invades, identifiable by
their red coats and powdered wigs, goose-stepping and robotic, like clockwork Nazis. They burn a thatched cottage. (The Irish maidens barely escape the fire, but, distressingly, the bottom three-quarters of their skirts have been consumed by the flames.) There is much writhing around to indicate the Famine. Father Michael Flatley enters in a nineteenth-century soutane intoning the Lord's Prayer. The Brits surround him and shoot him dead with their fingers. A man sings ‘The Four Green Fields' (a traditional nineteenth-century ballad written in the late 1960s). A boy playing, of all things, soccer is blown up by a British tank (presumably one of the little known nineteenth-century prototypes exclusively used for oppressing the Irish). Then Michael Flatley leads the 1916 Rising. It is not surprising that he wins, since the Brits are still in their redcoats and powdered wigs and are still using their fingers for guns. Everybody sings ‘A Nation Once Again'. Ireland is free and triumphant.