The Trib (8 page)

It was a totally disproportionate response, an ugly, unfair and unprofessional method of controlling a crowd that the gardaí should be truly ashamed of. These kids have been mown down by the State and when they try to make their voices heard what happens? They are mown down by the police. Eventually, two people were charged with minor offences. That means that only 0.0066 per cent of those involved in the protest were accused of breaking the law.

The issues behind the protest have been lost in the melee. This was about free education as a practical issue and also as an ideal. The lack of foresight in thinking that these problems will be solved by ramping up registration fees is astounding. There seems to be no interest in assessing the possibilities of means testing, a loans system or examining the corrupt grants system. Just whack up registration fees and hope people pay; act bluntly now, think vaguely later - the philosophy of our government.

People talk about students having a sense of entitlement. But the sense of entitlement to a job and a disposable income is slightly less intolerable than the sense of entitlement the real trouble makers on Kildare Street have. Students aren't a demographic that enamour themselves to the rest of the population. Their middle-class accents permeate vox pops on RTÉ radio, with ‘likes' and ‘bullshits', ‘totallys' and ‘whatevers' greeted with eyerolls by those who apparently know better. Their enthusiasm tends to be squashed by cynicism.

I had arguments with people last week online and offline about the value of protest. ‘What's the point? Sure nothing is going to change,' some said. That attitude seems ridiculous to me. Isn't the reluctance to be involved in democracy – not expressing your opinions, lapsing on being a watchdog to this government – isn't it that lax attitude that made many of us (and not all, as we are told over and over again, but many) complicit in some of the economic terrors we are now facing? Plenty of people might slag off students for marching, but at least the students are doing something. What are you doing?

The failure of our democratic process to be fair and the failure of our politicians to communicate or listen has created a vacuum within which groups like Éirígí grow. Moderate voices need to be heard the loudest, and those are the voices of the students who didn't resort to scrappy behaviour. These are the people who will be shaping this country. Listen to them. We can't afford not to.

12 September 2010

L
ast night I attended another emigration ‘party' for two more friends of mine who are getting the hell out of Dodge and heading for the promised land of Sydney, where a sizeable number of this country's young people already reside. I've lost count of the number of farewells I've bid to friends and acquaintances this year, and indeed to my own brother who headed for Hong Kong. In almost all of these departures it seemed to me that those leaving this country were doing so in a fit of optimism, not desperation. But what for the poor eejits who stay?

John Waters grabbed a slice of youth culture pie last weekend when he hit the Electric Picnic festival. Writing in his column for the
Irish Times
, he despaired at the poor lost souls wandering around the site in Stradbally, Co Laois. ‘The young Irish at Electric Picnic were in a place where they had been led to believe they might find what they were searching for, but they could not find it. And so they were guzzling soul-poison in the hope of locating it.'

Before you run to the nearest bar and shout for two pints of soul-poison and a packet of crisps, it's important to consider Waters' interpretation of young people, and indeed his own morbid summaries of what is essentially something called ‘having a good time'. It's rather unfortunate that thousands of people attending a festival over the weekend had to suffer the projections of a man who sounds far more lost than any of them.

Waters' polemic seemed to stem from observations that because people younger than him were consuming alcohol and drugs in his midst, they were doing so because they had little else to consume in life. That's rubbish of course. Just because there isn't religion at a music bash (save for perhaps, the Dublin Gospel Choir on the main stage on Sunday morning) doesn't mean there's nothing to be enjoyed. Waters laments that those who were having fun at the festival, who were using a weekend in a field as an escape from the pessimism that hangs dense in the air, are somehow losing out on the greater meaning in this universe. As if a bunch of kids running from tent to tent to catch decent tunes and have a few beers in the process are some sort of empty vessels starved of meaning in life.

Personally, I'd rather be a godless hedonist than a god-riddled ascetic. There is generally lots of meaning at festivals: the music itself, dancing, random encounters, meeting up with old friends, sharing a laugh, letting one's hair down. Perhaps Waters would have been more suited keening outside the inflatable church at the other end of the festival and scorning those comely maidens who chose to dance past his confusing mental crossroads of muddled pious philosophising.

The commentariat make a living out of cannibalising youth culture and its trimmings and then complain that they are suffering from indigestion. Generation after generation give out about a spiritual deficit in those younger than them. But perhaps this is the first Irish generation who have purposely opted out of tormenting themselves by searching for some unattainable greater meaning and who have chosen instead just to live.

Religion and spirituality are crutches which many younger people have dispensed with in order to stand on their own two feet. The Archdiocese of Dublin used to deal with a few defections from the Catholic Church a year. Now there are so many, the Church has to come up with inventive administrative ways to make it seem as though it is stemming the tide.

As for spirituality, what of it? There is not much evidence of spirituality in the generation that makes up the establishment of this country. A generation of dishonest bankers, greedy developers and corrupt politicians. A generation that completely overstretched themselves, who spent recklessly, who applauded consumerism, who told their kids to take out giant mortgages and to study commerce, who bought second properties and pretended to be landlords, and who elected a series of inept governments.

This younger generation, who according to Waters are in the midst of a spiritual famine, are also attempting to forge a creative boom out of nothingness, and to reinvent community out of disaffection. Those in their teens, twenties and early thirties are bearing the brunt of this economic crisis through a combination of zero employment, emigration and negative equity, yet they are simultaneously the most active in attempting to restructure a country into one whose sole goal isn't profit-making.

Thousands have left. Those who stay should be allowed to have a good time without being told that their lives are empty. If John Waters feels lost or disconnected from this new reality, then it's because this isn't his country anymore. That Ireland is dead and gone. Thank God, or whoever.

5 December 2010

N
ow, more than ever, is a time for cool heads, but unfortunately there was precious little of that last week. The measured assessment of Ireland's situation by Ajai Chopra was a mini oasis of calm amidst the hysteria that dominated last week's debate.

The danger is that as the general election gets closer, the hysteria is going to get ratcheted up even further. We know Fine Gael and Labour are going to form the next government. But the divvy-up of cabinet seats has yet to be decided. And there are worrying signs both parties are looking to outdo each other in the anger stakes.

Describing Ireland as ‘banjaxed' may make for good headlines, but it's hardly what the country needs to hear from the government-in-waiting. Nor does it help public confidence when both main opposition parties try to claim that the interest rate being charged to Ireland is higher than that paid by Greece when they know full well that three-year money as accessed by the Greeks is far cheaper than the longer term funding secured by Ireland.

Eamon Gilmore's angry insistence that he will not be bound by the terms of the agreement with the EU/IMF will certainly be a crowd-pleaser. But it is the most pointless piece of political posturing since Fianna Fáil's opposition to the Anglo-Irish Agreement in the mid-1980s. The government in which he will soon be Tánaiste will have to be bound by it.

In the current climate, there are obvious short-term political benefits to the opposition's approach. But Fine Gael and Labour are in serious danger of creating unrealistic expectations that they have no hope of satisfying when they come to power. The reality is that the deal reached with the EU/IMF was as good as could have been achieved. We were all out of options – the whole world knew it. The idea, which has been put forward in recent days, that we should have told the IMF and, more particularly, our European allies, to get stuffed is astonishingly naïve.

The European Central Bank has been propping up the Irish banks for some time now with emergency liquidity to the tune of tens of billions of euro. The merest hint from the ECB that Ireland's intransigence might cause this to change means our goose was cooked. So let's get real.

It is understandable that people wanted bondholders – particularly the €4 billion worth of unguaranteed senior debt holders in Anglo Irish – to share the pain. But once the ECB vetoed that move, for fear of contagion across the entire euro-region, that was a clear non-runner. But that hasn't stopped the calls for the government to revoke the full guarantee of the banking system, convert bondholders into equity holders and – even more dramatically – restructure the national debt and default.

Nobody can say for definite that matters won't reach a stage where Ireland – along with a number of other peripheral Euro countries – won't be forced to default. But to do so now unilaterally would be an extraordinary gamble with limitless potential downsides.

The highly respected
Financial Times
columnist Wolfgang Munchau made the sovereign default argument in an article in the
Irish Times
last week. But his forecast as to what would happen once we did that was less than reassuring. ‘A default would cause havoc, no doubt, and would cut Ireland off from the capital markets for a while. But I would suspect that the shock would only be temporary,' he wrote.

That's great, so. Just as the real economy looks like it has finally stabilised – with exports and manufacturing increasing, unemployment edging down, the exchequer returns stabilised and even consumer confidence no longer dropping – we adopt a policy measure that will create ‘havoc'. But don't worry, the suspicion is that being locked out of the capital markets will only be temporary. Munchau went on to argue that ‘even Argentina was able to gain funding from investors a few years after its default'.