Finance & Famine . . . Why Ireland is ‘hungry’ for change

Finance & Famine

BY LAURA FRIEL

“I DON’T KNOW WHY, they must have just liked potatoes.” Speaking of what is known here as ‘The Great Hunger’ and elsewhere less accurately as ‘The Irish Famine’, a tour-guide expressed ignorant bewilderment.
Along with others, my daughter and I were in England on ‘The Shakespeare Trail’ and I can’t even remember why the potato blight came up. Aoife rolled her eyes and groaned. And that was that. We left.
Curiously, references to ‘The Irish Famine’ have accompanied a number of recent commentaries on the current economic crisis in the south of Ireland. Sadly, some betray the same kind of ignorance and arrogance that once explained away the mass starvation of the Irish people almost two centuries ago.
Nowadays the crop that failed was not potatoes but property, overwhelmed not by blight but rendered worthless by too much easy credit. Once again the people of Ireland are being characterised as ‘reaping their own dire harvest’.
Former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson, writing in The New York Times, evoked the Famine as a means of explaining the current financial crisis.
“Many countries were exposed to the potato blight of the 1840s. It was a global affliction, but Ireland was unusually dependent on this one crop.”
Likewise “many countries experienced a debt based property boom over the last decade fuelled in part by reckless cross-border lending”. But “Ireland again proved to have something of a monoculture, this is the origin of its extreme vulnerability and heralds an awful decade to come,” says Johnson.
British newspapers also took up the famine theme with The Guardian producing a series of striking images to drive the analogy home. A beached map of Ireland built from the bleached bones of the dead; an emaciated image of ‘Roisín’ on a banknote offering an “Irish unemployment guarantee”; a cartoon of 19th century paupers being pick-pocketed by 21st century politicians.
The subtext of all of this was mixed.
Some used the analogy to describe the extent of the financial calamity and the scale of economic hardship it portends for ordinary people; others to peddle the traditional racist undertone of the ‘feckless’ or ‘inexplicable’ or ‘irrational’ Irish who can’t be trusted to run their own affairs.
But regardless of the author, underpinning this is the notion that somehow both catastrophes had occurred because fundamental laws had been flouted, laws of nature then and the operation of financial markets now.
But, of course, The Great Hunger was not an act of nature. The failure of the potato crop might have been but people starved because of particular social relations: power relations between Britain and Ireland, between landowner and tenant farmer and civilian and soldier.
All of this came together in the atrocity of the British military being deployed to ‘escort’ tonnes of agricultural produce out of Ireland while its population was left to starve.
The current fiscal crisis is also underpinned by very specific political and economic relations. And if we are to understand and address that crisis, we need to begin by scrutinising those power relations at home and abroad. And the good news is many people are already doing just that.
Political commentator Fintan O’Toole and economist David McWilliams are two of many who are already questioning the current financial crisis in terms of underlying power relations. Significantly, both are advocating fundamental change.
Just as the decision to allow Ireland to starve in the 1840s was based on doctrine rather than reason, McWilliams argues the current response to the crisis imposed by the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund is based upon an ideological assault.
Centuries apart they may be but similar ideological constructs have been evoked to declare both catastrophes as not only ‘inevitable’ but also ‘corrective’.
Nineteenth century colonialism justified its actions in terms of the doctrine of ‘over population’. Speaking of famine-stricken Ireland, British ‘expert’ Thomas Malthus advocated “a great part of the population should be swept from the soil” in order to restore the “equilibrium”.
Twenty-first century neo-liberalism also sees ‘recovery’ as dependent upon a punitive corrective. We can see this in the analysis of many mainstream economists.
For them, wholesale hardship in the form of wage cuts, job losses, reduced welfare and higher prices are not only inescapable but also restorative. While contemporary economic austerity bears no comparison to mass starvation, poverty has its own casualties.
In his book Follow the Money, McWilliams rejects this notion of inevitable hardship as ideological and claims that rather than sound economic analysis, it is underpinned by a “fear of contamination” - the same kind of fear that once fuelled US military intervention in Vietnam.
In other words, Ireland must not be seen to be ‘getting away’ with anything in case it encourages other peripheral countries to act in their own interests rather than the interests of the powerful core.
Punishment and penitence must be Ireland’s lot for the foreseeable future. In the 1840s, the priority had been safeguarding the cash crop interests of landowners; now it is the monetary interests of bankers and bond holders.
And as if that isn’t bad enough, David McWilliams claims, the operation of the Irish state (whose first duty should be to champion the well-being of its own citizens) has been hijacked by powerful interest groups intent on protecting themselves at whatever cost to the Irish people as a whole.
McWilliams argues that those power relations must be transformed through a reassertion of Irish sovereignty which in turn would enable the state to take back control of its own currency and fiscal policy.
In doing so, Ireland would be empowered to address the current crisis differently, in ways already established as viable by other countries that have faced, and recovered from, similar economic catastrophes in the past.
Fintan O’Toole also identifies an inner circle that has hijacked the Irish state for its own purposes. In his book Enough is Enough, O’Toole argues the overcoming of this elite through the assertion of Irish sovereignty and participatory democracy is fundamental to economic recovery.
O’Toole urges the mass mobilisation of ordinary people as a means of transforming first the political and then the economic landscape of Ireland. Through this movement, O’Toole believes the people of Ireland will be empowered to build “a new Republic”.
O’Toole points out that “as the scale of the economic and banking crisis became clear” many people independently came to the idea of building a “Second Republic”.
“It was meant to convey the idea of a need to begin again, to build from scratch, a set of public and political institutions worthy of the allegiance of the Irish people,” says O’Toole.
But there is an obvious flaw in this notion of a “Second Republic”, argues O’Toole. “How could there be a Second Republic when there was no First Republic? The task is not to rediscover or reinvent a lost republic. It is to build something we have never had,” says O’Toole.
O’Toole argues the myth of a Republic has been underpinned by a range of other misperceptions, the most fundamental of which has been the myth of democracy and the myth of wealth.
O’Toole argues we need a “radical reappraisal of our understanding of what it means to be wealthy”. Ireland’s status as a wealthy country during the boom years of the Celtic Tiger was partly “a trick of statistics” which confused income with wealth.
“Real national wealth is accumulated over many years and manifests itself in fixed assets, public services, infrastructure and capacity for innovation. The Celtic Tiger did not make Ireland rich by any of these measures,” says O’Toole.
As part of the EU, Ireland was aligned to enormous wealth but “the Irish had more reason than most to be sceptical of crude notions of collective wealth”, suggests O’Toole.
“Ireland had previously been part of ‘the richest country in the world’. It was called the United Kingdom. At the time of the UK’s global ascendancy, Ireland experienced what was proportionately the deadliest famine in known world history,” says O’Toole.
There is, of course, also an obvious flaw in O’Toole’s analysis. For while O’Toole agrees with Connolly that partition results in a “carnival of reaction, North and South” his thinking around building a new, real Republic never strays past the border. McWilliams also presents a partial, partitionist view.
This is a weakness but not an insurmountable weakness because neither analysis is intrinsically antagonistic to a 32-county republic. Indeed, their internal logic lends itself to an all-Ireland resolution.
But the strength of both McWilliams’s and O’Toole’s contribution to what is emerging as a national debate, is their call for collective action. For us, the ordinary people of Ireland, North and South, the task ahead demands unity of purpose.
For some in the South, the North and its problems has more often than not seemed more trouble than it’s worth. For many more, the notion of the ‘the Republic’ as the preserve of the 26 Counties as conceded by the British is just part of the way it is.
For Sinn Féin, the division of Irish sovereignty remains a key factor in undermining the emergence of a true Republic and the empowerment of ordinary people on the island of Ireland.
In the North, Sinn Féin played, and continues to play, a significant role in the transformation of power relations, between Britain and Ireland, between republican, nationalist and unionist. It isn’t easy but we know it’s possible.