Who turned the lights off?

Tim Pat Coogan wrote in 1980 that “nationalism in Ireland is like electricity flowing through a covered flex. It is powerful and unseen until someone frays the covering”. In 2011, one might think that someone had turned the electricity off.

Certainly, nationalism has been a powerful force in Irish history, even if its bulwark was nearly always the underlying economic conditions. If nationalism, in Coogan’s analogy, was a covered flex, then in nineteenth and twentieth century Ireland what ‘frayed its covering’ was hard, measurable realities, like the sectarian skewing of the economy that caused the Protestant Wolfe Tone to write his famous pamphlet in defence of deprived Catholics and pledge his life to the United Irishman on a Belfast hill, or the agrarian sectarianism and mismanagement that inspired the Young Irelanders, the Fenians and the Home Rule movement. It was this movement that formed the wider backdrop to the Easter Rising in 1916, and in the 1960s the continuing socio-economic marginalisation of Catholics in the North – not lofty idealism or quixotic anti-imperialism – fomented renewed national sentiment throughout the country. At all times, history teaches us, Irish nationalism has been closely allied to the real world of ‘bread and butter’ politics, to use that awful phrase of the parish-pump county councillor. The national and the practical have ever been two sides of the one coin.

In recent decades, however, it has become fashionable to deride national sentiment as an anachronism in the modern, multicultural world. Middle-class liberal types point (with justification) to the horrors of twentieth-century Europe, the ever-present perils of jingoism, the theoreticians who have shown that nationalism relies on an ‘imagined community’ (as Benedict Anderson has termed it), a ‘horizontal comradeship’ of the misty-eyed and maudlin, the simple-minded and the dangerous. Nowhere in this reductio ad absurdum is any concept of how, for example, someone like Roger Casement could be a consummate internationalist while also harbouring a powerful, egalitarian and inclusive commitment to his nation. Middle class liberals are likely to scoff that nationalism, a form of ‘primitivism’, ‘tribalism’ or ‘atavism’, is simply no longer palpable or relevant in an increasingly cosmopolitan world, but then you’re very unlikely to bump into these people down the local in the middle of an Irish international soccer game.

One the one hand, this type of event illustrates unambiguously that national sentiment is still a very tangible and resilient force, something that brings people together for genuine outpourings of fraternal affection and pride. On the other, the recent presidential election, in which Free Statism came out of the woodwork and unceremoniously catapulted the Six Counties into orbit around a distant planet called ‘Not in my universe’, illustrated also why this nation is in such a mess.

Today, the Republic paid out €700 million to unsecured bondholders in Anglo Irish Bank (i.e. gamblers who lost their bet), at the behest of the European Central Bank. In January a further €1.2bn will be paid out. This, of course, is bonkers. The bondholders, a nebulous group of the filthy rich, from blue chip banks and corporations to pension funds, have no means of extracting the money from us and no right in law, morality, or common sense to get the money back. Today also, the first significant arrest in a long time in relation to the banking crisis took place. It would be wrong to speculate on this arrest – and the person arrested should be dealt with by the law rather than the media – but it is disturbing that, from a broader perspective, so little has so far been done to bring about justice in relation to our sorry fiscal state of affairs.

Now, if we had a functional level of communal, comradely sentiment in this country, or any liathróidí (that’s balls to all you post-nationalists), we’d be hopping mad that our country, our people, are paying severely for the mistakes of venal, self-serving elites both in Ireland and abroad. If we had Roger Casement’s kind of national sentiment, we’d stop worrying about how this will affect mé féin and start thinking more broadly about how the unprecedented austerity will affect the greater number of our compatriots. Nationalism – that dirty taboo – might help us get the monkey off our backs. Nationalism – of a modern, non-chauvinist, inclusive and progressive variety – could be our twelfth man at the twelfth hour.

The reason that Southerners are so blithe and callous about our abandonment of the North in its time of crisis is the same reason that we are so blithe and craven in our abandonment of our country’s present social and financial interests. The selfishness underlying both was intensified over the past decade; during the boom we built up a sort of sectionalism (typified by the trade union movement’s embrace of factional lobbying), in which all of us were encouraged to see ourselves as social units, shoved together arbitrarily, for the purpose of individual enrichment. As Thatcher put it: ‘there is no such thing as society’. This sort of anti-nationalism, or at its extreme, misanthropy, insulates us from the sort of fellow-feeling that might serve us well in this time of economic upheaval.

I was reminded of this recently while reading Justine Delaney Wilson’s excellent exposé of the drugs trade in Ireland, The High Society, in which she quotes from an interview with one of the shining social consciences of the past twenty years, former Mountjoy governor John Lonergan. In explaining how we have lost our way in relation to crime, Lonergan posits how rich and poor youths are treated differently in the courts:

‘Take two young people, just for example. If a young lad, eighteen or nineteen years old, gets into difficulty and he comes from a very deprived background, almost the first consideration is a term of detention or something. It’s almost as if the system is saying, “I’ll do you a favour, I’ll send you into the prison or into detention and you’ll be saved from this horrible existence that you have and the potential damage it might cause you by sending you to St Pat’s [a young offenders’ centre],” never thinking that a criminal conviction is going to be a huge disadvantage. The opposite psychology automatically kicks in when it’s a young lad from a privileged background. Every effort is made to stop him getting a conviction; the last thing we want to do is to give him a criminal conviction because look at the consequences for him: He can’t go to America, he won’t be able to do this and that. It’ll follow him around forever.’

The problem with a society that relies in the first on individualism, is that the individuals who have influence and power, and the ability to evade prosecution, are those who have money. 96 per cent of prisoners in Mountjoy are from the lowest socio-economic groups, not because 96 per cent of crime is committed by the most disadvantaged sections of society – and certainly (as illustrated by the banking crisis) not because the 96 per cent of the most damaging crime emanates from these sections – but emphatically because the richest sections have maintained an unfair advantage in terms of how crime, and how society, are measured. True patriotism is about measuring all members of society equally and not measuring those of any other society any less. True fraternity is about valuing the welfare of each citizen above any financial institution, and true nationalism, surely, is that sense of generosity and fellow-feeling which inspires our most valuable and admirable activities as a people. If this nationalism is, to return to Coogan, ‘electricity flowing through a covered flex’, then surely the injustices being meted out to the Irish people by faceless international markets should be, like imperialism and lardlordism and the other incendiary tyrannies of the past, the generator that will bring us to our senses once again and jolt a slumbering people once more.  If we fail to stick together in defiance of this injustice, then we may become truly post-nationalist, but we might become post-nation as well.