Making Ireland Unlovable

A Call to Irish Historians

I am writing this in April 2010 to draw the attention of Irish historians to an Irish phenomenon of recent times which they have so far not researched and recorded. Because it is a phenomenon of a kind not normally to be expected in a liberal-democratic state, it might continue to escape their attention.

Our historians know well that, from the last two decades of the nineteenth century to 1916 and beyond, certain Irish individuals and organisations created an Irish identity that the Irish increasingly loved; and that out of this growing love the Revolution sprang. They have recorded the names, and the love-inducing deeds and words, of the individuals and organisations in question.

That collective self-love was possible because, as a result of those creative actions, the Ireland of the day possessed again, for the first time in many centuries, a coherent identity among the nations. Its past was as the nationalist historical narrative told it. Anciently, it had owned its entire land in freedom; spoken and written its own language; was illustrious for its learning and art and saints and missionaries. Then for long centuries it was blocked by an external intrusion against which it struggled repeatedly, and under which it suffered much and in great part abandoned its native ways and language. Always since St Patrick a Christian people, it had remained even in the centuries of adversity and persecution staunchly Catholic. Characterised now by a largely agricultural economy and rural ways and culture, it was increasingly repossessing things previously lost—its land, native language and native field sports. Increasingly, too, it was resolute in its struggle for political freedom; and as always its Catholic faith and morality were strong.

The new, independent Irish state, and almost its entire mass media, promoted something close to this composite Irish identity. With the addition of heroes and events drawn from the Revolution and of achievements of the Literary Revival, Ireland in this guise remained loved by the Irish, albeit with less motivating force, until the 1950s.

As with any national identity, that Irish one would have with time evolved and changed. It was itself far from the image in which the Irish had last seen and loved Ireland, which in those days they called Éire. The economic and intellectual paralysis, and the heavy emigration, that characterised the 1950s suggested that an invigorating renewal of the nation's idea of itself—one that would reflect new circumstances and generate them—was urgently due. New circumstances flowing from Seán Lemass's new departures, and from the innovations of the Second Vatican Council, suggested forms that such a revision might take. Most of the nation now had its own sovereign republic. So in the normal course of events, that new, updated Irish identity, like the one it would replace, would be shaped by realities present in the nation and by new ideas and actions sprung from them. Useful elements arriving from outside would be reworked and fitted in by Irish minds and feelings. But that, as it turned out, was not to be.

I come now to the phenomenon that has been neither researched nor narrated by our historians. From the early 1960s onwards, an increasingly successful effort was made, first by some elements of the national mass media centred in Dublin, then by those media as a whole, to cancel piecemeal the established Irish identity, while replacing it with nothing. This offensive, as it might well be called, was propagating an imported, very alien ideology that had powerful foreign backers. Large and increasing sums of money underpinned it. By 1985 it had so progressed that in his book Memory Ireland, published in that year, an observant Australian wrote:

Ireland is not a nation, once again or ever, so the new story runs, but two nations; maybe several; it does not have its characteristic religion—or if it does, it ought not; it does not have its characteristic language, as anyone can see or hear; it has no particular race or ethnic integrity. Ireland is nothing—a no-thing—an interesting nothing, to be sure, composed of colourful parts, a nothing mosaic. It is advertising prose and Muzak.

That 'new story' that William Buckley heard and read was emanating from the Dublin media which had become the unchallengeable definer of Ireland's identity. Unchallengeable because who could hope to compete successfully with that unelected, wealthy and sovereign image-making power?

That same power has in recent months (I am writing in April 2010) brought its 'new story' to a chorused climax. The 'interesting' nothing of twenty-five years ago has become, a criminal, perversely stupid and disgusting one; in a word, a dystopia, a country unfit for human beings to live in. This barrage by printed word and cartoon, and broadcast sound and image, has been enacting the sort of overkill that was sometimes engaged in by aerial bomber fleets of the Allies towards the end of the Second World War, when they rebombed the rubble of a well-bombed city to drive victory home. And the resulting dystopic image of Ireland is being broadcast to our detriment around the world.

The build-up began when the worldwide economic recession made itself felt, in local forms and for local reasons—mainly in the banking, construction and fiscal sectors—in one of the world's richest countries, The climax these last months, as our local recession was showing signs of ending, has been a raging exposition of general rottenness of mind and morals in the Irish Republic and the Irish Catholic Church. On page after page of Dublin's newspapers, among the reports of murders and drug seizures—the suicides and self-mutilations are not reported—headlines large and small have been accusing stupidity, cover-up, corruption. It appears the dim-witted Irish people have used an ill-conceived political system to elect stupid selfish persons to govern them and no rescue is in sight. The adjective 'Irish', when qualifying a way of doing things or a cast of mind, is commonly given a negative connotation. Where 'in the Republic' would be the normal way of indicating where something has been or is the case, the contemptuous 'in this State' is substituted or a brusque 'here'. As for the Catholic Church of the majority, we are told that it has so discredited itself, by the cover-ups of child abuse cases over the past fifty years, that it finally and rightly belongs to the past.

The national broadcaster has been amazing civil citizens in their homes. On radio its main news programmes are mainly not news or elucidation but for the most part 'interviews' in the form of accusatory interrogations. (I discovered that one of my daughters calls the daily 'Morning Ireland' potpourri the 'We Hate Ireland' programme, but I would not single it out.) The station's employed correctors of the nation shout and bark at summoned holders of public office, repeatedly interrupting their attempted answers, zealous only to establish 'blame' and to extract 'apologies' and resignations. On television the main 'talk-shows' with audiences, having planted in the audience selected angry men and women, call on each of them in succession to continue the barrage about the awfulness of life in the rich and well-fed Republic of Ireland.

Part of that alleged awfulness is the Republic as a state – 'perversely constructed, dysfunctional, not deserving of the name “republic”'. But as the entire national media add themselves extra-constitutionally to the constitutional Opposition in assaulting the Government and calling for its replacement, and neither the Government nor its main component, the Fianna Fáil party, the State's largest, has a national media organ speaking for or supporting it, it would be more accurate to say that the Republic of Ireland has cancelled itself as a liberal democracy and resembles, with respect to its mass media, an inverted one-party state.

The evidence of this 50-year-old phenomenon, from its tentative beginnings in the 1960s to its present climax, is there in the archives of the national media for our historians to research. Their task and purpose would be to produce a structured account of its origins and development, together with an explanation of how its successive agents saw what they were doing. Obviously the reduction of a loved Irish identity to a hateful nothing is of equal historical importance to the construction of that same identity that nourished the Irish Revolution.

There is, as I said, some danger that Irish historians might continue to ignore it. Historians in dealing with the role of mass media in the affairs of a democracy tend to have regard only to particular influences of certain media, or of the mass media generally, in particular circumstances. A continuing purposeful influence of certain media, and all the more of the entire national media functioning for decades as a purposeful, extra-constitutional institution —could escape their notice.

I have lived through the entire phenomenon. I paid close attention to it in its early years, and subsequently noted some of its high moments. Many others who have been coeval with it since early adulthood are still around, including a fair number of the Dublin media managers and foot soldiers who were involved. So the research in the archives could be supplemented with many contemporary observations, anecdotes and explanations.

A curious thing worth noting is that the Republic of today is not the first Ireland that the Dublin media have pronounced unfit for self-respecting human beings to live in. Back in the 1970s when they had just about lost their ideological pluralism, and become univocal like the media of a Communist state or of any dictatorship, they were saying much the same about the Ireland of the years from Independence to 1960, which they called, for short, 'the de Valera era'. So in fact the hysterical message of recent months amounts to telling us that we have gone and disgraced ourselves again!

That negative verdict on the 'de Valera era' was pioneered by The Irish Times in the 1960s, as indeed that paper pioneered and led the entire new departure. At the time its new ideological line seemed a purely commercial decision. Struggling bravely since Independence to remain true to its Unionist past without remaining Unionist, its circulation had fallen to crisis point. Those were boom years in Ireland as in the West generally. In 'Swinging London', as it got called, a section of the mass media had become the standard bearer in Western Europe of the new consumerist liberalism that had won the support of state and business in the USA. (Strictly speaking, it was left liberalism, but its key contribution to the consumerist economy makes that word a more apt qualifier).

For The Irish Times in difficulty to adopt a tentative, junior-school version of this new liberalism, and to refocus the paper on the young Irish who were enjoying the boom, seemed to be a wise commercial decision, and proved so. Moreover, the renovated orientation towards London fitted with the paper's ideological inheritance.

Researchers will notice that a frequent exhortation of the Times in those years was that 'we must become outward-looking', and that in effect this meant outward-looking towards London. It was thus a remarkable giveaway of the paper's ingrained out-of-touchness with ordinary Irish reality—as if looking out and going out, including waves of emigration and a huge missionary movement to three distant continents, had not been massively engaged in by Irish people in the previous hundred years!

In 1961 Telefís Éireann began transmitting. The old Radio Éireann was replaced by RTÉ, which covered radio and television. Many bright young Irish people worked in the tv station, along with some English people in management positions who had experience in British television and took it as their model. Soon both RTÉ services were reflecting, if in milder terms—they had a wider public—the new ideological allegiance of The Irish Times . A relationship of leader and follower was established which lasts to this day.

Deserving of investigation is whether there was a background of political or other persuasion to the The Irish Times's decision to become a consumerist-liberal organ, and to the subsequent falling into line of the tv station. Certainly at the time, at the height of the Cold War, America wanted an ideological conformity on consumerist-liberal lines of its West European satellites. It was the ideal ideological tool for producing in face of the Communist East a tantalising display of prosperity. That would in turn generate in revenue and profit more money for armaments and the space race. And a display of consumerist liberalism in practice would confront the Communist indoctrination of the Soviet satellites with a way of life that seemed challengingly libertarian.

And it did in fact come to pass that consumerist liberalism, spearheaded in each nation-state by elements of the national media, gradually became the public orthodoxy in all the states of Western Europe. It became, to boot, the bureaucratic orthodoxy of the European Economic Community under its successive names in its successive guises. Given this ideology's bold rejection and replacement of many key European and Christian rules for living, as well as its utopianism, it also constituted in effect the West's counterpart to the Soviet Communist ideological experiment.

In this broad context it is evident that the introduction and preaching of consumerist-liberal doctrine in Dublin in the 1960s was a small and marginal item. If it had not been initiated by The Irish Times it would have happened somehow; imperial requirement and force majeure were at work. But given that it was part of an ideological offensive that had powerful backing, it was for Ireland no small matter. It was an intrusion as alien to the nation's established way of life and values, and as intrinsically hostile to and subversive of these, as was the contemporary intrusion and preaching of Communist doctrine in, say, Romania.

Consider. The consumerist-liberal vision of the good life was a godless, democratic fraternity of individuals equal before the law, in which men, priests, religious, teachers, parents and the aged would be deprived of their traditional intrinsic authority; all adults including women and older teenagers would contribute financially to the economy; the unavoidably poor would be equipped by the state with buying power, the disabled facilitated in every possible way, education and health care made available to all, along with sex of all kinds by mutual consent of adults, with pornography legitimate, divorce available, and contraceptives and abortion readily obtainable. Integral to the scheme would be new rules about what to say, think or feel, and what not to, about certain groups and categories of individuals, and certain sacrosanct matters.

Clearly, the men and women who held this vision of the good life would find the way of life, values and behavioural rules of 1960s Ireland in many respects abhorrent. And they would perceive in the main sources of how the Republic was and saw itself—the nationalist historical narrative and aims, mass belief in Catholic teaching about supernatural reality, mass adherence to Catholic morality, and proud attachment to the Irish Constitution—major obstacles to the realisation of their vision there.

Necessarily, if they were to achieve that, the enterprise would begin with the capture of some suitable elements of the national mass media. Thus based, it would set about dishonouring and discrediting those pillars on which the established Irish identity rested, while persuading and recruiting Irish adherents. It would move on to the capture of the national media as a whole; the gradual replacement of the Catholic Church and the nationalist ideology as the principal moral influences on law-making; and the pushing through of amendments to the Constitution to facilitate the new rules. The ultimate goal would be the complete annulment of the previously existing notion and reality of Ireland. Then the liberal Correctorate, already established in the national mass media, the universities, and at key points in the civil service, would have a free hand to build a liberal Eden on the debris.

However, in the 1960s, most of that hoped-for course of things was far away. The new doctrine that was making its début in Dublin was, as I said, a tentative beginner's course., This was due both to the good sense of the evangelists and to the fact that the public had to be familiarised with the basics of the new vocabulary. Classical liberalism had been a tacit shaper of Irish nationalist politics since O'Connell's day and was a central element of Bunreacht na hÉireann. It was tinged with Catholicism as the British liberalism from which it was derived had been tinged with Dissenter Protestantism. But having been a tacit presence before the 1960s, 'liberal' was not a current word in Irish ideological discourse; and anyhow this new liberalism was very different from the old. So it was now necessary to get across that 'liberal' meant good and liberating, and was a synonym of 'enlightened'. Its opposite was 'conservative', which meant in effect, not impervious to change, but hostile to the changes which the liberals were urging and therefore bad. So 'change'. meaning change in this sense, was clanged out like a bell; and the Irish—who had abandoned more of their native culture than any other European nation, and who had taken to aeroplanes and television, and their women to the mini-skirt, like fish to water—were pronounced a pathologically 'conservative' people.

Actually much of the basic verbal pedagogy was done in terms of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which had a 'liberal' wing to be supported, as opposed to the 'conservatives' who were to be rejected. This allowed references to the supposedly 'Irish Catholic' view of sex as intrinsically sinful or dirty, an attitude which the good liberal doctrine of the Council would surely get rid of. It was in this context that The Irish Times began to capture as its special people the new-rich Catholics among the Protestants of South Dublin, who wanted to feel that they were a cut above the rest of the Catholic Irish. No worry to them that their favourite paper and RTÉ gave a drubbing to that pillar of Catholic and nationalist Ireland, the Christian Brothers. They sent their sons to classier schools.

When did we begin to hear 'rural Ireland' used as a derogatory term for the Republic outside Dublin (strictly South Dublin), where stuck-in-the mud rednecks were blocking the 'liberal agenda'? The national television station had for a time on weekdays a programme featuring news items from around the Republic. Its nickname among the studio boys and girls who made it was 'Redneck Round-up'. I think those things were later, probably in the 1970s.

In the 1960s I cut two snippets from Irish Times editorials. Both struck me because, while in form they purported to be descriptions of the current young generation, they were in fact exhortations or instructions. In the one I quote first, I was struck also, amid the general promise of glamour at hand, by the coded reference to 'coffee-skinned girls'.

The Christian modesty and chastity of most Irish girls was a block in the way of the consumerist programme. Media advertisements that progressively unclothed women were a help towards removing it. But a hint that the colleens had dangerous foreign competition at hand in Dublin might jolt them to their senses. The following is from an editorial of 13 January 1966:

Young people want things in a hurry, and want to forget the past ....The young man sees himself appearing in the pages of Paris Match or Life magazines....Without any trammel of the past, whether Protestant/Catholic or Separatist/ex-Unionist, the differentials are disappearing in our country. Our young people want to forget. Boys in Dublin gravitate to coffee-skinned girls....The past is not only being forgotten by the young, it is being buried with great relish and even with disdain.

My second snippet illustrates how historical revisionism—in effect the ideological undermining and replacement of the nationalist narrative—was popping its head up before the 70s when it became rampant. It is from an Irish Times editorial of 21 October 1965.

Young people of today are, in their own phrase, tough-minded.... Young people coming up, no matter what allegiance their fathers had, can look at the evolution of other countries from the British Commonwealth and wonder honestly if 1916 was really necessary. They can ask if, with Home Rule on the statute books, we would not today have a united Ireland, with or without some tenuous links to the British Commonwealth.

The fact that the 50th anniversary of 1916 was to be celebrated in 1966 was an embarrassment for the liberals. Telefís Éireann, where elements of the old Radio Eireann survived, dealt with the matter old-fashionedly in a fine tv drama.. The Times sidestepped by making the Rising more a Connolly than a Pearse affair; more about social welfare—a liberal concern—than national liberation.

On the face of it, it is not clear why our consumerist liberals have consistently been opposed to Irish nationalism. as such. To its inherited association with Catholicism and a historical narrative that made the Irish always good and the English always bad, well, obviously; but to Irish nationalism as such? Opposition to nationalism, let alone to American nationalism, had never been on the left-liberal programme in that ideology's mother country. Indeed, American liberals had even approved of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Their Irish brethren, after discrediting the inherited Irish nationalism, could have produced their own liberal version. In Romania the Communists made a strong Romanian nationalism into their best selling point. Castro learned the advantage of integrating Cuba's anti-Spanish nationalism into his Communism. In mainly Lutheran East Germany the Communist regime, after a kneejerk downgrading of Luther and removal of Frederick the Great's statue from the centre of Berlin, had second thoughts. They organised a big celebration of a Luther anniversary and restored Frederick to Unter den Linden.

The formal explanation seems to be that in the American imposition of consumerist liberalism on Western Europe, its imposition on the united-Europe enterprise was a key element. That enterprise was by nature anti-nationalist. Thus the liberals put in charge of it were necessarily opposed to nationalism in the member nations, and so, too, by esprit de corps , were and are their colleagues in those nations. A self-explanatory historical truth is verified again. The state-sponsored ideology of an imperial power is never anti-nationalist in that power's home nation, but always in its subordinate nations.

However, the special vehemence of Dublin liberal antagonism to Irish pride in and love for what Ireland is suggests that this ideological import has also served as an outlet and launch pad for Irish colonised self-hatred. In support of this diagnosis, researchers will find in no other liberal state that has been affected by the recent recession a metropolitan cabal using the national mass media to express and foment contempt for their nation's character and institutions. Foreigners living in Ireland, and Irish people who have lived on the Continent, remark that it is something the like of which they have not encountered elsewhere.. And given that, historically, the script of Irish colonised self-hatred was written by the Protestant Ascendancy, another dimension of Dublin liberalism is explained; namely, the fact that recurrently in its mass media during the past 40 or so years that Ascendancy seemed to be ludicrously repeating itself. 'Penal Laws next!' people joked.

Leave what currently goes for liberalism aside. While it is true that in its land of origin, the USA, it has long been an elitist ideology viewing 'most people'—the unenlightened white masses – with disdain, it is far from being a sufficient explanation of this Dublin-media phenomenon. In order to diagnose the fundamental passion at work in these few hundred Irish men and women and their vocal followers, the historian must call in the help of the sociologist and the psychologist. The passive element of their passion is a profound alienation from Ireland and the Irish as realities and as concepts; the active part is a corresponding dislike and contempt. Who are these unhappy people, and by what process did they come to self-select as employees of the the national mass media? Does their passion, beyond its rejection of the dystopia that is Ireland and the Irish, include some unexpressed utopian longing that is more concrete than non-Ireland?

A final, speculative thought about their extreme fury since this crisis in the banking and fiscal sectors hit our country. Does it arise from a combination of the knowledge that for a few years, while the Celtic Tiger boom lasted, they participated uncritically in its madness and for once found Ireland acceptable, and chagrin that Ireland, by returning to its normal hateful self, has robbed them of that possibility, definitively? Like damned souls, who having had a glimpse of heaven, were ushered back to hell?

I think I have made a sufficient case for a thorough exploration by Irish historians of how an offensive begun by a small portion of the Dublin mass media in the 1960s, and later engaged in for decades by all of them, replaced a loved Irish identity with a repugnant caricature, thereby rendering Ireland unlovable. I have made that case, sketchily, merely nibbling at the theme, leaving untouched by far the greater part of the 50-year offensive: the great onslaughts in the referendums of the 1980s to the early 2000s, and the story of how the Northern War, ecclesiastical cover-ups, and the banking crisis of 2008-10, were used by the assailants to finish the job. ¹

1. Added 5 November 2010. The 2010 campaign of the united Dublin media, as described above, continues to 'spread doom and gloom', as a popular reference to it has it. Meanwhile production and exports boom; the Republic still has the highest public-sector remuneration and the lowest taxes in the European Union; and more people are in employment than in 2005, three years before the recession began. At great cost to the State the disordered banking sector has been superficially repaired and a planned series of severe state budgets, is to repair the Government finances. Under the heading 'Ireland fifth best place to live' The Irish Times reports today that a just published United Nations Development Programme report 'ranks Ireland fifth in a quality-of-life index…'. 'Ireland retained its spot in the top five countries in the annual Human Development Index, with just Norway, Australia, New Zealand and the US rated as better places to call home, Despite the country's recent economic turmoil, Ireland remains unchanged since 2005, while Iceland , which suffered its own financial meltdown, slipped by ten places to 17 th … Ireland is among 43 countries which have a 'very high human development' ranking based on indicators such as life expectancy at birth, which stands at 80.3 years, gross national income per capita, which is $33,078, and average schooling totalling 11.6 years. In Zimbabwe, ranked last out of 169 on the list, life expectancy is just 47 years, average schooling stands at 7.2 years, and gross national income per capita is just 176 euros. Ireland ranks ahead of Canada in eighth place, Germany in 10 th place, and the UK which slipped to 26th...' 'A new report of the World Bank on Doing Business ranks Ireland ninth out of 183 countries as a good place to do business.