By John Knox
I was surprised to find any Irish supporters at all at Sunday’s rugby international at Murrayfield. I thought they were all bankrupt. But they appeared to be already bouncing back from economic, political, religious and sporting collapse. And they saw their team outpace the Scots by 21 points to 18.
“Rugby comes first,” one Irishman told me. “You’ve got to get your priorities right.” The only economic concession he made to get to Murrayfield was to come by ferry and car rather than fly at £700 a ticket.
So as the votes were being counted in the emergency general election at home, thousands of Irish men and women were leaving the country to attend a rugby match. Others were leaving Ireland for good – 1,000 a week. Unemployment is running at 14 per cent.
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The Celtic tiger is definitely sick. The construction industry alone has lost 150,000 jobs in the last three years. One in ten mortgage-holders are in trouble. Government spending cuts are twice as deep as they are in the UK. The minimum wage has been reduced by 12 per cent. And the country owes 85 billion euros to the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. The new Irish government hopes to renegotiate the terms of the loan – and no doubt there will be some tweaking – but eventually it will have to be repaid. More fundamentally, a question remains over whether Ireland will be able to recast its political and economic institutions to prevent the cycle of boom-and-bust happening again. We are living at a time when many countries are having to recast their ruling arrangements… Libya, Egypt, Tunisia. Even the UK has embarked on modest change, with coalition and minority administrations becoming the norm in its various nations and districts. In each case, it seems to me, one of the central issues is how to avoid the dangers of cronyism. Fianna Fáil’s downfall was that it became too friendly with the bankers, the property developers and its own circle of supporters, such that it was unable to resist the pressures of the financial merry-go-round. Fine Gael has shown the same tendency in the past and it is only now returning to government because it was not holding the parcel when the music stopped. A strong Labour Party and the presence of left-wing independents may counter this centrifugal force, but we shall have to wait and see. In the Middle East we see what extreme examples of cronyism can do to a nation… reduce it to riot and revolution and economic stagnation. In Britain and the USA, and in institutions like the EU and the United Nations, the ruling elite can fail to see danger until it is too late. So the banking collapse caught them by surprise. Oil prices and climate change threaten to do the same. At Westminster, we saw what cronyism did over MPs’ expenses. The public schoolboys now running the government there are in danger of contracting the collective blindness and insularity which private clubs slowly develop. In Scotland, Labour was famous for its cronyism, in national politics and in local government. The SNP have so far avoided it, perhaps because they have not been in the majority in parliament or in most of the local councils. And perhaps too because they have not been in government for long. Cronyism is not altogether a bad thing, of course. It can be called comradeship or community. It makes governing easier. The people involved are usually genuinely trying to do their best for their country or town. They prefer to work with people they know, who have been reliable friends in the past. There is usually a common ethos and there is always a clearly understood plan of action. But the danger is that the cronying group can become detached from reality and no-one is prepared to rock the boat by pointing this out. The solution? The elite needs to have checks and balances to its power – in the form of a questioning parliament or rigorous consultation system. It needs to allow outsiders to join the elite. And, most important of all, it needs to constantly question itself and not take itself so seriously. The Irish are usually very good at this, and that is why they may recover from their present disasters more quickly than we suppose. They did it on Sunday on the rugby field; let’s see if they can do it in the economic and political fields as well.Find out about donating to The Caledonian Mercury
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