Book: After the Ball
Author: Fintan O'Toole
Price: New Island Books, ££7.99
Fintan O'Toole's Irish persona is more recognisable in France or Poland than in Britain: the public intellectual. He writes an influential column in the Irish Times, but he has also produced a stream of closely argued books on the state of the nation and a brilliant biography of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Along the way he has been dramaturge for the Abbey Theatre and for a while commuted to New York, where he was drama critic for the Daily News, and acquired an intimate fascination with the way Irish America recreates the Ould Sod in the New Jerusalem. Though a regular star of the New York Review of Books (in whose pages he has tried to talk sense into the Americans about Gerry Adams), he is based in Dublin once again, to the relief of many.
These admirers do not include the imitative neocon tendency in the Irish media, nor the see-no-evil spokesmen for the beleaguered Catholic church, nor the Fianna Fáil political establishment - whose malodorous involvement in the Irish beef scandals of the 1990s was forensically analysed in O'Toole's exposé Meanwhile Back at the Ranch. O'Toole's stance is firmly on the liberal left, though there is nothing knee-jerk about his responses; collections of essays such as Black Hole, Green Card and The Ex-Isle of Erin are full of unexpected and lyrical passages, often revolving around some surreal Irish experience or institution which O'Toole has scaled up into an epic symbol. Such phenomena might include the "Celtworld" theme park in County Waterford, or the vast halal meat-processing plant in Ballyhaunis whose Pakistani workforce doggedly play cricket instead of frequenting country and western nights at the Midas Nite Club. Out of the tacky and mundane, O'Toole's mordant humour makes what satirical mayhem he will. At its best, this is journalism to stand with George Orwell or HL Mencken.
His current target is contemporary Ireland and what it has made of itself. He has long been preoccupied by what the Dutch cultural historian Joep Leerssen christened Irish "auto-exoticism": our tendency to be indulgently fascinated by ourselves, and to analyse our historical and cultural condition as if it was something wonderfully "other" and outside our own control and responsibility. The Saxon oppressor, once a useful element in this process of distancing, is no longer so easily employed. Yet the syndrome has persisted into the era of the Supermick. The astonishing economic boom of the 1990s provided a rich potential for auto-exoticism. As EU funds flowed in, dotcom millions mounted up and the Celtic tiger became the darling of investment analysts in Business Week and even the Economist, a culture of self-congratulation emerged alongside. Ireland, once the land of saints, scholars, haemorrhaging emigration and stagnant economics, was at last Having It All.
After the Ball is a rebarbative attempt to analyse the other side of paradise. For those expecting O'Toole in his coruscating mode, avidly pursuing the eclectic complications of Irish kitsch, the new book's relentless marshalling of statistics and its rather bald presentation may be something of a disappointment. But he is deliberately matching style to function. The objective is to present the facts, as he sees them, beneath the glitz. What interests O'Toole is the uncounted cost of the transformation of Ireland since the 1970s. He is partly concerned here with the corruption that accompanied the boom (as I write this, the Irish Times reports that the settlements made by the dishonest wealthy to the Inland Revenue, often arising from revelations extracted via state tribunals, have reached E1bn). But he is above all concerned with what was happening to the "little people" who did pay taxes, during the years when the invulnerable rich flaunted their private jets and racehorses.
"They always have passion," gushed the blurb for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Awards at the height of the boom. "They have laser-focus, creativity and discipline." As O'Toole points out, it is ironic - to say the least - that this mawkish encomium was directed towards the uncharismatic figure of Denis O'Brien, who acquired a mobile phone licence from the state at a knockdown price under circumstances subsequently investigated by the Moriarty tribunal, sold it on at vast profit to British Telecom, trousered E290m, and departed to Portuguese tax exile in a private jet. In other areas of the boom economy, friends of the now-disgraced Taoiseach Charles Haughey had their paths smoothed by tax breaks (famously for stallion stud fees) and special-price land deals, while kickback payments poured into private accounts under the cover of "political donations" - a very privileged kind of auto-exoticism indeed.
O'Toole tries to do the sums. Measured by GDP, the Republic of Ireland was twice as rich in 2001 as in 1991, but his view is that this wealth rests on a spectacular and increasing inequality: poverty, he asserts, has been getting worse throughout, in terms of inner-city conditions, healthcare, and disposable income among the less privileged. Moreover, in a globalised economy where profits are repatriated, some of the statistics of wealth creation turn out to be illusory.
Much of his analysis rests on a jaundiced view of the free market economy, and a sceptical approach to how far Ireland approximates to the model. O'Toole argues, echoing other leftist sceptics like Kieran Allen, that the conditions for the Irish boom were created by the initiatives of interventionist government, a proactive trade union movement, and dirigiste economics. Certainly, the economy was deliberately opened up, with the wooing of international investment and a full commitment to Europeanisation that surprised even its long-standing advocates. There were also privatisation measures which paralleled some of the sleaziest things happening across the Irish sea: for example, the process by which Telecom Eireann became "Eircom," at the expense of many badly burned small investors. When the going looked good, everyone claimed the credit for turning the ship of state around from the becalmed 1970s - notably the chronically self-important Ray MacSharry, Fianna Fáil ex-minister of finance, and his morally bankrupt boss, CJ Haughey.
After their self-congratulatory accounts, it is a relief to read O'Toole's version of the Euroboom, which revolves around the way that massive EU handouts lured conservative rural Ireland into modernisation: "The EU offered modernity in a form that seemed at first to be purely material. It was modernity not as sex, secularism and confusion but as green pounds, mechanised milking parlours, beef and butter mountains and headage payments... Before it quite knew it, the conservative heartland had bought into a modernising project much more radical in its implications than anything it could have imagined."
For O'Toole, the crunch came with the Maastricht treaty vote of 1992, when the voices of conservative Catholicism, fearing the legal implications regarding abortion, called for a "no" vote - and the farmers ignored them: "When we look back over the last 30 years, the astonishing thing is not that there were sometimes bitter social tensions in the Republic but that they were contained with relative ease. With massive levels of unemployment and social exclusion, with a fierce struggle between secular and religious forces and with a violent conflict on its doorstep, Irish society should not have been able to accommodate huge economic and cultural changes. Without the EU's success in luring conservative Ireland into the modern project, it almost certainly could not have done so."
Much of this badly needs saying, and O'Toole says it as sharply as ever. But one does not have to be a chauvinist or a fat cat to see a lot of gold among the dross of the last convulsive quarter-century. It is surely not a bad thing that the Irish now own large chunks of Bond Street instead of digging its pavements. And while it may be true that the performance of Irish companies is often oversold, and many profits vanish overseas, there are sectors of Irish production (notably the food-producing companies, based on the revitalised agricultural economy) which have performed strongly and created real local employment. If it is true, as O'Toole says, that the Irish boom relies heavily and insecurely on information technology and biotechnology, this is hardly unique. (Ireland is also, incidentally, the top producer of Viagra.) His strictures on health provision, and the maintenance of privilege in access to social services, are well taken; but as he himself admits, his approach to indices of social protection is based on fairly crude criteria. The fact that the middle classes also do best out of higher education is, again, not unique to Ireland.
Above all, it is not quite clear where O'Toole stands on what EU membership has meant to Ireland (and for Irishness). I suspect he disapproves of many of its economic effects, but welcomes it in cultural and psychological terms. But not all of his judgements are completely convincing: I am not sure, for instance, that "nothing discourages enterprise more than the belief that the system is crooked and that rivals with an inside track already have it sewn up." In Ireland at least, a common reaction seems to have been a determination to buy into the inside track oneself, and the evidence is that many people did exactly that.
Further, many of the ambiguous outcomes of the breakneck years of boom might, and should, be seen against Ireland's lamentable performance in social protection, as well as economic performance, from the 1920s to the 1970s. For all the cracks that have opened up in a modernised society, early 21st century Ireland is a better place than mid-20th century Ireland to be young, or female, or non-Catholic, or gay, or non-white. If immigration has exposed a dark side of racism in Irish society, this is not new, and the recognition and denunciation of prejudice is in itself an advance. But O'Toole is right to inveigh against complacency. It is true above all that much of what the Irish have traditionally prided themselves upon has been threatened by the very conditions of boom and modernisation: high levels of elementary education, for instance, have been compromised by inner-city decline and rural demoralisation, to the extent where an OECD survey found that 23 per cent of those tested in Ireland did not have the literacy skills necessary to function in contemporary society.
A culture of clientelism, backhanders, and separate laws for rich and poor has been demonstrated with shocking clarity: some of O'Toole's sharpest demonstrations of inequity concern the treatment of tax fraudsters vis-a-vis those found fiddling social welfare. The big cheats, as he points out elsewhere, were the pillars of the community. During 1979-81, which covers only three years of the corrupt Haughey's lengthy ascendancy, the money that flowed from him and his friends into the Ansbacher tax evasion scheme, located in the Cayman Islands, escalated from E5m to E27m - a scam from which the great and good prudently averted their gaze.
Meanwhile the little people paid income tax at rates of up to 60 per cent, social spending was cut, thousands of beds were lost in public hospitals, and the Celtic Tiger cub stretched its muscles. In a typically well chosen metaphor, O'Toole starts one chapter by describing the recent refitting of the late Aristotle Onassis's yacht Christina O, with its whale-tusk bar, Limoges porcelain, bronze and mosaic swimming pool, new helipad, murals by de Chirico, staterooms and suites. "Why is this of the slightest interest to Irish taxpayers? Because they paid for it." A consortium of Irish millionaires (including Haughey's tax adviser) purchased the Monaco-based leviathan for $50m and outfitted it to the acme of ostentatious luxury, claiming all expenses against their Irish income for tax avoidance; according to O'Toole, the cost to the Irish exchequer was E25m. Whatever this means for the increasingly elusive definition of 21st-century Irishness remains to be seen, but Fintan O'Toole is more likely than anyone to be able to tell us.
