Suzanne Harrington: Happy St Patrick's Day - we've earned it

Suzanne Harrington: Ireland has changed radically in the middle-child period of history. Pic: Andrew Hasson

In historian Rutger Bregman’s 2017 manifesto for a better society, Utopia for Realists, he points out that despite the pebble dash of doom sprayed at us from every outlet, we – humanity– are in a better place than any other time in our history.

“In the past everything was worse,” he writes. “For 99% of the world’s history, 99% of humanity was poor, hungry, dirty, afraid, stupid, sick and ugly.” Today we have supermarkets, soap, schools, hospitals and lipstick. Living the dream, baby.

Obviously not in terms of climate crisis coupled with, writes Bregman “A culture that encourages us to spend money we don’t have on stuff we don’t need, in order to impress people we can’t stand. Then we go and cry on a therapist’s shoulder. That’s the dystopia we live in today.”

He is echoing Fight Club author Chuck Palanuik: “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history. No purpose or place. We have no Great War, No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives.”

So while we’ve eradicated starvation, smallpox, children up chimneys and a life expectancy now regarded as barely middle-aged, we’ve replaced it with an existential crisis borne of Ouroboros capitalism and what the late anthropologist David Graeber termed “bullshit jobs”: that is, jobs that don’t produce anything useful. Telemarketing, PR, corporate law, the people employed by airlines to calm you when they’ve lost your luggage. Flunkies, box-tickers, goons. Journalists, probably. Sorry if you’re on the list.

But hey. We have abundance beyond belief, comfort beyond our ancestors’ wildest dreams. We are at a point in history where the Brexit-induced absence of tomatoes in UK supermarkets is considered a crisis. A salad-related calamity. And in Ireland, if we zoom out from the immediate gloom of gas bills and interest rates, our past three or four decades of progress gleams like polished emerald. 

A country unrecognisable from its very recent past, where misogyny was enshrined in law, children were bought and sold, hypocrisy and acquired blindness to truth a specialist Irish skill. We were gold medallists at under-rug-sweeping. Experts in doublethink. Not anymore.

Since the 1980s, our social regeneration has progressed with fast-forward speed. We’ve gone from an impoverished theocracy controlled by a network of unelected clerics to a small country with some of the best equality legislation in the world. From a place where you couldn’t buy a condom to the fourth state in the world where you can gender self-identify. 

From Joyce and Beckett to Normal People, Derry Girls, Fontaines DC, Banshees of Inisherin, An Cailín Ciúin. The best golf and rugby players, if that’s your thing. We have given the world two blockbuster holidays celebrated globally by millions – Halloween and St Patrick’s Day. 

On Friday, everywhere, the world will be celebrating with us, as our nearest non-EU neighbours fight over tomatoes and descend into fascist rhetoric. Go us. And happy St Patricks Day – we’ve earned it.