Jack Power: Cause to celebrate Ireland's 50 years in EU
A photo taken on 22 January 1972 of the signing by Denmark, Ireland, Norway and the United Kingdom, of the Treaties of accession to the European Communities in Brussels. Picture: AFP via Getty Images
Fifty years ago, Ireland, along with Britain and Denmark, joined the European Economic Community (EEC), a freely-entered co-operative and the greatest steward of European peace and prosperity.
That leap of faith was as important as any, and far more important than most, in building a modern, confident Ireland capable of resolving its affairs with an energy, potential, and heft our forefathers could only imagine.
That seismic shift informed a recent Red C poll, which recorded that 88% of us believe Ireland should remain a member of the European Union (EU). A no-brainer choice confirmed by market research.
William Butler Yeats, an old-gold voice from the new-born Ireland, was right when he wrote Easter, 1916:
Were he alive at this turning of another year and to write those lines with the hindsight half a century of EU membership confers, he might have to consider changing just one word.
He might regard the beauty of our achievement as something more, something deeper than terrible. He would, no doubt, have a warts-and-all view of this Republic too, as anyone alive to the chastening lessons offered by Brexit euro scepticism-cum-hatred might.
With a choreography only the most Machiavellian — or the most fortunate — political handler might muster, Paschal Donohoe, recently re-elected president of the Eurogroup coven of eurozone finance ministers, was able to announce, just in time to mark the 50th anniversary, that the Government’s finances are on track for a record surplus — that’s worth repeating: A record Government surplus is anticipated.
Income tax, Vat, and corporation tax receipts all remain strong despite an uncertain outlook, unsettling inflation, tooth-and-claw globalisation, the odious Vladimir Putin, China’s neo-imperialism and autocracy, not to mention accelerating climate change.
The Government collected €77.5bn in the 11 months to the end of November, up €15.2bn, or 24.5% on the same period in 2021.
State coffers were boosted by almost €13.6bn in November alone, €2.2bn higher than the November 2021 total.
The fact that Gross National Product (GNP) per capita is, in real, in-your-pocket terms, today around 3.8 times the 1973 level underpins that tremendous advance.
EU membership is not the only driver of those unprecedented dividends, but when he spoke in the Dáil in 1973, offering the first financial statement after we joined the EEC, finance minister Richie Ryan recorded that the year’s public capital programme was set at £305m, a figure £56m higher than that allocated in 1972.
This 23% increase was new-found confidence writ large even if he, and the other 1973 minister for finance George Colley, spoke in billions as often as they, or even their bravest colleagues, spoke of enacting legislation to facilitate divorce or, a cause that even then dared not speak its name, marriage equality.
Those tax returns are a consequence of EU membership if not exclusively then primarily.
Another metric, one more nebulous, more soft power, was the December award to U2 of one of America’s most prestigious cultural laurels.
Formed just three years after we joined the EEC it is difficult to imagine that an earlier Irish band might have been so international, so border-free, yet so proudly and distinctly Irish that they might have been awarded this Kennedy Centre Honour.
It is hardly coincidental either that one of Ireland’s boldest, global cultural statements of the last half century — Riverdance — was made on a European stage. It has been seen by around 25m people around he world.
Mary O’Hara becomes Jessie Buckley. Long may that release, that uplifting honesty, that joie de vivre, prevail.
These achievements, tax records, and international cultural recognition can seem remote, almost irrelevant to the day-to-day Sisyphean trudge through a darkening world.
There are, however, myriad examples of how the energy of a united confederation of 750m or so diverse souls in 27 countries can have a positive, intimate impact in our lives and our families’ lives.
The uplifting, if already fading from living memory of Josie Airey is just one. In 1979 the Cork woman won a landmark case in the European Court of Human Rights forcing our uber-conservative, misogynistic government for a misogynistic society, to provide free legal aid to people contesting civil cases if they did not have the means to do so.
The ruling was significant as it gave — and gives — access to Europe’s legal systems to citizens in all countries under the wing of the European Court of Human Rights.
That former Waterford Crystal workers rescued some of their pension rights through EU courts is another example.
Had they been dependent on our government, the one that refused to enact an EU directive on insuring pensions through indifference, indolence, or something more sinister, they would be impoverished.
Had the EU not intervened it is probable that legal drift netting for endangered salmon would not have been banned in 2007, even if that protective legislation came a decade or two too late.
Despite farm-driven derogation after derogation on the early Nitrates Directive designed to protect water quality, it is not too hard either to imagine that EU intervention will ultimately insist on at least a review if not a reduction of the national herd.
German and Dutch taxpayers will eventually question why they should fund unsustainable, climate-destructive behaviours — especially as the Dutch are today reducing their herds.
Our family, like most in today’s connected, shiny, Prosecco-slurping Ireland, has a powerful, undeniable reason to celebrate EU membership, particularly the changed ambitions that membership introduced to our health and social services.
My sister Mary was 57 last month. She has been in full-time care since she was 12 and lives her life with all the physical, emotional, and mental disadvantages rubella can introduce during a pregnancy.
When the dreaded time to find a place in permanent care for her arrived, my parents were offered an option in east Cork.
They visited the facility then administered by the Southern Health Board. The home was so grim, so very inadequate, and so coldly Dickensian — it was subsequently condemned as a fire hazard — that my father cried quietly for several days.
To put his distress in context, he led the Garda’s national Serious Crime Division for several years, so he did not blink easily.
“If I held a prisoner in those conditions I’d be fired — and rightly so,” I remember him saying.
Mary did not go to east Cork and, hallelujah upon hallelujah, she and two of her peers today live in a beautiful, purpose-built home with dedicated, kind beyond comprehension, superstar staff.
The EU may not be hands-on responsible for that advance but, equally, it is impossible to imagine that great redemption — what else is it? — without the must-do-better goading from a Europe that generously provided funding for great structural and social progress.
Now our time to reciprocate has come. We must support less fortunate EU member states, particularly new members, no matter how loudly the charity-begins-at-home chorus demands.
That momentum is accelerating. Ireland has been a net contributor since 2013. Per capita Ireland is the second-largest contributor, with the average Irish citizen contributing €539 a year, more than double the average of €239.
Farming and food production seem to have enjoyed the lion’s share of the EEC/EU bounty. Before 1973 much of Irish farming was barely above subsistence level, rusty, rattling cars, draft-chilled, poor houses, and inadequate, outdated farming equipment and practices persisted.
All too often hand-me-down clothes and a genteel Gaelic poverty were the highwater mark of 50 years of independence — an independence unable to break a servant-master relationship with Britain.
That assessment, of course, depends on whether you regard farming as a business, or as a social engine to protect families and traditions challenged today as never before. That debate continues, often animated by entrenched cakeism.
Nevertheless, the EU’s common agricultural policy supports almost seven million beneficiaries at a cost just north of €60bn a year, a tremendous sum that must colour the sector’s cheap-food argument.
Agriculture, in 1973, accounted for 18% of Ireland’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and 40% of all exports.
Bord Bia record that Ireland’s food, drink, and horticulture exports increased to a record €13.8bn last year, despite Covid and Brexit. We exported the equivalent of almost €37m in of food or drink every day last year to more than 180 countries.
Ireland exports about 90% of its food and drink production, though we absorb 100% of the environmental impact. The dairy sector, worth more than €5bn last year, remains the largest element.
Teagasc records that the average dairy farm income in 2021 was €98,745, an increase of 25% on 2020. Tillage farms earned €57,939, an increase of 74% on the 2020 level.
Eurostat figures show Ireland reflects this through the fourth highest average land price in the EU, at €25,724/ha. Among EU member states for which data is available, the Netherlands topped the table, with an average of €69,632/ha in 2019 for arable land.
The average wage in the general economy, according to the CSO, was just under €45,000 last year.
As Mary Chapin Carpenter said: "The stars might lie but the numbers never do."
EU membership and growth in markets outside Europe facilitated by EU trade deals, has been a spectacular success for the farm families and businesses in a position to take advantage of those great opportunities.
However, it would further tarnish an already shabby legacy if the environmental impact, especially since milk quotas were lifted in 2015, was not recognised and ameliorated.
The tremendous loss of biodiversity, habitat, bird, and insect life, and the relentless assault on water quality recorded in increasingly desperate terms by the Environmental Protection Agency every year, are consequences of our great leap forward. How this Faustian pact might be broken remains to be seen but, one way or another, it must be.
Another Faustian pact agreed half a century ago has had a hugely detrimental impact on another traditional sector — commercial fishing and the communities who relied on it. Our fishermen seem painted into an ever-tightening corner, expected to survive on the crumbs from the quota table.
It is hard not to share their frustration as they watch the seas around this island fished while they languish in port. How that knot might be unravelled remains a mystery.
Our roles in or even commitment to European defence remain a mystery too. Our governments welcome cables that bring power from continental Europe to this island, but have no capacity of any kind to protect those links.
In an age when cyberattacks have replaced blitzkrieg, we cling to the coat tails of any protection the EU’s IT police might offer. We can barely say we have a functioning navy, and our army struggles to retain personnel at all ranks.
It is not necessary to look beyond the freezing citizens of Ukraine to understand where this complacency-cum-naivety leads.
It is an irony beyond comedy that so many of those happy to celebrate the idea that this republic was midwifed by violent insurrection, resist the idea of using the same methods to defend the lifestyle we have come to enjoy today — the luckiest Europeans in history, if not the luckiest humans in history.
The migrants trying to reach Europe want no more than to join that life. An old European parable – the boy who put his thumb in the leaking dyke – seems appropriate on this issue. Those poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free will reach Europe one way or another tomorrow if not today.
If EU solidarity on the issue can be achieved — easier said than done — then assimilation rather than crisis might just be possible.
Like farming, Ireland’s education system and culture have benefitted enormously from our EU membership. The number of third-level students has increased more than ten-fold since 1973 – a ratio far beyond our increase in population from 3m to 5m.
Opportunity is all but universal and the realisation of potential very real — as evidenced by so many multi-national corporations’ presence and contributions to this society.
The Erasmus programme, which over the last 35 years has funded over three million European students to spend part of their studies abroad, is an especially powerful way to open eyes and broaden horizons.
That process will accelerate as EU colleges use technology to reach students far beyond their national borders.
It is one of the vulnerabilities of a transnational confederation like the EU that championing it despite its very real democratic deficits, and its inability to dissuade rogue members from their excesses, all too often means reading stultifying spread sheets or trying to absorb the kind of deep auditing only the perverse enjoy.
Even as the generation who lived through the last days of our dependency on Britain — they even managed our currency albeit at arm’s length — enjoy retirement jaunts to Austrian resorts or Costa Del Cheapohoocho it is important to look beyond the material benefits of EU membership — my sister Mary would certainly hope, if she were able, that we might.
That hope stands even if, according to World Economics, Ireland has had the fastest-growing economy in the world over the decade ending in 2021.
It is important to take stock to try to imagine what might be were we still more Ballymagash than Brussels; to imagine our lives if a Maynooth consistory still had more sway in our lives or education than, say, Paschal Donohoe’s Eurogroup finance ministers.
That even using the phrase “Ballymagash” no longer raises the blushes it once did is a victory of sorts even if an incomplete one — just as the EU is an incomplete project. Ireland sends 13 very diverse MEPs to the European Parliament which has a post-Brexit membership of 705.
Unless they work with one coalition or another, they can have little enough impact. But they can.
The EU is far from perfect, no organisation of the scale and diversity can ever be, but if we are to better contribute to its success, we should be less indulgent, less tolerant of Brussels candidates who want to become MEP just because their Oireachtas careers have run into the sand. That charge is applicable to about half of our MEPs.
The EU, the biggest trading bloc in the world, has been a bulwark of European stability since 1945 and even if has not lifted as many people out of abject poverty as the Chinese Communist Party it has changed the lives of scores of millions of Europeans very much for the better without resorting to autocracy or terror.
Its support of our interests post-Brexit should not be forgotten either. It is reasonable to imagine similar support should Ireland be reunited through democratic means.
It would be a crime against our children and our grandchildren not to continue and enhance that process. Despite all the very real difficulties of the day we are living in a real Golden Age, one that demands attention and needs our constant nurturing.
To paraphrase: Participate or lose it — a call we dare not ignore as who knows where the next half century may lead. How wonderful it might be if it was as good, as fulfilling as the last 50 years.
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