And oil of a sudden, the island of saints and scholars was no more

THE other papers presented to this conference on The Disappeared Civilisations deal with historic or pre-historic cultures which became extinct: Easter Island and the Inca empire in Peru among them.

By contrast, the paper which follows addresses the extinction of a nation, economy and culture which was powerful within living memory. Some of my older colleagues can even remember a point, towards the end of the 20th century, when Ireland was known as the Celtic Tiger.

Indeed, it’s timely that this conference is happening at this time.

Because exactly 50 years ago, this month, an event happened which effectively pulled together the factors leading to the death of the Celtic Tiger. That event was the announcement by the airline owned by the small state of Ireland that it was adding a substantial surcharge to its long-haul flights.

The national airline was known as Aer Lingus. We have been unable to identify the meaning of that title, and so must assume it was invented for branding purposes, like Haagen-Dazs ice-cream. Aer Lingus had opted to go for low fares. When oil hit the historic price of $75 a barrel, their surcharge initially excluded short-haul flights, but still frightened the thousands of Irish citizens with second homes in Spain, Portugal, Tuscany, Bulgaria and Turkey, who knew all flight prices would now rise. As happened. The number of trips they could take to those second homes dropped, as did rental income and, in due course, the value of the homes themselves. Owners found themselves paying mortgages with money they didn’t have to pay for houses they couldn’t get to.

While the meltdown at Sellafield was the most dramatic factor in the destruction of what had briefly been the showcase of Europe, it was, in reality, no more than the final nail in a complex coffin.

These pictures show deserted apartment blocks in Ireland’s once-great cities. Deserted. Empty. But the depopulation of the blocks had started before the accident at the nuclear reprocessing plant. All had been built without significant insulation and few had the capacity to burn solid fuel. Once oil became too expensive for domestic use, these supposedly “luxury” apartments became uninhabitable.

A common characteristic of dying civilisations is refusal to recognise the inevitable. In Ireland’s case, the country with the richest energy reserves in the whole of Europe refused to develop them until it was too late. Awash in wind and wave power, this nation could have been the power supply of the EU, supplying electricity at premium prices to other states.

Not to mention its capacity to grow fuel in the form of rape seed and other high-energy crops.

Analysing how such a resource-rich nation could sleepwalk into extinction suggests that, like other extinct states, Ireland became enmeshed in myth, ancestor-worship, displacement activity and their version of the Roman circus.

The most damaging myth was that of the Celtic Tiger. Tiger worship reached its apex in the first decade of the 21st century. Despite the closure of manufacturing plants and their transfer to China and India, Ireland convinced itself that it had something called a “knowledge economy” which would render it invincible to more serious job-erosion.

This, of course, was based on the racist assumption that no other nation could educate its people to the same levels as the Irish, so they could do difficult jobs like software development. Of course China and India did precisely that, speedily and on a vast scale. One has to wonder how so highly educated and insightful a people as the Irish could so delude themselves... another potent myth was the car. We know from archive material, most notably TV and magazine advertisements, that people were seduced by the fantasy of fast driving on empty roads. This in spite of the fact that the evidence was available, every day, to each and every one of them, that the empty road was a thing of the past, and that they rarely got to drive faster than 17 kilometres an hour.

They seem to have distracted themselves from the painful reality by bitter jokes, including the description of a major road called the M50 as “a car park”. In addition, desperate to utilise the power under the bonnets of the expensive vehicles, some of the young men of the nation went out at weekends on smaller roads, their courage boosted by alcohol (a preferred drug at that time), driving as fast as the bends in those smaller roads would allow, and sometimes a lot faster.

ANCESTOR worship took an unusual form in Ireland at the beginning of the 21st century. Where the Greeks, Romans and Scandinavians told and re-told sagas of sex, brutality and heroism, the Irish, at this time, set up tribunals, which provided a venue for a continuous morality play, allowing them to gaze, fascinated, at the evil deeds of politicians, bankers and police officers (known, quaintly, as “gardaí”) and convince themselves they were learning from each morality play. In fact, of course, they were diverting themselves from their own failures to anticipate and cope with the challenges of their own times.

Displacement activity, as we know, always flourishes in the dying years of a civilisation, and so the sculptors who built the great stone faces on Easter Island ended up, at the nadir of that culture, defacing and vandalising each other’s work.

Displacement activity in an Ireland which had run out of steam (quite apart from oil) took many forms. This picture shows one of them. The semi-naked figure on the bed is not dead, but participating in one of the many rituals which seems to have replaced the liturgy of the once-powerful Catholic Church in Ireland. The rounded objects on her back are stones.

Heated stones. Our understanding is that this woman would have paid large sums of money to the priests at a shrine called a “spa” to have hot stones rubbed on her skin for some magical supposed outcome.

Loss of faith was clearly an issue at all levels in this little country during its precipitate decline. Loss of religious faith was one aspect of it. Tired of being vilified and mocked, many Catholic congregations sold their assets before the final slump and invested them in Africa and South America, in locations where the hot-stone myth had not taken hold.

However, loss of faith affected other groups, too. The rulers of the nation, the politicians, experienced such an acute diminution in their belief in themselves that they handed over the platform at their annual gatherings to socially-concerned priests, professors of social capital and consumer broadcasters.

Study of Ireland, just before the final disaster, would suggest that sport played as big a part in keeping the populace happily unaware of the oncoming disaster as had the Roman games two millennia earlier.

My colleague is now demonstrating an artefact of the time. This historic item attracted loyalty, passion and emotion grossly disproportionate to its function.

It was known as the Munster jersey...