Ireland breathes sigh of relief because, like our children, we deserve better

DOWN in Shillelagh, near where Wicklow, Wexford and Carlow meet, there’s a small pile of stones in a field.

It’s high over the town. The stones have been fashioned into a tiny Marian grotto, and the grass around it is carefully tended by local people.

The stones are all that remain of the Shillelagh Union Workhouse. It’s hard to find out much about its history, although it is known it was “declared fit for the reception of paupers” in 1841, and that an “idiots’ ward” was added in time for the Famine. It didn’t close down until 1921, the year of our civil war. I visit the field often because my grandson, who lives nearby, likes to play there.

There is something about that pile of stones, and especially the stone plaque in front of it, that brings me up short.

There’s an inscription on the plaque, in memory of all who died in the workhouse between 1842 and 1921. It asks God to give them mercy and compassion, and to grant them a place of “light and refreshment, where no sorrow is, or pain, or sighing”.

It makes me pause every time I see it, and I read it again. I’ve searched for the origins of the phrase, and can’t find it (there’s something a bit like it in the Book of Revelations, but not the same).

It’s that word “sighing” — there’s something so strangely passive and accepting about it, and yet something so incredibly sad. These were institutions that still existed less than 100 years ago, where people who had nothing were forced to accept their lot. To live on charity, and to die with nothing.

I sometimes get really angry when I see that plaque, because I tend to think of it as a metaphor for the way we have been in the face of betrayal. Several generations of our children have been betrayed by failed public policy and collective and individual greed. A succession of politicians who fuelled an artificial boom with bad tax policies, for electoral purposes, were succeeded by a group who sold the country’s sovereignty behind closed doors.

Yes, we got rid of some of them when we got the chance. But we haven’t protested or demanded better. We haven’t taken to the streets or joined any movements for change. We’ve just become cynical, jaded, disillusioned. The anger we should have felt has been replaced by sighing. We don’t expect any better. Maybe we feel we don’t deserve any better.

Even when we voted in a new government, our expectations weren’t great. The pass had already been sold, to the extent that we had no control of our destiny.

The bank guarantee, followed by the bailout, had placed insurmountable obstacles in Ireland’s way, and allowed others to make all our decisions. And the collapse of the economy had created an enormous mountain of public debt, quite apart from the debts of our failed banks. What else is there to do, I suppose, but sigh?

Until last weekend. Last weekend was the first time in a great many years that the people we elected to represent us did so with pride and passion and skill.

At last, there was a sign of hope that we had elected leaders who knew how to conduct themselves in a crisis, and who knew what they had to deliver for their people. The outcome of the European Summit at the weekend was a triumph for Europe and a triumph for Ireland.

Because it meant that Europe has changed direction. Of course there will be many rearguard actions before the details of the agreement are worked out, and of course we won’t get 100% of what we’d like when it’s all over. But the pendulum has begun to swing decisively away from the one-sided austerity programme, and towards a much more balanced approach that combines necessary fiscal tightness with a structured commitment to growth and a European-wide mechanism for dealing with the banking crisis.

Ireland is at the heart of that change — we have influenced it, joined it, and stand to benefit significantly from it. And in achieving that position, Enda Kenny and Eamon Gilmore have, if you’ll pardon the cliché, punched way above their weight.

I guess it’s not too surprising that the reaction of many commentators (including in this newspaper) to the breakthrough at the weekend was as jaded and begrudging as usual. Some find it impossible to believe that there could have been any breakthrough at all, while more are absolutely horrified at the thought that Kenny and Gilmore should get any credit.

But they should. The shift in direction was clearly a masterstroke by some senior politicians in Europe, and Ireland’s specific inclusion at the heart of the new direction was an astonishing coup by Irish politicians. It was a piece of top class statecraft.

You have to have been at summits like last weekend’s to really appreciate what they’re like. They can be a bit like some of the interminable matches that featured in Euro 2012 — long stretches of dreary inaction, and then suddenly an explosive moment where instant decisions have to be made. Get them wrong and you look like an eejit. Get them right and you’ll be remembered like Torres or Balotelli.

I’ve been at a lot of European summits, including several where vital Irish interests were involved.

In one of them, at Corfu, Albert Reynolds was juggling the need to make progress on structural funds in the main meetings with an equally vital set of meetings “on the margin” with John Major. This was one of the most delicate moments of the peace process, and it was much easier to get it wrong than right.

Reynolds was being bombarded with official advice on all the issues, but he was largely ignoring the technical stuff and concentrating on the personal chemistry. It worked, but it wasn’t easy.

AND I was there during one interminable night in Brussels, when it was Dick Spring’s job to secure as much as possible of the €8bn that Reynolds claimed to have secured at an earlier summit in Edinburgh.

Again, it was a night of the most intense pressure, from all sides, and this time compounded by the need to stay fully on top of technical details. Our civil servants were magnificent that night, as they always are. But political calls had to be made if a deal was to be done, and as the night wore on it got lonelier for the politician at the centre of it. But he succeeded, by stubbornness, timing, and hard graft.

There’s no doubt in my mind that the same qualities were on display last week. The communiqué issued at the end of the meeting would have been ground-breaking without any reference to Ireland — and it could easily have happened.

But the ground had been carefully prepared by Eamon Gilmore and his department, and the Taoiseach employed considerable timing and skill to make sure Ireland’s crisis was addressed. And, as he said himself, hard graft. We’re going to need a lot more of that hard graft, and we’re lucky that Gilmore and Kenny have it in spades.