We can all play the blame game till kingdom come

WE don’t credit the Brits with ‘giving’ us our country; or, at least, giving us the idea of it.

Prior to the first English occupation of Ireland, this island was a patchwork of kingdoms, sometimes allied, sometimes warring: and it was when Johnny Foreigner arrived that the concepts of ‘Ireland’ and ‘Irishness’ took hold.

Because we are a small, gossipy country, the primary importance of the local has not gone away. Your neighbour, whom you know and trust, will always be preferable to some stranger in Dublin or Kerry, no matter how important they might be. So much of Irish culture, in song and literature, is rooted in place. We get homesick if we travel down the road.

The kingdoms of Ireland might not exist as political units anymore, but they live on as social and emotional constructs; the physical territory was defined by the local GAA club, and, before that, the church.

So it’s no surprise that the people of Cavan would rally around the Quinn family, and no surprise that people in metropolitan Dublin find this loyalty baffling: you have to be part of that community to understand it. Yet even in urban areas, similar thought patterns prevail.

To the urban mind, and especially the media, Sean Quinn took a disastrous punt on an ailing bank, then got up to all sorts of hi-jinx to avoid paying his debts. Pictures of Gucci-clad family members, and stories about high-priced cakes, only added to the juicy depiction of the Quinns as archetypal Celtic puppies: Rich, smug, morally lax and deserving of their place on the baddies’ list, along with bankers, property developers and most politicians — the people we can blame for the condition of the country.

But for supporters of his family, Sean Quinn is a victim in the same way as the rest of us. He simply made a bad investment, and is now being vilified for it. The same baddies — bankers, property developers, most politicians, this time aided by the media — are simply trying to divert the blame off themselves and onto the Quinns.

What’s common to both narratives is that someone else is always to blame. It’s not me or my neighbours, but those people in Dublin. Or the people who are richer than me. Or Europe. When Brian Lenihan famously opined that ‘we all partied’, the idea was dismissed as a pathetic justification. Suddenly, it seemed, no one partied: we were a country of economic innocents, all led to the slaughter. No one was even slightly guilty of hubris or greed.

And now it’s the vested interests who are stalling recovery: the unions, the public servants, the politicians, the media, the self-employed, multi-national corporations, farmers, students, middle-class parents. Ireland has more kingdoms than ever before.