Myths of the past will continue to haunt us in the future

I lunched last Sunday with a gargantuan guzzler and bon viveur who announced his plans to take a sleeping pill tonight and retire early. New Year’s Eve is funny.

It vies with Saint Patrick’s Day for raucousness and public disorder. It divides the world into those who retreat, and those who go out. Living in earshot of Dublin’s Christ Church Cathedral, its pealing bells will herald the New Year.

I have nodded off and missed the whole thing once or twice, but opening doors, letting out the old, and in with the new, is tradition. New beginnings then, but no New Year’s resolutions for me.

New Year’s Eve, Christmas, birthdays and anniversaries are grappling hooks for life. You chug out of one and then another to get along. A seasonal rhythm to life is ancient. It’s overlain by constantly acquired new traditions.

What we imagine as venerable is often pastiche, only recently imported or improvised. Most of what passes for traditional Christmas, is gaudy, German and imported by the Prince Consort in the 19th century. Incidentally, his statue on the lawn outside Leinster House still stands, censorious with superiority. Good that he’s there, though.

Best that Irish lawmakers feel his disapproving German gaze on our native squalor. No need then for dense reports, less still for banking enquiries. Just one look up, at imported tradition bearing down, is sufficient.

I was in Germany for Christmas. It’s full of Christmas markets, kitsch, big music and nice people. The food is hugely underrated. Germans know how to graze on the good things in life. Portion control is a tradition that only starts west of the Rhine.

It’s all gargantuan and rich, but ultimately restrained. No, they won’t cross an empty street until the light turns green. And German reunification has physically recentred Europe for good. Until 1989 the Brandenburg Gate was beyond the wall that marked the edge of Western Europe. It wasn’t a wall many predicted would fall. Last week marked the 25th anniversary of Helmut Kohl’s walking through that Brandenburg Gate, reuniting Germany, and recentring Europe.

A united Germany, like Christmas here, is largely invented tradition. It never existed until 1870. It seemed it never would again after 1945. But there you are; another new tradition. Most modern European countries are only that; new traditions. France and Denmark have the greatest claims to unaltered antiquity.

Though France of course has very little by way of political continuity. After that, and certainly in Ireland, it’s all degrees of make-up, blood-soaked fairytales. Being a country is a little like living in Hollywood. You can be anyone you want in the movies.

The storylines, of course, have to be convincing. For a long time, our Irish story was convincing for most. Now nobody believes the story anymore. New tradition must be invented.

It’s no accident that a hundred years after tearing asunder European empires and replacing them with nation states, we are already over half a century into creating a new trans-national amalgamation, the European Union.

Immutable facts are usually rapidly moving objects. The EU, unlike the nation states whose incongruity it seeks to make sense of, has failed dismally to create any traditions. Having no lore, it lacks love. By contrast the hackneyed, half-manufactured myths of its constituent countries still stir nostalgia. There are limits to logic.

One new Irish tradition is Ryanair. Its recent attempts at love are on the comical side of cheesy. But it gets us where we want to go and allows an outing for our air of put-upon superiority. You know the “isn’t it disgraceful the way we are being treated?” blarney, when we know perfectly well it’s far from a jumbo jet we were reared.

Landing in Berlin on Christmas Eve, I thought a lot of the passengers were East Europeans, going onward to home in Poland or beyond. But like the returned immigrants home here for Christmas, home once an immutable fact, has become a moving object. The Irish story of emigration is being overtaken in its significance by immigration.

It is still a new story, only slowly taking root, and largely bereft yet of ostensible traditions. But the immigrant, not the emigrant, is the defining figure for this Irish generation. Just at the moment we stopped believing our own old Irish story, the back-story of what it means to be Irish is changing.

Small nation states carry the burden of myths which they fail to fulfil, but which live on to taunt them in an irreversibly globalised economy. Both our context abroad and our constituent parts at home are being radically internationalised in sync.

While Germany was celebrating the jubilee of Helmut Khol striding through the Brandenburg Gate, another public strider, the former chief executive of the National Treasury Management Agency, Michael Somers opined last week about Ireland’s turn off the road, into the ditch.

That he said, was when we “joined the German club, where we continued to play by our own rules”. “At times,” Somers said, “we seemed to think we had discovered a new economic theory that applied to Ireland and allowed us to do things that others could not do.” As Enda Kenny previously admitted in a moment of unvarnished frankness “Irish people simply went mad to borrow”.

It’s a new Irish tradition now, that there was unbearably light regulation then. This alas is mythological nonsense. Two weeks ago today the inquisitor of our economic collapse Peter Nyberg returned to categorically tell the Oireachtas Banking Inquiry that there was no lack of regulatory power. There was, however, an appalling lack of application.

The country was overrun with people crossing the road when the lights were red. The traffic cops were in the pub and policy makers were preparing for a “soft landing”. On Monday, newspaper reports about a civil service analysis that old age pension rates are unaffordable, prompted Joan Burton’s rapid response that they are “absolutely secure”. Only a heart of stone would not break laughing.

These shenanigans are our genuinely old traditions, more loved because of it. They are not improvised or imported. Of course, based on the current funding model, old age pension rates are entirely unaffordable. It is a mistake too, to cap water charges so ridiculously low for four years. They’ll have to increase the more, thereafter.

Funnier still that those computing the unaffordability of the state pension for others, and its need for reduction, never thought that the largesse of their own civil service pensions be changed from defined benefit to defined contribution.

Logic has its limits and tradition has its power. Having embraced all the schmaltz Germany can offer at Christmas, we can traipse past the Prince Consort, in and out of the banking inquiry for the New Year, all snouts up and bottoms out. For auld lang syne dear, for auld lang syne, we’ll take a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne.

Just as we stopped believing our own old story, the back-story of what it means to be Irish is changing