End delusion, tackle underachievement

This week, most of us celebrated St Patrick’s Day with the usual Irish verve, with our devil-may-care indifference to the circumstances of our everyday reality. Over the coming days, we’ll do something similar, even if a shade or two more sombre, as we recall the Easter Rising of 1916.

There will be heartfelt expressions of reverence and gratitude for those men and women, who, we are assured, laid the foundation stones of this Republic. Soldiers will march, bands will play, and reasonable, if entirely predictable, speeches will be made. Great events will be re-enacted with an almost unshakeable belief that those events were the genesis of a free, independent, and decent country.

The alternative narrative — that 1916 led to almost a century of dominance by Fianna Fáil, who, for all the great good they did, all but destroyed the country nearly a decade ago and left a legacy of debt that will stymie this society for decades; that 1916 led to something very close to a Catholic theocracy of undisguised bigotry in which other voices were silenced; that 1916 sowed the seeds for 30 years of terror in the North — is hardly mentioned, much less given the kind of credence rational consideration would suggest it deserves.

That narrative would also reflect on how privilege, and a strong sense of permanent entitlement, have been fostered in sections of this society. It would also consider how conservatism, the culture of secrecy, and the absence of accountability in public life have created an unelected but all-powerful administrator class. This class is so embedded that it has become a barrier to progress. It is so very powerful that it need not worry unduly about those politicians, or, at least, those very few brave politicians, who might challenge it.

The examples are myriad — how the legal professions’ influence emasculated the Legal Services Bill; the pension apartheid ever closer to splitting this society in a dangerous way; the free-for-all health service so mismanaged, unaccountable, and out-of-control that it defies belief; the police force’s excoriation in a recent peer assessment; the housing crisis, of course, and, though this is not by any means a complete list, an education system creaking at the edges and struggling to cope with a changing world. All of these, and many more, weaknesses could only survive in a dysfunctional, unsure society, one without real confidence or vision — a society in the grip of an emotional stasis that prevents it comparing what is to what might be.

That dysfunction is at the root of the foolishness and dishonesty that allows some in Fine Gael, and others in Fianna Fáil, to suggest that the two parties are incompatible and could not govern together. This refusal is an affront to our democracy and ensures that none of the vested interest groups need fret, though they are obvious barriers to this being a better society. They can rest easy in their well-feathered beds, because rather than fight them, the people in a position to enforce real change are far happier fighting each other. Yes, we have many things to celebrate, but there is an awful lot we cannot yet be proud of. It is time to tackle stasis and underachievement in an uncompromising way.