what reality proposes and the idea of God or providence. Mirroring the traditionalist/mod- erniser split, the culture has now divided into those who cling to simple pieties and those who reject any connection between Christianity and public culture, or indeed between tran- scendence and everyday existence. The public conversation is now avowedly agnostic, if not atheistic. The result is a sterile discussion, devoid of fundamental understandings, in which it is impossible to initiate any dialogue of starting over. Chastened by the raft of reve - lations about clerical abuse and its cover-up, the Irish Catholic Church contributes little or nothing to the discussion of such matters. The “young people of Ireland”, to whom
Pope John Paul II professed his love in 1979, are now the adults who contemplate the failure of their country to develop any collectively agreed fundamental understanding of itself. As a result, their own children may depart to, in the words of the incoming Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, “build the future of another country”. Ireland’s problems – its inability to provide for its own people, or even to perceive the abundance of gifts it has been given and make good use of them, its constant searching for some new dependency to enter into – all these are symptoms of an historical experience that remains to be dealt with at a cultural level.
D
eep in Irish culture is a lack of self- belief, indeed a self-hatred, inculcated in the centuries of dom- ination by our nearest neighbours,
and still festering in the Irish mind like a recalcitrant virus that sleeps and sleeps and then, every so often, erupts once again. This has rendered it impossible for Ireland to retrace the line of its own destiny, to reimagine after its long period of being dominated, how it might function in the world according to its own energies and ideas. The result is a society that lurches from extravagant self- regard to profound inferiority complex, which often seeks its answers in imitation of societies deemed more “modern” or “progressive”. One of the legacies of the Celtic Tiger is that its false prosperity served to suppress discussion about what a coherent and suc- cessful version of Irish society might look like. For more than a decade, it became impossible to argue with those who were able to lay claim to an unambiguous victory for a particular model of progress. By eliminating Irish attach- ments to tradition, nationalism, religiosity and singularity, they had succeeded in opening Ireland up to the outside world, and creating an economic model based on this openness. Few anticipated the extent of the vulner-
ability this would bring with it. The complacency of that period has recently been supplanted by an orgy of recrimination. This too can be interpreted as a desire to evade the fundamental. Perhaps the only major change arising from the recent general election will be that a line may now have been drawn in the sand to mark the start of a new period of Irish thought and endeavour.
■John Waters is a newspaper columnist and author.
12 March 2011 | THE TABLET | 15
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