During the Celtic Tiger there was a sense that everyone was flush. There is a narrative now that things are getting better, and, more viscerally, there is a general feeling that this is the case. But looking around the capital, it’s a tale of two cities. You’re loaded or you’re broke. You’re on the way up or you’re on the way down.
Although we might look back on the Celtic Tiger years now and cringe, and rightly so – considering the boom was so ridiculously bombastic and utterly temporary and doomed – there was nonetheless a sense that it did lift some boats that might have languished by the pier unmoored.
But now, with cuts being made to the most vulnerable, there is no get-out clause. What we’re seeing at the moment is not actually growing prosperity, but a widening chasm between those who feel things are getting better and those who are seriously struggling.
Perhaps our awareness of this is heightened because the idea of splashing the cash feels even more vulgar than before. There is a post-bust guilt attached to partying like it’s 1999. Look around the city right now: poverty is everywhere. While the shops are full, there is also a brisk trade in heroin and other opiates in Dublin.
The Christmas lights are twinkling and the cocktail glasses are clinking, but there are endless streams of people begging.
Many of the population are trying, with great urgency, to think themselves out of recession. They want their nice things back: the dinners in restaurants without gasping at the bill, the takeaway coffees without adding up how much five lattes a week costs, the petrol paid for with a €50 note and not coins scrabbled together from the change jar.
Lust for comfort
There is a lust for comfort, a type of primal desire to recreate the warm fuzziness that consumerism bestows in the short term. We thrive on the superficial. And individualism – on which the previous boom was built – is all about “what can I have? What do I want? What’s good for me?”
The accusatory political pish-poshing directed at those who point out what’s actually wrong these days, typified by Pat Rabbitte’s bullish response to Fintan O’Toole’s columns, is reminiscent of Bertie Ahern’s “sitting on the sidelines, cribbing and moaning” remark, when he slammed anyone who had the audacity to raise the question of whether an economy based on everyone flogging crap houses to each other was perhaps not the best way to create infinite growth for evermore.
Like all minority parties in governments, Labour is aggrieved that people won’t get on board with its narrative. It must be very frustrating. Of course, Rabbitte is right to point out that there are some good things happening – in the words of that great barometer of Irish society, Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, “no shit, Sherlock,” – but it is not the job of journalists to cheerlead for governments.
The public has become a Simon Cowell to the Government's X Factor. Ministers stand up and perform, and we slate them. "Can't they see we're trying?" they must think in the wings backstage. "Don't they understand how good we are?"
If we could, as in The X Factor, we'd vote them off every week. I don't know how they keep performing.
We need to think about the consequences of some of us taking flight back towards the good times, while others are left behind. We don’t do consequences well in Ireland, focusing on the immediate benefit but rarely on its impact.
We facilitate American tech companies here, but think little about the tax they don’t have to pay and the benefits that payment would bring to our society and societies elsewhere.
We become lackeys for the US military because of the business it brings to a regional airport and the diplomatic high-fives that result, but we think little about the torture doled out by the CIA around the world.
And we most certainly didn’t think of the consequences in 2011 when thousands and thousands rushed out to vote for Fine Gael. I don’t know what people where smoking if they believed a party of neoliberals would somehow think of the little guy, but I’m pretty sure it’s being sold on the Liffey Boardwalk most days.
And now, apparently, we want those who have a good bit already to get some more, but we forget the inevitable consequence that those with little will rapidly have nothing.
In the gutter
I walk past the Gutter Bookshop in Temple Bar nearly every day. On its window is the Oscar Wilde quote, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”.
Late at night and early in the morning, in the gutter of its doorway sleep one or two homeless people, curled up as the temperature dips below zero and the hard, sharp rain seeps into their sleeping bags. Metres away, the cocktail glasses clink, laughter rings out in the cosy pubs, and what must be the torturous smell of bread and cakes wafts from the nearby bakery.
We are all in the gutter, but what on earth are we going to do about the people we’re condemning to stay there?