Pat Rabbitte is taking a big chance by making happiness an election issue, says Frank McNally
While he has wisely stopped short of claiming that a Fine Gael-Labour coalition will deliver it, that is certainly one implication of his latest poster slogan, which counterpoints Ireland's new wealth with the rhetorical question: "But are you happy?" As campaign pledges go, this is a serious upping of the ante.
I don't recall the issue of happiness featuring so explicitly in an election here before. Politicians are nervous about the word, with good reason. Even the infamous 1977 Fianna Fáil manifesto, which promised just about everything else, did not claim voters would be happy when Jack Lynch was back in charge. And although there has been a trend in recent years - especially among environmentalists - to question the reliance on purely material measures of progress, happiness still tends to be referred to only in coded terms.
"Quality of life" is the euphemism favoured by politicians and public bodies, probably because it sounds like something from a consultant's report. It sounds measurable, at any rate, and therefore lends itself to visible improvement - whereas the mere mention of the word "happiness" puts you on a slippery slope to philosophy and religion, and things that are well beyond a TD's constituency border.
Maybe, as Buddhists think, the only way to achieve happiness is stop yearning for anything, happiness included. Where would politicians be if that caught on? And, in political terms, Christianity is the ultimate opposition movement, arguing that the current world is just a vale of tears, but that paradise awaits us in the next one, provided we do the right thing between now and election day.
In fact, one London think-thank has attempted to measure human happiness, although its findings are controversial. The New Economics Foundation (NEF) uses consumer spending - the god of conventional economics - as one of its indicators. But it calculates Britain's overall well-being from 28 other factors too, including crime levels, air and water quality, and the break-up of families. The result is something that has been called the "Gross National Happiness" index.
The controversial bit is that, according to the foundation, Britain's GNH peaked 31 years ago, in 1976 - a year also notable in that country for rampant inflation, a level of economic mismanagement that brought intervention from the International Monetary Fund, and the birth of punk rock. Despite these suggestions to the contrary, happiness was apparently rife. It then plummeted during the 1980s, before rising again in the 1990s. But like the length of men's hair, it has never regained the levels it was at in the summer of '76.
Although the NEF's approach has been dismissed by many mainstream economists, its line of thought has been leaking into politics. Tony Blair speaks much about life quality these days. And David Cameron has turned Conservative orthodoxy on its head by saying politics should be about "not just what is good for putting money in people's pockets, but what is good for putting joy in people's hearts".
Maybe this is what emboldened Pat Rabbitte to launch his new slogan. In a somewhat older example of a left-wing thinker posing a rhetorical question on the subject, George Orwell once wrote an essay with the title: "Can Socialists be Happy?" His answer was no, more or less. But the problem didn't lie with socialists, he thought, so much as with the concept of happiness.
An atheist himself, Orwell pointed to the lack of decent literature about heaven as proof that even imaginative people couldn't conceive of such a perfect existence, or even want to. By contrast there was a respectable body of work about hell, from Dante to James Joyce. As for earth-bound utopias in literature, from Swift to H.G. Wells, they all came across as somewhat inhuman.
"Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness," concluded Orwell. Hedonism was self-defeating, he thought. What people really wanted, whether they knew it or not, was "struggle and self-sacrifice".
Orwell was not a politician, of course. And it would be a brave Labour leader who would now run for office with "Struggle and Self-sacrifice" as a slogan. But the successive social partnership agreements that have underpinned Ireland's boom suggest that Orwell had a point.
The titles of the various agreements have relaxed a bit since their national-emergency origins in 1987, when the Programme for National Recovery was launched. Even so, as late as 1993, we had the still grim-sounding Programme for Competitiveness and Work. As success grew, the title of the millennium agreement managed to play up the dramatic tension between "Prosperity" and "Fairness". And even the abstraction of the current deal, "Towards 1916", does not suggest a nation ready to chill out and enjoying its achievements. We remain a long way off from the "Don't Worry: Be Happy" agreement.
Getting back to Orwell for a moment, he thought that the big problem for socialists trying to persuade people of a better world was "the inability of mankind to imagine happiness except in the form of relief, either from effort or pain". A person with a toothache saw happiness as not having a toothache. Maybe in letting the h-word out of the bag, Mr Rabbitte is just offering short-term pain relief to those now on hospital waiting lists, or in traffic jams. But he's storing up problems for himself should he win a second term.