THESE ARE truly strange times in Italy. Every time you turn on the TV news, you are immediately hit with images of Grafton Street, the Liffey, the Ha’penny Bridge and many other familiar Dublin landmarks.
There was a time when “live” images from Ireland were few and far between and almost always concerned with a rugby or soccer match from Lansdowne Road. (Yes, I know it is now called the Aviva Stadium). One could get quite excited at seeing the familiar windy, wet, grey skies complete with spectators wrapped up as in readiness for another Scott expedition to the Antarctic. In recent years, too, the pleasure at not having to deal with the foul Irish weather was heightened by the fact that the teams in question, especially the rugby team, were performing astonishingly well.
For the past 10 days, however, the live images have obviously been focused on “La crisi Irlandese” (the Irish crisis). It is as if the country had been hit by a combination of the bubonic plague and a return of the Famine. The word, “Irlanda”, has been splattered all over the front pages too – “Irlanda, arriva il salvataggio UE”; “Aiuti all’Irlanda”; “Appello all’Irlanda – Alarme UE per il debito”, “Debito, Irlanda alle corde”. I do not even have to translate these titles, you all know too well just what they mean, namely that the Irish goose is not so much cooked as well and truly overcooked.
In recent days, friends and acquaintances have been on the phone to commiserate. “What has gone wrong?, Ireland was our model of hope”; “What happened, Ireland seemed to be doing so well”; “Have you still got a newspaper?” – these are just some of the frequently recurring observations.
For the last week or so, too, I have been doing the rounds of Italian TV and radio shows on programmes that almost never discuss an Irish issue in any depth. Every presenter asks the same question, “And that Celtic Tiger of yours?”. Obviously, there are no simple, glib answers to explain the “crisi Irlandese”.
So you find yourself coming up with the (not very original) observation that it is as if the Irish have been on a 10-year long bender and have just this morning woken up to a dreadful headache. For years, exiles such as myself have returned to Ireland to find that modest new houses in various nondescript areas of Dublin were valued at the same square metre value as apartments in New York’s Upper East side or houses on Amsterdam’s Herengracht canal or an apartment just off Piazza di Spagna in Rome.
Oh yeah? I had obviously missed something here. While I was asleep, Shamrock Rovers won the Champions League, Ireland became a permanent member of the UN Security Council and Bill Gates applied for (but was refused) Irish citizenship. For the wide-eyed returning exile, it was hard sometimes not to feel that the Irish might just have lost the run of themselves.
Yet, all is not lost. People like myself have spent the past week timidly pointing out to Italians that this is perhaps much more an Irish banking than an Irish economic/industrial crisis, while it has clearly been much prompted by bond market speculation against an economy which, after all, counts for less than 2 per cent of the euro zone.
More importantly, the Celtic Tiger may have come and gone, but he leaves behind him a much changed Ireland. For years now, Italians returning from Ireland have expressed to me their amazement at the infrastructural “look” of the country. The tourist can hardly fail to be impressed by the Luas, the Dublin Port Tunnel, Croke Park, the Aviva Stadium not to mention the new Terminal 2 at Dublin airport.
This might sound glib, but in a country where after 13 years, the modernisation of the 1960s built Reggio-Salerno autostrada in Campania and Calabria has still not been completed, it is something. After all, there are problems and problems.
The goodwill and sympathy for Ireland expressed by many Italians in recent days tends to help them forget other domestic realities. The Irish are now in trouble, but would they feel comfortable living in an economy in which organised crime accounts for 7-8 per cent of GDP, where a handsome port city like Naples cannot even manage to collect its garbage, where there is no such thing as the “dole” and where one of the world’s most famous archeological treasures, Pompeii, is literally falling to bits because of lack of routine maintenance?
Comparisons with Italy (or anywhere else) are obviously odious. Yet, just look at this – Freedom House puts Ireland 14th in the global ranks of media freedom, while Italy comes in at 72 (between India and Bulgaria); the OECD’s PISA project on school children’s reading ranks Ireland 5th and Italy 20th; in the QS world university rankings, TCD comes 52nd while the highest Italian university is Bologna at 172nd; Transparency International ranks Ireland 14th while Italy comes in at 69, between Rwanda and Georgia. Remember, too, Italy is a G8 country with the world’s seventh largest economy.
So maybe, dear old Ireland, all is not lost.