Money in a poor country and money in a rich country are two different things, writes Fintan O'Toole.
'In a rich country, money is a piece of paper with which you buy goods on the market. You are only a customer. Even a millionaire may purchase more but he remains a customer, nothing more. And in a poor country? In a poor country, money is a wonderful, thick hedge, dazzling and always blooming, which separates you from everything else. Through that hedge you do not see the creeping poverty, you do not smell the stench of misery, and you do not hear the voices of the human dregs. But at the same time you know that all of that exists, and you feel proud because of your hedge. You have money; that means you have wings. You are the bird of paradise that everyone admires.'
The words are those of a rich courtier in one of the last absolute monarchies, the regime of Emperor Haile Selassie in Ethiopia. After the fall of the autocracy in 1974, the great Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski interviewed the functionaries of the court for his magnificent book The Emperor. In this passage, one of the fallen nobles is explaining why it was so vitally important that the aristocracy be given regular transfusions of cash. Money was the water without which the hedge that separated them from the human dregs would shrivel and wither.
Reading this passage again recently, it struck me how well, and how weirdly, it illuminates contemporary Ireland. A voice from Ethiopia, where the gulf between rich and poor is absolute, ought not to resonate in a developed, prosperous western democracy. Yet this description of what money means is undeniably relevant to the feel of Ireland now. And it perhaps suggests one of the reasons why this place feels so strange.
This is, on the surface, a rich country. But the behaviour of people with money is that of rich people in a poor country. Many of them use money, not just to buy more stuff, but to form a thick hedge that protects their eyes, ears and noses from invasive realities. Those realities are not quite denied. Rather, as the courtier put it, the knowledge of their existence is a source of pride. So long as it is held at bay, poverty makes riches all the sweeter. After all, if there were no squalor, the ability to live well would not be such a mark of exceptional status.
Rather than calling Ireland a rich country, perhaps, we should instead say that it is a poor country with a lot of rich people. And a lot of people who are not rich but feel the need to pretend that they are by living way beyond their means. They are close enough to the hedge to be intensely aware of it and to imagine that they can slip through to the other side.
But they will never have that special something that the rich so clearly possess: the ability to get the State to play by their rules. Unlike the rich, they can't construct a political system that allows them to evade taxes and when outright fraud becomes unacceptable, to avoid them legally. They can't get the State to fund their hobbies, as the rich racehorse owners have arranged for the taxpayer to fund much of the prize-money for racing.
And they can't create a climate in which the Government does its best to keep the poor poor. Just consider what the McCreevy government is doing at the moment. (I know it is technically the Ahern government, but Bertie's position as head of government is analogous to the insipid and gradually disappearing froth that forms the head of a pint of Bass.) There is something almost psychotic about the way, as soon as cutbacks in State spending become necessary, the Government lashes into the most vulnerable. The speed and energy with which cuts in Community Employment Schemes, rent allowances, dietary allowances and back-to-education schemes are being implemented suggest that it is almost a relief to be able to take off the mask of consensus politics and get back to the great pleasures of kicking the poor.
It's not as if any of these measures actually save very much money, or are part of any coherent Government policy. The changes in the Back to Education Allowance, for example, make no financial or policy sense at all. At the moment, someone who has been on welfare for six months can go into a full-time college course and still claim their welfare payments. This is being changed to 15 months. But since the payments are being made anyway, why force people to stay on the dole for an extra nine months rather than doing something positive to better themselves? And when every State policy agency is talking about the need to allow people to move constantly between the workforce and education, why discourage people from upgrading their skills?
The only answer to these questions is sheer bloody-minded perversity. If these people can better themselves, they might get closer to the protective hedge that makes wealth in Ireland so deeply pleasurable. And this would risk the one thing that this Government finds unthinkable - making the rich unhappy. If the poor stopped being poor, after all, what would be the point of being rich?