Enough is Enough: How to Build a New Republic by Fintan O’Toole – review
Sean O'Hagan | November 21st, 2010 at 12:02 am |
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Fintan O'Toole's manifesto for a new Ireland is radical and rooted in decency
In
Ship of Fools, published this time last year, the
Irish Times journalist Fintan O'Toole laid bare the causes of – and castigated those responsible for – Ireland's ongoing economic implosion. The book described in often mind-boggling detail the financial ineptitude, endemic corruption and barefaced greed that led to the collapse of the so-called Celtic Tiger economy.
Now, as Ireland grapples with the dreadful aftermath of that implosion, O'Toole has written a different kind of polemic, not just a prescription for recovery, but a kind of manifesto for a new republic based on the founding ideals of decency, fairness and the pursuit of the common good. In his introduction, he notes: "The twin towers of southern Irish identity – Catholicism and nationalism – were already teetering before the great boom began in 1995." The long sectarian war in Northern Ireland, together with the Republic's Europeanisation throughout the 1990s, seemed to have put paid to the dream of a united Ireland. At the same time, the storm of scandals that has rocked the Catholic church speeded the process of secularisation that began in the 1960s. "The Celtic Tiger wasn't just an economic ideology," O'Toole writes. "It was also a substitute identity. It was a new way of being that arrived just at the point when Catholicism and nationalism were not working any more."
At its basest, O'Toole notes, this hastily constructed and ill-defined identity was recklessly consumer-driven and manifested itself "in an arrogance towards the rest of the world" and "a wilful refusal of all ties of history and tradition". At its best, it denoted a break with the old, insular, parochial Ireland where the parish priest was as powerful – and as unaccountable – as the local politician. It also spoke, albeit too loudly and brashly, of a new spirit of European Irishness defined by "optimism, confidence, a new openness and ease, an absence of fear".
All of that confidence has ebbed away. Ireland today seems a vulnerable and anxious place, its uncertain future tied to borrowing and bailouts, the sheer size of which set the head reeling. Suddenly, too, the spectre of the old, pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland looms large, a place defined not by hope and optimism but by high unemployment, poverty and mass emigration. Blessedly, Fintan O'Toole is not a doom-monger but a voice of restraint, reason and rigorous analysis. In a very real way, he is writing against the rising sense of anxiety and fear in Ireland today. If
Ship of Fools was an often angry obituary for the excesses and short-sightedness of the Celtic Tiger years, it was also underscored by a tentative optimism for a future in which Ireland might learn the hard way from its recent mistakes and excesses.
Enough is Enough lays out the ways in which that might happen, the chief one being, as the book's subtitle suggests, a reinvestment in the notion of what it means to be a republic.
In many ways, Ireland's recent political – and, indeed, business – culture echoed its older religious one, insofar as what O'Toole calls its "self-serving elites" looked out for themselves while remaining blithely unaware of – or, in many cases, actively opposed to – any notion of the greater good. O'Toole has already written in some depth about the croneyism and clientelism that bedevils Irish politics: the widespread and almost taken-for-granted granting of favours to family members, friends, associates and local supporters. Here, he returns to that theme to make a much bigger point.
"The culture of massive salaries", he writes, "was imported from the private sector into the public sector, in the process virtually destroying an idea that is essential to a republic – the notion that people in positions of leadership have the privilege of serving the public."
This betrayal of a defining political ideal is the core theme of O'Toole's book. He begins by demolishing the "five myths" of the Irish Republic, the two most topical being the "myth of representation" and the "myth of wealth". He then lays out what he calls the "five decencies" that might lead its citizens into a safer, fairer, less market-driven future: security, health, education, equality and citizenship. Like the late Tony Judt's book,
Ill Fares the Land,
Enough is Enough often seems to be saying that a fairer society can only be rebuilt on our collective rediscovery of progressive social democratic values. And, as with Judt's manifesto for a fairer Britain, O'Toole's reclaiming of the ideal of the republic seems at times as radical as a latterday socialist – or indeed communist – manifesto.
Its radicalism, though, only appears as such because we have drifted so far away from the belief in what O Toole calls "our collective capacity to create a country to be proud of". To this end, he calls for a return to "the dignity of citizenship" and an end to "the pursuit of private gain" at the expense of the public good. Only time will tell if the disgust and anger currently directed at those self-serving elites can transform itself into the kind of organised political action needed to reform Irish politics and society. As it stands, the new republic that O'Toole so brilliantly outlines seems more like an improbable, if not impossible, dream. But, then again, so did the old one.
