From prosperity to austerity

A socio-cultural critique of the Celtic Tiger and its aftermath

Eamon Maher, Eugene Brien

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781526101471
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Examines the Celtic Tiger, the once much-vaunted Irish economic phenomenon, and the subsequent financial disaster, from a socio-cultural perspective

1

Crisis, what crisis? The Catholic Church during the Celtic Tiger years

Eamon Maher

Any book purporting to offer a socio-cultural critique of the Celtic Tiger cannot fail to deal with the thorny issue of Irish Catholicism. There is a commonly held belief that the Celtic Tiger hastened a wave of aggressive secularism that proved fatal to the hallowed status of organized religion in Ireland, and particularly to the majority faith, Roman Catholicism. However, such a perspective fails to recognize the steady decline in vocations to the priesthood from the beginning of the 1970s, a situation that could well have been the motivation for Pope John Paul’s visit to the island in 1979. As more challenges to the Church’s position on moral issues such as contraception, divorce and abortion came to the fore, and as the erstwhile deference to the Church and its priests dissipated, neo-liberal values began to take root. A more educated population was no longer willing to accept being dictated to on issues that they considered matters of individual conscience, and so there began a slow process of secularism. Charles Taylor’s take on such a development is interesting from an Irish perspective:

One understanding of secularity then is in terms of public spaces. These have been allegedly emptied of God, or any reference to ultimate reality. Or, taken from another side, as we function within various spheres of activity – economic, political, cultural, educational, professional, recreational – the norms and principles we follow, the deliberations we engage in, generally don’t refer us to God or to any religious beliefs; the considerations we act on are internal to the ‘rationality’ of each sphere – maximum gain within the economy, the greatest benefit to greatest number in the political area, and so on. This is in striking contrast to earlier periods, when Christian faith laid down authoritative prescriptions, often through the mouths of the clergy, which could not be easily ignored in any of these domains, such as the ban on usury, or the obligation to enforce orthodoxy. (Taylor 2007, p. 2)

During the Celtic Tiger years, the majority of Irish people were undeniably in favour of ‘maximum gain within the economy’, believing, mistakenly, that ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’, a maxim that fails to specify that it tends to lift the boats of a few to an inordinate degree while leaving the others firmly attached to their moorings. When it came to politics, there was a distinct tendency to espouse the ideal of ‘the greatest benefit to the greatest number’, a philosophy that led to planning corruption, but also to the silencing of dissenting voices, especially those who expressed reservations in relation to the direction the country was headed. It was viewed as heresy to question the dominant view of the political class that the good times would roll on for ever, that Ireland had finally assumed its place at the top table of wealthy nations and would continue to stay there. The celebrated author and then priest John O’Donohue predicted such a trend in an article that appeared in The Furrow in 1993:

Now that religion is in demise, industrial society has taken over its role and in a very subtle way colonizes and controls the territory of the sacred. Human longing is very effectively taken over and steered into glamorous and exciting culs de sac, where its energy is numbed and vulgarized in false patterns of gratification. (O’Donohue 1993, p. 617)

From being a model of orthodoxy, a society where the various institutions of the State were strongly influenced by Catholicism, where loyalty to Rome or deference to the dictates of bishops informed the behaviour of people in their public and private lives, Irish society reached the stage where religion was relegated to a private, personal concern. In addition, because of the clerical abuse scandals and the mismanagement of same by the Catholic hierarchy in the 1990s, the Church lost its moral standing, with the result that a strong advocate for the poor and marginalized was no longer capable of making its voice heard to the extent that it might have done in the past.

In order to assess the degree to which Catholicism declined as a reference point for Irish people, I think it is worthwhile to consider the theories propounded by the French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu, who is quoted in a number of the chapters in this book. Bourdieu highlighted the concept of ‘habitus’, which he defined as:

the product of the work of inculcation and appropriation necessary in order for those products of collective history, the objective structures (e.g. of language, economy, etc.) to succeed in reproducing themselves more or less completely, in the form of durable dispositions, in the organisms (which one can, if one wishes, call individuals) lastingly subjected to the same conditionings, and hence placed in the same material conditions of existence. (Bourdieu 1997, p. 85)

In both primitive and sophisticated cultures, a set of commonly accepted values bestow symbolic capital on certain individuals who are viewed as encapsulating what is considered desirable or acceptable within that culture. In Ireland, it was the case for many years that being regarded as a ‘good’ Catholic was an obvious advantage if one wanted to work in primary or secondary education, succeed in politics or business, climb to high positions in the civil service, and generally enjoy the esteem which is often showered on the righteous. The elites in a society have a vested interest in inculcating a certain ‘doxa’ – that which is beyond question – as it allows them to preserve their privileged status without the threat of social unrest.

The ‘habitus’, however, does not remain constant, and in the Ireland of the second half of the twentieth century, and during the era of the Celtic Tiger in particular, the focus shifted from God to Mammon in a spectacular fashion. The spiritual was replaced by the material as the desired cultural capital and one’s position in society was gauged more by what car one was driving than by the number of times one was seen in church. Bourdieu explains how:

symbolic interests (often described as ‘spiritual’ or ‘cultural’) come to be set up in opposition to strictly economic interests as defined in the field of economic transactions by the fundamental tautology ‘business is business’; strictly ‘cultural’ or ‘aesthetic’ interest, disinterested interest, is the paradoxical product of the ideological labour in which writers and artists, those most directly interested, have played an important part and in the course of which symbolic interests become autonomous by being opposed to material interests, i.e. by being symbolically nullified as interests. (Bourdieu 1997, p. 177)

This, in my view, accurately captures the paradigm shift that occurred within Irish society: there was a change of emphasis from the symbolic capital to a search for real ‘capital’, as encapsulated by disposable income, car(s), property portfolios, holidays, eating out and so on. According to Fintan O’Toole, social conservatives are incorrect in offering the loss of religious faith as an adequate explanation for the amorality that characterized the Celtic Tiger years. For one thing, the Church had revealed its own desire to protect the institution at all costs by placing its reputation above the safety of children. Also, in the Taoiseach of the time, Bertie Ahern, the Church had one of its staunchest allies, a person who railed against the ‘aggressive secularism’ of those who dared to question the Church’s control of education for example. The real problem with the decline in the Church’s authority was that there was no real ‘civic morality’ to take its place:

The Irish had been taught for generations to identify morality with religion, and a very narrow religion at that. Morality was about what happened in bedrooms, not in boardrooms. It was about the body, not the body politic. Masturbation was a much more serious sin than tax evasion. In a mindset where homosexuality was a much worse sin than cooking the books, it was okay to be bent as long as you were straight. (O’Toole 2009, p. 183)

As Irish culture became fixated on the pursuit of material wealth at all costs, there was a move away from the religious ‘habitus’ that had held sway for a number of centuries. In the words of the sociologist Tom Inglis, Ireland went from a culture of self-denial to one of self-indulgence (Inglis 2006, pp. 34–43). Whereas in the past self-indulgence was considered a mortal sin, at the zenith of the Celtic Tiger it became a type of rite of passage, something that underlined one’s freedom to do things that no longer had the stigma of sin attached to them. The danger, as Inglis saw it, was that when the fear associated with self-indulgence was removed, people failed to grasp the potential harm unbridled hedonism can have:

In the attempt to express and realise oneself through consumption, through discovering new goods, tastes and pleasure, people run the risk not just of becoming self-consumed but of eliminating themselves through their addictions. (Inglis 2006, p. 42)

When evaluating the legacy of the Celtic Tiger, it is crucial to point out that it instilled a desire for instant gratification that ended up having a deleterious impact on many people. Catholic guilt did fulfil some worthwhile purposes: it often served as a brake on extreme behaviour like excessive drinking or violence; it preached honesty, respect for others, moderation, fidelity within marriage. That is in no way to downplay the many negatives fundamental Catholicism also brought with it, such as an unhealthy attitude to sex and to everything associated with the body. The Irish are not good at half-measures, however. They tend to adopt an all or nothing approach, especially when it comes to religion. In this regard, Inglis offers a convincing assessment of what emerged during the Celtic Tiger years:

The Irish … have become the same as their Western counterparts in their immersion in the material world, their pursuit of pleasure, quest for excitement, fulfilment of desire, obsession with consuming and obsession with self. They have moved from being quiet, poor Catholic church mice embodying a discourse and practice of piety and humility, to becoming busy, productive, self-indulgent rats searching for the next stimulation. (Inglis 2007, pp. 189–190)

So how did we get to this point? A brief look backwards is necessary to understand the factors that brought about such a dramatic change. In the Introduction, we discussed the impact the revelations surrounding Bishop Eamonn Casey and Fr Michael Cleary had in the early 1990s. Much worse was to come in the exposure of clerical abuse scandals contained in the Ferns (2005), Ryan and Murphy (both in 2009), and Cloyne (2011) reports, which revealed an institutional mindset that bears all the hallmarks of ‘groupthink’.

In his 2007 study of abuses by the American military in the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, Philip Zimbardo found himself frustrated by the unwillingness of anyone in authority to accept blame for what went on. The power of the ‘System’ rendered soldiers and officers incapable of viewing the actions of the military in a critical, objective manner. Zimbardo uses the term ‘groupthink’, a concept devised by his former teacher, the Yale psychologist Irving Janis, to explain the bad decisions made in groups composed of largely intelligent, well-meaning people: ‘Such groups suppress dissent in the interest of group harmony, when they are an amiable, cohesive group that does not include dissenting viewpoints and has a directive leader’ (Zimbardo 2007, p. 354). He cites the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 and the mistaken conclusion of the Bush cabinet that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that started the allied invasion of that country in 2003, as two glaring examples of groupthink. In Ireland, the Church hierarchy’s poor management of the clerical abuse crisis was caused, not so much by malevolence on the part of the bishops, as by a spectacular incapacity to view the problem for what it was, a cancer that could not be cured by moving offending priests to different parishes or sending them away for treatment.

It is clear that the Catholic Church is not the only institution that is prone to groupthink. Recently the national broadcaster RTÉ was found guilty of the same fault in 2012 when it allowed a Prime Time Investigates programme, Mission to Prey, to be aired alleging that a priest, Fr Kevin Reynolds, had raped a woman and fathered a child by her while working as a missionary in Kenya. The priest had offered to undergo a paternity test to refute the allegations, but the programme producers, convinced they had their facts right, declined the offer and went ahead with the broadcast. RTÉ subsequently issued a full apology and had to pay damages for this serious error of judgement. The raft of revelations of abuse of various kinds by priests in recent years could well have led to an expectation of guilt in the case of Fr Reynolds. What saved many clerical child offenders in the past was precisely the opposite view: very few could conceive of any priest or religious being responsible for heinous crimes against children. So the system can work in different ways, but the end result is always severe myopia when it comes to the faults within a group where orthodoxy and lack of critical capacity hold sway.

The spectacular fall from grace of the Catholic Church in Ireland in the past few decades can be gauged by the fact that the majority of people no longer see the Church as a moral arbiter, and refuse to allow its teachings to impact on their daily lives, especially when it comes to controlling their sexual behaviour. A survey of Irish Catholics carried out by Amárach Research on behalf of the Association of Catholic Priests in Ireland found that Church teachings on sexuality had ‘no relevance’ for 75 per cent of respondents or their families. In addition, 87 per cent of respondents believed that priests should be allowed to marry and 77 per cent were in favour of women priests (Amárach 2012). Weekly Mass attendance is now at 35 per cent and the congregations are predominantly middle-aged and older. There is a marked disconnect between official Church teachings and the way in which Catholicism is lived and practised on the ground. In addition, the age-profile and conservative nature of the Irish hierarchy are an obstacle to communicating in a meaningful manner with the Irish people, and with the young in particular. A commonly voiced criticism levelled at the Church is the degree to which this man-made institution fails to reflect the teachings and example of its founder, Jesus Christ, a man who identified with the poor, befriended a prostitute and spoke kindly to a tax collector. He was slow to judge or to issue reproaches. He spoke of freedom and rebirth, of love of self and love of neighbour. He was kind and tolerant. Such was the inspiration of the witness he provided that this followers were prepared to run the risk of death to spread the good news of which he was the living incarnation. The prescriptive messages coming from the Vatican in recent times could be viewed as starkly out of tune with Christ’s message.

In spite of this rather pessimistic picture, is it accurate to use the term ‘crisis’ to describe what is happening in the Irish Church at present? What is so bad about a once-powerful institution being humbled, if that results in its rediscovering what should have been its primary mission in the first place, namely looking after the poor and the marginalized? It is quite noticeable how many people, even some of the harshest critics of the Church, speak admiringly of the work done by the Jesuit priest Peter McVerry or Sister Stanislaus Kennedy. Why is this? It is quite simple really: these are two examples of religious people who live out the Gospel message of unconditional love for the have-nots of society, for those who are the victims of homelessness, drug addiction, depression, unemployment, the inevitable results of the two-tier society that is Ireland at present. Fr McVerry regularly called the government to task during the prosperous Celtic Tiger period for missing a golden opportunity to tackle poverty in a meaningful manner. Seán Healy, Director of CORI (Conference of Religious of Ireland), has similarly been to the fore in highlighting the plight of poor people, whom his organization seeks to protect from the most swingeing budget cuts. The politicians didn’t listen, mainly because vested interests find it difficult to commit themselves to a programme that will disturb the status quo. The Church in general should never have become another arm of the State, a role it assumed in Ireland during the decades after independence. The ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Eamon Maher and Eugene O’Brien
• 1 Crisis, what crisis? The Catholic Church during the Celtic Tiger Years: Eamon Maher
• 2 The Celtic Tiger and the new Irish religious market: Catherine Maignant
• 3 Shattered assumptions: a tale of two traumas: Brendan Geary
• 4 ‘Tendency-wit’: the cultural unconscious of the Celtic Tiger in the writings of Paul Howard: Eugene O’Brien
• 5 Popular music and the Celtic Tiger: Gerry Smyth
• 6 ‘What does a woman want?’: Irish contemporary women’s fiction and the expression of desire in an era of plenty: Sylvie Mikowski
• 7 Topographies of terror: photography and the post-Celtic Tiger landscape: Justin Carville
• 8 Immigration and the Celtic Tiger: Bryan Fanning
• 9 ‘What rough beast’? Monsters of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland: Kieran Keohane and Carmen Kuhling
• 10 Women, fictional messages and a crucial decade: Mary Pierse
• 11 ‘A hundred thousand welcomes’: food and wine as cultural signifiers: Brian Murphy
• 12 Contemporary Irish fiction and the indirect gaze: Neil Murphy
• 13 ‘Holes in the ground’: theatre as critic and conscience of Celtic Tiger Ireland: Vic Merriman
• 14 ‘Ship of fools’: the Celtic Tiger and poetry as social critique: Eóin Flannery
• 15 Between modernity and marginality: Celtic Tiger cinema: Ruth Barton
• Conclusion: Eamon Maher and Eugene O’Brien
• Index