Ireland - The Promised Land No More

 Inside the Irish Meltdown 

How the Media Portrays an Irish Tale of Misery

   The Irish have a reputation of thriving on misery, taking the hardships of life in good humour, seasoning severity with a touch of satire. It’s the rule of the Irish Exceptionalism, that their culture is not touched by the crash and burn recession after the heights of Celtic boom. Remember FlanO’Brian and his satire on the Dublin revivalists who went looking for the true Irish culture in the Gaeltracht area of the rural poor in An béal Bocht (The poor mouth), only to find misery and hardship mocking their efforts to preserve true Irishness. I had a lit.-class at a German university titled Poverty in Irish Literature, where about 20 ardent Irish enthusiasts learned that an entire literary genre, mis-lit, was established on Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, an autobiographical rendering of his tragically impoverished childhood in Ireland. It has always been about finding Irish identity, but equalizing it with potatoes and poverty may just be a very persistent stereotype. Granted even in non-English-speaking countries there is an Irish pub on every street corner, but does that really reflect what Éire is about? In a post-revivalist Ireland between Guinness, clover, Catholics and the bombings, what is Irish today? How does the global news portray the Isle of Saints and Scholars post-financial meltdown and how much do people care?

Your average Guinness-drinking passer-by doesn’t know or care that the Irish spoke Gaelic and not English, that is until the Henry VIII, the monarch, whose life was turned into a TV-series with copious amounts of sex and drama (The Tudors), decided Ireland should become the first British colony in 1536. Ever since than English was the language of the loathed British occupier, similar to German in Alsace, only in Ireland English never left the cultural sphere. And nowadays only three percent of the Irish population are able to communicate their everyday woes in Irish Gaelic, despite it being a mandatory subject at school. 

The CIA World Factbook affords you next to a bunch of statistical information on everything from unemployment to childbirth and religious affiliation on the Emerald Isle with a brief overview of Irish history starting with the Celtic tribes around 600-150 BC and ending with the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, which formally ended the violent uprisings against the British colonial might in four articles. However the spooks fail to mention that this particular multiparty agreement is also known under another name, the Belfast Agreement to smooth the ruffled Protestant feathers. Obviously it still depends on who you ask, a Catholic or a Protestant. If you ask John, Jack or Dick about Irishness, he might, with a little luck, be able to tell you that the island is still separated into two distinct countries, like Korea, there are the Northerners who have a British passport and the citizens of the Poblacht na hÉireann who are Irish, but than again this distinct line often gets blurred by the sweltering age-old religious conflict that still violently opposes Protestants with Catholics. So religious conflict really is not a Middle Eastern specialty, nor was it a Muslim invention, it started in the heart of Europe with Martin Luther and never left. In 2005 the religious troubles gained a new momentum, when IRA disciples murdered the Roman Catholic Robert McCartney in Belfast. And while the pope knights the architects of the peace process, many demonstrators in Belfast during “marching season”, the Economist called Belfast riots, feel Catholics always get what they want, which in turn leads to more demonstrations, you get picture.

Often times even informed publications cling to stereotypical renderings of the poor Irish countryside to underlie reports about the cost of austerity policy, bailout programs or even travel guides. The New York Times published a photo series entitled “Ghosts of the Celtic Tiger” by the renowned Irish photographer Kenneth O Halloran, in no relation to the Irish historian Sylvester O’Halloren, who posed as the real life model for Maria Edgeworth’s Count O’Halloren in The Absentee from 1812.What do you see in the pictures? In Tales from a Promised Land he photographed the ruins of a post-boom Ireland, without the usual nostalgia for the success story of the economic heights.

But of course Ireland is no longer a peripheral Euro country, at least since the big bail out in 2010. Ireland has been included in the list of countries in desperate need for a capital injection. In the past two years alone, the German magazine Der Spiegel, links Ireland to the financial crisis in over 130 articles alongside Iceland, Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal. Naturally, Ireland was one of the countries the money grubbing Ex-CEO of MF Global, former CEO at Goldman Sachs and former New Jersey Governor later turned Senator, Jon Corzine, bet against and lost billions. In a globalized world even the tiny island with only 84,421 square kilometres feels the aftershocks of the most recent casino-like excesses on Wall Street. Yet, while dear Jon reportedly made $ 8 million in compensation, the New York Times reports Ruined Apartments are the new symbol of Ireland’s fall from Grace, making thousands and thousands homeless. And in the bi-monthly magazine Intelligent life, affiliated with the Economist, Irish traders in 2008 reportedly blame foreigners for the downward spiral, outing Ireland as a xenophobic melting pot.

Faced with such overwhelming negativity, nobody, not even the sentimentalists, care to appeal to the good old days of yore, the Golden Age of myths and legends, of Cú Chulainn, Deirdre and Conchobar, when the island of approximately 6.3 million people produced four Nobel literature prize winners, Michael Flatley's shoes could make spectators swoon and when the war for the Irish independence proofed fruitful in 1922. Now, all you read is tinted with a strong nostalgia for the better days, when people visiting Dublin’s Writers Museum would gladly pay € 10 for a bowl of soup. But between the nostalgia, national pride and the austerity policy dictated from Brussels, Ireland is expected to suck it up like they have always done and find a new identity beyond the myths of the Celtic Tiger.