Irish Adventures In Nation-Building
by Bryan Fanning
(Manchester University Press, £18.99)
Joe Carroll
Professor Fanning is an omnivorous reader of modern Irish history. But as a sociologist (he teaches in UCD) he is not satisfied with just the facts. In this his latest book, he focuses on “the intellectual, social, political, religious and economic ideas and processes” which have shaped Irish society and nationalism.
This is a large order to fit into 200 pages. The essays are for the most part critical reviews of books and essays which have tackled these subjects in recent times. A key concept is the role of nationalism in the building of modern Ireland and how it is shedding its original cultural and religious colouring as economic issues become front line.
Landmarks
Two landmarks have had huge influence: T. K. Whitaker’s report on economic development of 1958 and the OECD report on Irish education of 1965. Thenceforth it was not that Ireland changed utterly but it would never be the nation that Eamon de Valera envisaged in 1943 with the “laughter of maidens” at the crossroads. The pre-Whitaker Ireland is covered in chapters about the declining influence of Catholicism, the Irish language and the role of intellectuals.
Moving to more modern times, there are chapters covering women and social policy, the treatment of travellers, immigration and the Celtic Tiger. The fact that the Celtic Tiger description derived from the booming East Asian Tiger economies of the 1990s has resulted in a chapter comparing how Taiwan and Ireland fared with rapid economic development.
The comparison shows that in Taiwan cultural nation-building co-existed with economic nation-building while in the Irish case the main phase of cultural nation-building preceded our rapid economic development. “Having abandoned all forms of protectionism by the mid-1960s, Ireland was open to a neo-liberal development project that resulted in its economy becoming the most globalised in the world,” the author writes.
But it is hardly right that Ireland had abandoned “all forms of protectionism” by the mid-1960s almost a decade before we joined the then EEC. One has only to think how protected our car assembly, textile and shoe-making industries were well into the 1970s.
The chapter on “The Sociology of Boom and Bust” reveals some interesting differences of view between experts. In this case the author is reviewing Sean O’Riain’s book on “The Rise and Fall of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger”. He describes this as a “sociological analysis that is very much focussed on the role of institutions.”
Thus it challenges the Fintan O’Toole analysis in Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sunk the Celtic Tiger that “bad political culture and bad public morality were to blame.” Such narratives, O’Riain argues, tell us little; the standard account they present tends “to reduce Irish political and economic failures to the greed, opportunism and incompetence of individuals.”
Many people would agree that this was indeed the case; but for a sociologist like O’Riain the problem lies more in “the dysfunctional interplay of liberalism, clientelism and corporatism.” So you take your pick.
This book makes one think hard about the received truths and clichés which have attached themselves to Irish nation-building.