Mary Kenny
Marie Kondo St Patrick’s Day, as we all know, has in recent years become an occasion for “marketing” Ireland in various corners of the globe. The shiny new liberal Ireland is merchandised in such a way that it will attract many more investors, customers and traders.
I’m all for investment, trade and opportunities for jobs – who isn’t? Well, according to the economist David McWilliams – self-described on the jacket of his new book Renaissance Nation as “Ireland’s most prominent economist” – the obstacle to any thriving prosperity is, and has been, the Catholic Church.
Message
The message of his book (or the most salient message) is that the Catholic “cleristocracy obstructs economic growth” and the “regressive forces of Church and State” prevented Ireland from economic expansion until recently.
It was only the gradual opening of liberalism which has brought prosperity to Ireland, since social liberalism and economic liberalism go hand in hand is his thesis. He has special praise for the Repeal the Eighth Amendment movement, the very nub, for Mr McWilliams, of the individualism which powers economic dynamism.
The McWilliams doctrine of personal choice is inextricably linked with dynamic consumerism and entrepreneurial energy.
By the same token, he regards women remaining in the home looking after their children in a negative light – economic liberalism regards them as “non-productive”, don’t you see. A mother at home is not generating revenue – one of the reasons, doubtless, that the clause in the Constitution extolling the home-maker must be removed.
All this is imparted with Dalkey Boy’s cocksure facetiousness, even when he’s patently ignorant of that which he speaks. (He claims that the 1907 riots against Synge’s Playboy of the Western World were organised by “misogynists”. Actually, they were organised by Sinn Féin, which was the main political party at the time which championed women’s suffrage – and chose a woman, Constance Markievicz, to elect.)
He claims that Catholic influences restrained and repressed the Irish entrepreneur, while ignoring the evidence that some of the most successful Irish businessmen have been products of Catholic education – from William Dargan to William Martin Murphy, from Tony O’Reilly to Michael O’Leary. Sean Lemass, and for all his faults, Charlie Haughey, were economic progressives educated by the CBS, and the man who did most to liberalise European trade policy, Peter Sutherland, was an alumnus of Gonzaga College – and as it happens, a sincerely practicing Catholic until the day of his death.
People can also create great enterprises for the good of their community, as Monsignor Horan’s achievement in building Knock Airport shows.
Liberal society
McWilliams’ claim that only a liberal society which prioritises individual choice can grow prosperous is blatantly contradicted by the example of China, now the second richest economy in the world, although still organised on controlled Communist lines.
“The more tolerant we become, the richer we become,” he writes. Personally, I think we should be tolerant because tolerance is a virtue in itself, and a message of diversity can be drawn from Christ’s words: “In my father’s house there are many mansions.”
But tolerance promulgated for the sake of engendering individual wealth seems somewhat self-serving.
Liberal tolerance has much to answer for
Yet, for all its virtuous aspects, tolerance has limits. Writing recently in the Financial Times, the Jewish critic Rebecca Abrams asked how it was that the Dutch, by 1945, could have actively assisted in the murder of 80% of their Jewish population – a death rate more than double than of Germany’s or Austria’s? After all, the Netherlands had been so religiously and socially tolerant.
And that, Ms Abrams reported, was precisely the problem, alluding to the Dutch author Bart van Es’s explanation that “a culture of tolerance played a key part in enabling complicity with the Nazis”. A shoulder-shrugging “whatever you’re into” can allow and assist evil actions.
Everything has limits, and there are some things that should not be tolerated.
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l I only finally recycled my Christmas cards last weekend – no, I’ll never be a fan of Marie Kondo [pictured], the tidying guru who rails against accumulating “pieces of paper”!
And before I despatched them to the recycling bin, I went through each and every one of them again, calling to mind the sender of each card, and feeling a sense of gratitude for all the kindness and blessings the messages expressed at the season of the Nativity. So nice to re-read them and savour all those links in a community of friends and family.