Looking at Ireland, I don't know whether to laugh or cry

As the moneymen from the IMF move into Dublin, novelist Colm Tóibín considers his country's bloody past, turbulent present and uncertain future
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Colm Toibin
Author Colm Toibin in Dublin, the seat of Irish government. Photograph: Kim Haughton

In the spring of 1985 while I was reporting on the trial of Leopoldo Galtieri and the other Argentinian generals for crimes against humanity in Buenos Aires, I was asked by a friend who lived outside the city to collect two American guys on a Saturday morning in a city centre hotel and go with them to San Isidro in the suburbs. We were going to spend the weekend sailing on the river Plate.

In the railway station as we waited for the train I discovered that the two American guys were in the city to deal with the economic crisis which was affecting Argentina in the aftermath of the generals' rule.

One was from the World Bank and one from the IMF. As the train got going, I remarked on what a fantastic service it was, that it ran every half hour even through the night, and the tickets were incredibly cheap. The two Americans looked at one another and then one of them told me that this would not be continuing, that it made no sense, that they had been studying the economics of public transport in the city, and the system was insane.

It would be cheaper, one of them said, actually to pay people to go on this train than to maintain the current way of selling and checking the tickets, especially if you included pension costs. I should enjoy the train while it lasted, they said, because it would not be in existence much longer in its present state.

When I told them what I was doing in Argentina, they seemed mildly bored. Every day witnesses were coming into court to tell of how they had been detained illegally and tortured. Most of the stories were horrific and beyond belief.

The trial, which was reported each day in the newspapers, was likely to go on all year. Finally, my American friends said that they believed it was a waste of money and a waste of time. Argentina, economically, they said, was a basket case, in desperate need of root and branch reform. The trial was, at best, a distraction.

We had a good weekend sailing and I saw them a few times over the weeks that followed. I remember one evening as we made our way from the hotel to a restaurant in a taxi we found that streets were blocked, and then we came right up against a group of angry protesters, with placards about jobs being lost and wages cut.

One of the guys I was with grew really angry, could barely contain himself in the taxi. This was the last thing Argentina needed, he said. Protests like this were not just a waste of time, but they were irresponsible.

The country was going to have to go through years of hardship, he said, to get to a position where it could begin again. There were no choices. Argentina was not just broke, it owed a fortune and the costs of public services were outlandish. Protesting would not make the slightest difference.

I remembered my American friends this week as news came that a delegation from the EU and the IMF were to arrive in Dublin on Thursday. I think I have an idea how dedicated and serious-minded these fellows would be, especially on weekdays, and how little interest they might have in Irish history, Irish pride, Irish sovereignty or even Irish doublespeak. They like to get the job done and then get home.

On the night before these figure-crunchers arrived in the city, I watched a discussion programme on Irish television in which commentators, people younger than me, invoked the dead heroes who had fought for an independent Ireland, naming some of them, including patriots from the 18th century, and wondering how they would feel now were they to find out about the shame we Irish felt.

We had fought so hard for our freedom, they said, and now, with the arrival in Merrion Street, where the government is housed, of besuited stone-faced economists with German and Scandinavian names and number-crunching knuckles, we had betrayed our dead. Patrick Pearse eat your heart out, the Germans have arrived.

On Thursday morning the main editorial in the Irish Times had a headline Was it for this?, a quote from WB Yeats's poem September 1913:

Was it for this the Wilde Geese spread

The grey wing upon every tide

For this that all that blood was shed

For this Edward Fitzgerald died

And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone

All that delirium of the brave?

The editorial asked if this was "what the men of 1916 died for: a bailout from the German chancellor with a few shillings of sympathy from the British chancellor on the side. There is the shame of it all. Having obtained our political independence from Britain to be masters of our own affairs, we have now surrendered our sovereignty to the European commission, the European central bank and the International Monetary Fund. Their representatives ride into Merrion Street today."

It was hard to know whether to laugh or to cry while watching the commentators on TV invoking dead patriots and the Irish Times editorial going on about the men of 1916. Patriotism, it seems, is the first refuge of Ireland, now that the scale of the crisis and the urgent need to solve it has been fully recognised.

I should perhaps declare an interest before I burst out laughing or fall around crying. My grandfather fought in the 1916 rebellion and was imprisoned afterwards. I was brought up in the proud memory of his bravery. My uncle and my father worked all their lives for the Fianna Fáil party which has run Ireland most of the time since 1932 and which is in power now. I have never ceased to believe in their patriotism and idealism.

But just now I don't care about sovereignty and I don't want to hear about dead patriots and how they might feel. I care about the actual problems which many of my compatriots are facing – losing their houses, their jobs, their dignity as citizens – and believe that the task of the Irish government is to defend the rights of those who are suffering as best they can rather than consider the fact that they have betrayed the memory of the patriot dead.

The problem is not merely that there is no blueprint in Ireland now, no agenda, for how this might be done. The problem is also that it wasn't there before the Celtic Tiger either, nor during its heady reign. In areas which really matter, such as health and education, Ireland has, since independence, been deeply divided.

There are two health systems here, for example. One is for middle-class people who pay health insurance and the other for those who can't afford to pay. There are short waiting lists for one, and long waiting lists for the other. Often, both see the same doctors, who treat the first group in private hospitals, or private rooms in public hospitals, and the second group in public hospitals.

Everyone here knows that the difference can be a matter of life and death. Some of the doctors make a fortune. There has been no serious effort to reform this, but many efforts instead to copper-fasten it. This is one example of what sovereignty has done to us.

What sovereignty has done to us also is to create a political system in Ireland in which political vision or skill or seriousness are not valued. The four main Irish politicians, for example – the taoiseach, the tánaiste (the deputy prime minister), the minister for finance and the leader of the opposition – all come from political tribes; all of their fathers were members of parliament as well.

They inherited their politics and, it seemed, their seats in parliament. Thus they came into politics without having to think seriously, or try very hard. Normally, they made sure not to change much, and they generally did no real harm. Under the pressure of the banking crisis, however, they have been no use at all. They are out of their depth.

And they have a sense of entitlement which, as they ruined their country, has become an awful arrogance. Everything they have told us over the past two years has turned out to be untrue. And that is putting it mildly.

It is clear now what will happen to Ireland over the next five years. It will be treated as an economy rather than a society, as a problem to be solved by looking at figures rather than considering the needs of citizens. One possibility is that the arrival of the outsiders in Merrion Street will involve the destruction of the power of the ruling Fianna Fáil party and its entitlement to rule.

The problem is that there is no Irish political figure or Irish opposition party in a position to replace them with any serious social vision or sense of purpose and determination to build a new country. Listening to the debates on radio and television, or in the Irish parliament, over the past two years, or the past week, has not been inspiring.

Yet there have been changes which have mattered. There are two things which have happened in my lifetime which I still feel a sort of reverence for. One is the Good Friday agreement, and the other is the European Union.

The first allowed for compromise and nuance in Ireland over issues of identity and sovereignty. It allowed for the idea that you could be British in Ireland, or both Irish and British, or just Irish. It allowed for the idea that history carries as much shadow as substance, and that nothing is simple in our heritage. It was negotiated with imagination and openness by Irish politicians and civil servants as well as British ones.

The EU did not merely pay for roads and other necessary infrastructure in Ireland, it opened the country up to the world around it. The more I found out about contemporary Germany, for example, and the more I travelled there, the more I came to admire it and the more I came to hope that some of its best qualities could come to influence and affect Ireland.

Thus when the Irish Times on Thursday mentioned "the German chancellor" I did not automatically feel that this person was in some way a malignant force in the world. Instead, I saw someone rational and prudent, sensible and deeply intelligent.

So, too, when the Irish Times mentioned "a few shillings of sympathy from the British chancellor on the side", I didn't feel any shame at all. I noticed in the past week that the tone of the British chancellor has seemed both sympathetic and reasonable.

Europe remains, it seems, especially when placed under pressure, a loose and uneasy collection of competing nation states. But we need to think of it also as a collection of cities, each of which has been vastly improved by membership of the European Union, with some space in between.

Anyone wandering in the city of Hamburg now, for example, has a right to sense not only the beauty of the place, but how rich it has become, and how well run it is. And that goes for London too and Madrid. The way those cities have opened up to the outside world, and exude, most of the time, a sense of tolerance which is at the heart of European humanism, should be a matter of pride to all of us.

In the meantime, around the corner from where I write this, men in suits are crunching numbers in Merrion Street. Many of them are experts in how to cut public spending, in the cost of bailout packages, and the price to be paid by bankrupt countries in exchange for systems of support.

I can imagine the looks of bafflement, pure boredom, that would come on their faces were they to be told about Irish history or our patriot dead.

I could list a number of wonderful pubs in the centre of our city, Dublin, and some great art museums and theatres and book shops they might enjoy, I could name the writers they should be reading, but I know they will be busy, working late into the night.

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