Preventing The Future – Tom Garvin

This was the last of my Christmas books and boy did it inform my mind regarding the recent Ryan Report. If you want to gain some insights into the why and how of what happened, read this book. Plenty of little yellow page markers and passages underlined in my copy. There is an excellent introduction which outlines the basis for Garvins’ book. His “starting point” is the work of Mancur Olsen as Garvin attempts to answer the question which is the object of this book: why was Ireland so poor for so long? This introduction is of itself sufficient reason to read this book. It explains the principle tool used by the vested interests within the Irish state to ensure those interests were protected.

to pursue one’s own material interest while disregarding an alleged collective, communal or general national interest can be declared by the culture to be immoral, anti-national, a betrayal of one’s comrades, political ‘idiocy’ in the classical Greek sense, evidence of a gross lack of ’spirituality’, selfishness or thievishness. Such idealogical declarations and finger-pointings can suit the private interests as well as the public purposes of elites striving to keep their followers in line.

I have observed and been subject to such tactics in many and probably in all groupings and not just politics. Although one must remember Gerry Collins’ in 1991: “Don’t burst the party!” with tears in his eyes designed to induce the maximum of guilt. I have heard the same type of rhetoric used in Scouting and Guiding (“Think about the young people!”) as someone sought to defend the status quo and ensure that nobody in authority gets upset.

But let me return to my yellow page markers. For starters:

The Fianna Fail government was tired in 1947, and the harsh winter of that year did not help. The same men who had stormed into office as Young Turks in 1932 held office and, in the eyes of many people, had become increasingly complacent in office. During the war years, it seemed that many ministers were immune from the privations which other people had to endure.

Does that sound familiar or what? In addition Garvin asserts that in 1948

the Fianna Fail monopoly of power was over. In sixteen years, the party had woven a web of connections, influence, multiple monopolies and bureaucratic and ecclesiastical alliances that amounted to a kind of large mutual benefit society for powerful institutions and individuals.

So why are we surprised that some sixty years later we find ourselves in exactly the same position. But then it is probably understandable when one accepts the place the belief in loyalty to the leader plays within Fianna Fail. Dev was the leader and it seems that a façade of allegiance to his, what I assume were honestly held, beliefs was in place and we get an insight into that belief form an interview he gave to the Manchester Guardian in 1927.

The journalist queried, ‘ … suppose your expert advisers tell you that by insisting on the use of our own resources you can indeed support a larger population, but only at a lower standard of living, would you [as prime minister] face that?’ De Valera had replied:
You say ‘lower’ when you ought to say a less costly standard of living. I think it quite possible that a less costly standard of living is desirable, and that it would prove, in fact, to be a higher standard of living. I am not satisfied that the standard of living and the mode of living in Western Europe is a right or proper one …

So here we have an insight into Dev’s thinking that we would all be better off with less. While I would be the first to agree with him, I’d prefer to use persuasion so that people might exercise enlightened choice rather than relying on deliberate neglect as a means achieving my aims. But it appears that within government it was the practice to say one thing and do quite another. As in cherish the children and at the same time subject them to systematic abuse.

But for another dose of deja vue Garvin tells us

… it does seem that it takes a sometimes scary economic downturn to force economically rational decisions injurious to the interests of political elites through the Irish governmental decision-making system. Such a pattern of decision-making was certainly evident in the late 1950’s and again in the late 1980s; veto groups were forced to remove their vetoes when it was put to them that a general collapse of some sort might occur.

Garvin’s analysis leads him to consider that

faith in the modern world seems to be liable to be poisoned by an overly intimate relationship between Church and state and, more generally, by an intimate relationship between ecclesiastical organisations and political power.

An analysis I would have to agree with and which seems to have been recently evidenced by former Taoiseach Ahern’s opinion that those seeking a larger financial atonement was required from the Irish congregations responsible for the abuse outlined in the Ryan Report as “anti-clerical”. It is also to be noted that the same Mr Ahern was once an employee of the individual negotiating with Dr Woods TD on the sweet deal they subsequently achieved. A “web of connections” indeed. [I've stopped using the term 'Bertie' which suggests that this man was some kind of benign cuddly figure in Irish life.] But thankfully the web is under some strain, at least in relation to the Roman Catholic Church and Garvin comments.

Ireland is becoming declericalised; the laws and rules of behaviour laid down by priests for laypeople to conform to came to be defied and afterwards simply increasingly ignored, which, from the Church’s point of view, was worse.

Garvin offers some hope by saying that “A focus on ideas suggests, rather, the possibility that human agency can defy the constraints of political and social structures and create new political possibilities.” It’s just that it seems to take so damm long. Mind you when you have deliberately set out to prevent any ideas other than approved ones seeing the light of day through censorship and the threat of being socially ostracised, it is not surprising that it takes so long. We need only look to the former USSR and to China.