During the long colonial occupation, Irish people learnt to be wary of rules and laws. They considered these to be means of continuing their subjugation, and saw them as incompatible with the betterment and advancement of their family, friends and community.
In a compelling book sociologist Niamh Hourigan (who is senior lecturer at the School of Sociology and Philosophy at University College Cork) argues that the colonised Irish developed a way of doing business that eschewed legality and transparency, relying instead on discretion, informality, face-to-face contact, and above all the return of favours.
This attitude has remained with us long after independence. Voters do not judge parliamentarians on their record as lawmakers, but on what they deliver. Politics is transactional: TDs receive votes in exchange for getting people medical cards or helping them secure benefits.
A voter in North Tipperary explained to Hourigan that he votes for the discredited Michael Lowry because he ‘looks after his own’; similarly, it mattered not to the friends, neighbours and employees of Sean Quinn, who rallied in their thousands to support him, that he owed a vast amount of money to the Irish State: the most important thing for them was to stand by one of their own.
Violence
The chaos and violence of 1921 were the final emphatic rejection of British laws and rules. But such anarchy could not be a foundation for a new dispensation. The nascent Free State needed a rule-based system that enjoyed popular legitimacy, and allied itself with the Catholic Church, perhaps the only rule-imposing institution Irish people still respected.
Hourigan argues that the Church’s distaste for commerce and capitalism may partially explain why independent Ireland was an economic laggard for the first four decades of its existence. During the long prosperous period that followed the economic reforms of the late 1950s, an elite emerged that combined the rule-aversion of the general population with soaring ambitions.
It made good sense for these businessmen to cultivate leading politicians. The latter, meanwhile, needed their donations, for politics was becoming more and more expensive: Jack Lynch famously toured the country in a helicopter during the 1970s general elections.
In an intimate, secretive political culture corruption inevitably thrived. A new phenomenon came to characterise Irish life in the last decades of the 20th Century: instead of remaining indifferent to laws and rules, as the Irish had been for centuries, elites began to treat them with contempt, or reframe them to suit their purposes.
Politicians introduced legislation to suit their friends and patrons; they lied about the company they were keeping. Hourigan raises the question of the bank guarantee of September 2008.
The bankers, politicians and civil servants involved had a moral and legal duty to keep notes of the meetings that took place in the days and weeks leading up to the guarantee, but where are these notes? Who kept them? Could it be that no-one kept a record of the events that preceded the most momentous decision in the history of the State?
Ireland briefly ceded its independence to the Troika, which imposed rules on us even one of its officials considered harsh, rules which we could not disregard or ignore. The State created NAMA and the ISI (Insolvency Service of Ireland) to deal with growing indebtedness. The former mollycoddles bust developers, while the latter imposes draconian spending limits on struggling families.
Hourigan poses an intriguing question that only time will answer: how will a people used to working outside the rules react to these fresh impositions of unfair and unpopular measures?
