We were all in it together, we all made mistakes
The blame game must stop before we can deal with our present woes, writes Eamon Delaney
Saturday November 21 2009
You cannot blame the barman for giving you a hangover. We have to move on in terms of dealing with the present economic crisis and stop blaming the bankers and the Government for all our ills.
The broad mass of Irish society signed up for the philosophy of the Celtic Tiger. The retrospective experts who are now so wise about where it all went wrong, weren't (with a few exceptions) particularly assertive during the times of continuous boom and growth.
The fact of the matter is that the banks didn't force people to take out loans and the Government didn't force people to embrace a system that lowered taxes and pursued a UK/US economic model. The electorate gave the Fianna Fail/PD coalition a continuous mandate to keep going with robust, wealth-creating policies, and when Charlie McCreevey left for Brussels, he was a hero.
Two weeks ago, on a press trip to Brussels, I saw that he was anything but and the visiting Irish hacks turned on him for the same policies he was praised for back in the early noughties.
On the subject of the banks, the blame-game attitude is particularly unreasonable. Of course, the banks became reckless with their lending and on the upper scale their extravagant loans to developers were way too risky.
But in terms of handing out cheap loans and mortgages, they were doing exactly what the Irish public wanted them to do. We have always had a poor sense of collective responsibility. The attitude is that it's always someone else's fault, usually the politicians.
This exemption of responsibility comes from a political system (and media) which panders to the electorate and offers only goodies and no pain -- until recently. As Pat Leahy put it in his recent book 'Showtime', about Fianna Fail in Government, our political system is ruled by the electoral cycle, "where everything -- policy, economics, government personnel and coalition choices -- has been subjected to the overwhelming imperative of retaining power".
For Bertie Ahern, this was a particular obsession. "The electoral imperative expressed itself in a chronic short termism when governing and an almost manic desire to cultivate, carefully and individually, a myriad of constituencies -- ranging from school action groups to powerful public sector, from builders to hospital consultants".
This is spoiling us. And, of course, it means that when it now comes to confronting such lobbies, the Government is paralysed.
Worse still, the fragmentation of society into all these competing groups means that the overall good of the community is lost, with no one now prepared to make sacrifices.
The media also have a lot to answer for in feeding this continuous sense of grievance and laying all of society's ills at the Government's door. RTE is particularly guilty, starting the day with 'Moaning Ireland', with its righteous interrogations and then finishing it with its emotionalised news reporting on 'Prime Time', which treated the removal of free medical cards from the elderly as if it was the introduction of internment.
But, again, the public is never at fault. It is only the Government, and the bankers and the property developers, despite the fact the latter provided thousands of jobs, built thousands of homes and provided millions in tax revenue -- the same revenue which caused the public sector to grow so large, incidentally.
The fact is that economic and social transformation of Ireland endures, built on native enterprise culture as well as inward investment. It wasn't all built on property. And let us not underestimate the devastating impact on us, as on other countries, of the foreign banking crisis.
Granted we were totally exposed because of our overspending and the tax reliance on property, but we can learn from these mistakes. But we should admit that they were our mistakes too, and not just the Government's. We bought into the Celtic Tiger and did rather well out of it. But we lost the run of ourselves. And until we admit that, we will not be able to move on and deal with our problems.
Eamon Delaney is an author whose next book, 'Breaking the Mould -- a story of Art and Ireland', will be published next month by New Island
Irish Independent
