The Irish Election: A Joycean view

Return of the Old School Spalpeen?

“When the soul of a man is born in this country, there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.”  (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

As the clock runs down to the General election in Ireland, it’s hard not to be apathetic. 

Irish voters clearly remain mired in a civil war landscape. In spite of the painful shortcomings of all three big parties, the electorate seems content to play ‘Lanigan’s Ball’ on an interminable loop; Fenian Failure steps out and the Blueshirts step in again. The spineless complicity of the Dáil opposition in the country’s gang rape by international financiers and speculators doesn’t augur well for their imminent tenure in government.

Even the grubby little spat between the Sinn Féin and Labour is just a thinly veiled re-run of the old Official and Provisional split of 1969/70. The Stickies or ‘Official IRA’ went on, after successive rebrandings (from ‘Sinn Féin The Workers Party’ to the ‘Workers Party’ to the ‘Democratic Left’ before a final reverse takeover of the Labour Party) to carve out a niche among socialist and working class voters. This is a patch they guard jealously against the encroachment of the black northerners from the Provisional movement although the days when the Stickies would shoot opponents such as Seamus Costello seem consigned to the footnotes of history.

The opportunity to forge in the smithy of our souls the uncreated conscience of our race seems yet again to have been lost.

But then again, maybe not. The unpalatable truth of the matter may well be that the manifest ideological and intellectual poverty of mainstream Irish life -- both in the established media and the political classes -- is such that it doesn’t actually matter which donkey is crowned at the end of this bunfight. It will after all, most likely be civil servants in Dublin and Brussels who will wield power irrespective of which shiny-suited charlatans are returned by this pseudo-democratic charade.  

Despite presiding over the longest period of sustained prosperity in the State’s history, there has been a shameful failure on the part of successive governments to address perhaps the greatest stain on the national body politic. Structural emigration has not only been ignored in the fat years; it now actually seems to be an active component of any recovery being touted by the parcel of rogues to whom the country’s future is to be entrusted.

There is something shocking about the implicit expectation in a modern Western democracy that a significant percentage of the population will (almost as a policy consideration) be forced to leave the country in search of work. That old familiar spectre of the 1950s and 80s is making its cyclical return;  the 21^st century spalpeen might be more literate and savvy than his navvy forbears but he is a still a working man forced to leave his shores reluctantly.

Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it, runs the old adage. But as an Irishman who left the country in 1996, Jimmy Joyce seems perhaps more apposite; ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’...