Irish have 'chucked concern for the poor'

Merriman Summer School: The Merriman Summer School was told last night that Irish people "have rediscovered both the leprechaun and the pot of gold".

Academic Mr Alan Titley told the 37th annual Merriman School that the return of the leprechaun as a symbol of Ireland "is because we have no symbols of our own that we can happily agree on". In a searing critique of modern Ireland, Mr Titley said: "We have embraced capitalism with a fervour that would put any fat American capitalist to shame; and most sinisterly of all, we have happily chucked out any concern for the poor of the world."

In a paper entitled "Gnawing the same old bone: how Ireland has not changed at all!", Mr Titley said that it is only a hollow cliché to suggest that things are changing more rapidly now than ever before.

Mr Titley is head of the Irish department at St Patrick's College, Drumcondra, Dublin.

He said: "The generation of people who were born in this country in the first two decades of the 20th century saw the coming of the radio, the cinema, the aeroplane, television, electricity; they lived through a war of independence, a civil war, two world wars.

"In every generation there are massive social upheavals. We always seem to imagine a time when life was static, some time in the not too distant past, but usually before we were born."

He added: "The single most salient and defining feature of Irish intellectual discourse is our never-ending obsession with ourselves, with our identity, or lack of it, with who we are, if we are anyone at all, and all that tired and fatuous discussion that takes place without cease or irony in academia, in learned journals, in summer schools, and in lectures, like this one.

"We also distinguish ourselves by our readiness to dump whatever defining features we have and then to scramble madly for another.

"We ditched the language in large part in the 19th century and embraced the Catholic Church; the church is vanishing as quickly now as the language did then."

In a separate address, Fianna Fáil was accused of jettisoning vision for a managerial, ideology-free approach.

Historian Kevin Whelan of the Keough-Notre Dame Centre said the party had lost its way.

"They have become not policy makers, but policy takers and usually imported from the US . . . with the problems associated with them."