The Irish Times view on the year ahead: Imagining a new world

In this, the centenary year of the State's foundation, the tumult of the early 1920s will loom large over a country still grappling with the complex legacy of those years. It will be a time to reflect on 100 years of statehood – its successes and failures, its glory and its shame – and to consider its future. But the centenary falls at a moment when Ireland, like much of the world, is intensely absorbed in its present upheavals.

A once-in-a-century pandemic has upended social and economic life as much as any shock in the independent era. We do not know if the crisis will end this year, but we know it will end at some point and we know the questions its aftermath will pose. If 2022 is to be the year in which the world emerges from the pandemic, then decisions made this year could set the country’s course for a generation.

That is because crises have a way of forcing real, enduring change. There was a straight line from the Great Depression to the New Deal. The modern European welfare state was partly the result of the trauma of the second World War. The 1918 flu pandemic was often written out of the history of an era defined by the Great War, but today, from our vantage in a country where daily life is curtailed by restrictions, we have a better sense of how that earlier health crisis may profoundly have shaped attitudes and mentalities in Europe in the interwar years.

Political change

The Covid-19 pandemic has shaken a world prone to chronic complacency. If, amidst the terrible suffering it has inflicted, there are lessons to be drawn, the most important of them relates to our own vulnerability.

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Fragile health systems, unsustainable economic models, the illusion that nature can be bent to man’s will – all have been badly exposed. If that cannot rouse us to take seriously the epochal challenges presented by a rapidly heating planet, and to change our lives accordingly, then far greater trauma and dislocation await.

Big shocks by definition come at us quickly, but their effects can percolate slowly. We can see today that the financial crisis of more than a decade ago had relatively little effect on global banking or the capitalist system it underpins. But, in Ireland at least, it accelerated social and political changes that were already afoot.

The break-up of the old political duopoly at the heart of Irish politics might have taken a lot longer were it not for the radicalising effects of the crash, and the yearning it produced among young people in particular for a new way of doing things.

The anger of those who were forced to emigrate, or who stayed and struggled on only then to find themselves locked out of the housing market, is perhaps the most important force in our politics today. It was the same obstinate refusal to tolerate the way things were that drove some of the most positive social changes of the past decade, including the referendums on marriage equality and abortion rights.

Pressing questions

In a similar way, the pandemic has super-charged a trend towards greater State intervention. Overnight, things we were told could never happen became reality. The Government moved to top up private incomes. Evictions were banned. The private healthcare system was nationalised. These were temporary measures, but the fact that they occurred at all could change society in lasting ways.

Trying new things is invigorating; people get a taste for it. If a crisis-era conceptual frame could be applied to the country’s most pressing social problems, could they too be solved? Those problems are plain to see. Ireland may be rich, safe and relatively clean. But its benefits are unevenly spread. Tens of thousands of children live in poverty. Access to healthcare is too often determined by means rather than by need. A “free” education system is anything but. And a dysfunctional housing system entrenches social and generational inequalities by making it impossible for so many to find an adequate place to live.

In the background, meanwhile, are broader failings that have persisted for generations: an absence of real local government, lopsided regional development, poor urban planning, or an inability to see big projects to completion. In a post-Brexit world, larger strategic questions about how Ireland positions itself in Europe and how it manages the relationship with its self-isolating neighbour cannot be put off for much longer.

There are limits to this vision of post-pandemic purpose, of course. Debates on state intervention are not settled, and while the pandemic has given fresh force to ideas of social solidarity, it has also reinforced many people’s existing views. Nationalists and liberals have taken different insights from the experience; autocrats and democrats both believe their cause has been strengthened.

So the idea that a shifting national sensibility, still less a global one, could emerge from the pandemic this year is a fanciful one.

But what matters is that new questions are in play. The aftermath will belong to those with the audacity to answer them.