When I was a small boy my mother used to tell me what life was like for her in the early years of the Free State. She said that during the winter months she would walk to school in her old man’s boots; during the summer months she’d go in her bare feet. When the Emergency brought food shortages, so she said, they’d put jam in their cups of tea to sweeten it. Like my father, she was part of the postwar Brawn Drain, and came to London when the No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs signs were prominently displayed in lodging houses. As my uncle said after she died in the late 1970s, she had a hard life.
I often think of her when I hear about what has happened to Ireland in the wake of the demise of the Celtic Tiger. My cousins tell me of cuts to salaries in the public sector, of ghost estates knocked down before the houses are even put on the market, of their children emigrating just as my mother and father did to find work. Where did it all go so wrong?
There are no easy answers and this perhaps is not the best place to rehearse them. But the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger has been the biggest political event in Ireland since the end of the Troubles. It's a subject I try to explore in my new book, Fools & Mad, a book-length poem that satirises the whole debacle through the mouths of 12 of Ireland's most prominent poets, from James Joyce and WB Yeats back to Oscar Wilde, James Clarence Mangan and Brian Merriman to Mad Sweeney.
The book's title comes from Swift's Epitaph:
He gave the little Wealth he had,
To build a House for Fools and Mad:
And shew’d by one satyric Touch,
No Nation wanted it so much.
Swift left money to found an asylum, St Patrick's Hospital, near Kilmainham in Dublin. It's still functioning – I was there myself in 2012, at the invitation of the playwright, actor and musician Dylan Tighe, whose show Record was playing that year at the New Theatre in Temple Bar. I was part of discussions after the show, and read from my work on an excursion to the hospital.
In Fools & Mad I meet a figure I take to be in fancy dress while out walking by the river. He takes me to a large Palladian palace in the woods, and reveals himself to be Jonathan Swift. The palace is a dream version of his gift to Ireland, the asylum he left to the nation in his will. He introduces me to 12 Irish poets incarcerated in his "House for Fools and Mad".
Once he has introduced me to all of the poets, Swift releases them and takes them to a clearing in the forest, the full moon shining down, a long table and a bench before us. Kathleen Ni Houlihan emerges from the verge, a shabby-looking creature in front of her. It is the Celtic Tiger and the 12 poets are to form a jury to put the tiger on trial in a Court of Poetry.
Fools & Mad deliberately echoes the satire of Merriman's The Midnight Court, in which the men of Ireland are put on trial by the women of Ireland, who berate them for their lack of virility.
But instead of the Queen of the Fairies being the final arbiter, as she is in The Midnight Court, I make Swift my judge, as – in the second half of the poem – the 12 poets debate the case against the Tiger. It's sort of Twelve Angry Men meets The Mad Hatter's Tea Party.
I made some very deliberate choices about the way the poem was structured. I decided to make the jury in the Court of Poetry all male. It seemed to me that Ireland's financial woes were caused by men, almost exclusively: bankers, businessmen, politicians. And the book's title is deliberately ambiguous: on the face of it, the Fools & Mad seem to be the poets themselves - I'm thinking of Dryden's famous lines: "Great wits are sure to madness near allied/And thin partitions do their bounds divide". However, as the poem progresses it's the Plain People Of Ireland themselves who seem to be indicted, until finally a figure emerges from the greensward to claim responsibility for the Tiger, and the reader is left to draw their own conclusions.
I also relocate Swift’s House for Fools & Mad to a large Palladian palace. This is meant to symbolise two implicit lines of argument in the book: that economics – “the dismal science”, as it is known, while concerning itself with formulae and calculations – the straight, rational lines of a Palladian architecture – is actually a House for Fools & Mad. Few economists – David McWilliams is an honourable exception – saw what was coming, which begs the question, “why not?”
The Palladianism of Swift’s House is also meant to evoke the White House, and the casino capitalism – sub-prime mortgages, derivatives, Lehman Brothers – in which America led the way before the crunch hit.
And why a Court of Poetry? This device, used by Irish poets to send up their Saxon oppressors after the decline of the Gaelic order, represents the relative lack of sanctions suffered by many of the perpetrators of what has befallen Ireland. Economics may seem to be as unpredictable as the weather, and the demise of the Celtic Tiger just one of those freaks of finances that has affected so many across the globe. But I don't think that's the case at all, and while Fools & Mad may not bring a single miscreant to justice it can embarrass every crook who is at liberty in Ireland while my cousin's children continue to emigrate.
John O’Donoghue is the author of Fools & Mad, published by Waterloo Press. His memoir, Sectioned: A Life Interrupted (John Murray, 2009), was awarded Mind Book of the Year in 2010
