In early September 2008, weeks before the bank guarantee, Brian Cowen appeared on the Late Late Show to celebrate the opening of the new Wexford Opera House. It was "community initiative and resilience and vision" that had brought the opera house to Wexford, he said. "That's the defining characteristic in Irish life that has helped us through much adversity in our history."
In January 2011, Enda Kenny said he intended Ireland to become “the best small country in the world in which to do business”. Later, in Washington, he told a business audience, “My number is a public number – you can call me anytime.” In July 2012, at a rally in Cavan in support of Seán Quinn, Fr Brian D’Arcy said, “We have a right, a duty to stand by one of our families and neighbours when they are in trouble. And nobody will take that away from us.”
This last quote is from Niamh Hourigan’s book; the others could easily be. Between them, they tell a story of how a value system forged in historical adversity has adapted to fit modern times, with sometimes perverse effects.
This is the story of the recurrent conflict between rules and relationships; for Hourigan, it is the key to understanding where we have come from, and where we are going.
In the Cowen quote, community relationships are the bedrock for progress. In the Kenny quotes, a similar emphasis on relationships is accompanied by an implicit diminution of the value of rules (don’t worry about the red tape, he suggests). For Brian D’Arcy, here, the rules are irrelevant: the strength of relationships trumps all.
"The way rules and relationships are interwoven is different in every society, and this creates a unique pattern, rather like a fingerprint," Hourigan writes. In Rule-Breakers, she seeks to "map this fingerprint" for Ireland and trace it in the detritus of the crisis.
She starts in the colonial era, citing the author Elaine Byrne’s argument that one of the long-term consequences of the 1801 Act of Union was a popular suspicion of the rules of the State. Not only were those rules alien; they were also administered corruptly.
Part of the cultural response to this was a retreat into the realms of family and community, largely impervious to the incursions of the colonial forces. Ordinary life came to require a “dual morality”, where people would pay token respect to the formal rules laid down by the colonial authority in public, but owe higher loyalty to relationships in private.
Hourigan finds echoes of this elsewhere in the post-colonial world, citing Peter Ekeh’s work on Nigeria, where local authorities are notoriously corrupt, but “ethnic unions” handle comparable sums of money constructively and honestly.
Kinship-based society
During the 19th century, as agrarian economies across Europe industrialised, kinship-based societies gave way to more impersonal, urbanised ones. Factory work and city life imposed more rules on people; in parallel, the struggle to improve working and living conditions built union and political movements that promoted an ethos of universal, rule-based fairness. In Ireland, though, the agrarian economy, in which the family was often the key economic unit, remained the norm.
There were counterbalancing forces. O’Connell and Parnell promoted a belief in the primacy of law and peaceful politics. The introduction of mass education, and later of standardised State exams, promoted respect for standards and rules.
And a “devotional revolution” in Catholicism brought a new, rules-based discipline to religious practice in Ireland. In particular, the new emphasis on rules governing sexual behaviour found ready acceptance in a society traumatised by famine and seeking a means to regulate population growth and land distribution.
The universality of Catholic discipline would prove to be a crucial force in the early decades of the new, independent State. The creation of that State was planned and effected in covert networks based on extraordinarily strong relationships.
In other post-colonial societies, relationship-based liberation groups quickly became sources of corruption. In Ireland, though, the individual integrity of the leaders of the young State and the status of the Catholic Church, to which the State was willing to subcontract huge areas of policy, worked to keep such corruption in check.
As Ireland belatedly modernised, the influence of multinationals, of Europe and of improving education standards meant a growing prominence of rules in Irish life. Still, the power of relationships endured. As Ireland grew wealthier, this had a corrupting effect in two key ways.
Political elite
As a business elite emerged, with close ties to the political elite, the same emphasis on relationships that was fundamental to the rest of Irish life allowed these elites to reinforce each other in a “parasitic growth on everyday intimacy in Irish society”.
And, even where flagrant corruption was not a problem, the emphasis on the value of relationships conspired against diversity of opinion and leadership, ensuring the ubiquity of what we would come to know as “groupthink”.
It hardly seems necessary to outline the role of this corruption of relationship-based values in the crisis: the bank boards that didn’t question the transgression of rules on good lending practices; the regulators that supped with the bankers; the builders that donated to the politicians; the “golden circle” of board members that scratched each other’s backs; the critics who were told to “put on the green jersey”.
The particular value of Hourigan’s work is that it allows us to root this corruption in a wider cultural malaise, without excusing those responsible. Irish people may be scathing about the “strong inter-elite relationships” at the heart of the crisis, but use many of the same behaviours in everyday life.
To take the example of politics, she cites studies which found that Irish TDs spent a majority of their time on constituency work, that half of this work involved making representations to rule-based systems, and that one in five people had made contact with their TD in the preceding five years.
Hourigan’s point is not that a reliance on relationships is wrong per se. But a value that was a source of strength in adversity led to a chronic imbalance in our value system between weak rules and strong relationships. In the financial sector, in particular, this chronic condition became a pathology.
One might expect Irish society, thus, to be crying out for a new rule-based culture. But, here again, Hourigan sees echoes of the colonial era: ordinary people have seen the rules (ie pay your debts and your taxes) implemented unfairly. The consequence appears to be a further undermining of respect for the State.
Is there a cure? Our value system needs to be “recalibrated”, she suggests; greater emphasis on transparency (a strategy of “making the intimacy visible”) will help. Ultimately, though, the cultural shift required may be less about the politicians and more about the voters. They could start by reading this book.
Colin Murphy is the author of the play Guaranteed! and film The Guarantee, and is working on a play about the bailout for Fishamble
