Celtic Tiger Ireland is dead. Long live the Celtic Turkey, writes Kate Holmquist.
I was rooting, or should I say gobbling, for Dustin on Saturday night as we fought over the mobile to text our vote, as the older children saw no one worth voting for but certainly didn't want to see my 10-year-old voting for a turkey. It turns out my 10-year-old, like Dustin, had his finger on the zeitgeist.
The delightfully camp Eurovision is so monstrously bad that it has raised bad taste to a fine art and all we have left is irony. We have the turkey we deserve, a bird with a swollen Charles J beak sending up the national pride we used to feel in the Eurovision and stripping it down to its essential meaning - Irlande Douze Points, recalling the days before the infamous Tiger when douze points were all we had. Irish Eurovision songs have always been turkeys (from an aesthetic perspective, whether they won or not) and so now we have a turkey presenting us with our own bad taste, our utter cultural confusion in a golf-course land of women in tanks running each other off the road on their way to the spa.
We have secondary and university students asking themselves why they were born into lives of unceasing career competition when they don't even agree with the definition of "success" that's being imposed on them. It's not enough for Ireland to get douze points, now every single individual has to get douze points in the glitzy, skirt-ripping success race that Ireland has become.
So let's turn it on its head and be deliberately awful, says Dustin. How more Dadaist, more surreal, more postmodern can you get? (By the way, Ireland is amongst the top five turkey-eating countries in the world, along with Israel.) I love Dustin's attitude the same way I love the fact that D4 is set to get a clumsy postcode of D04123 (and various permutations thereof).
I love him because he's challenging the snobbery that for so long has made Ireland a self-satisfied place so dull that many of the truly talented leave, and not just for the tax breaks.
We like to think that we're terribly sophisticated here, oh so global, so chic - when really we're just a nation of over-spending chavs. Tow the island over to a spot a few miles offshore of New Jersey (the D04123s will insist on Connecticut, but that's another day's referendum) and we'd fit right in. Our forty shades of green have been replaced with 40 shades of Farrow & Ball white.
When I began living in Ireland in 1979 (I mention this only to preempt those inclined to say, 'if you don't like it, go back to where you came from, you American'), the foundations of "good taste" were only being discovered. Those in the know were purging themselves of swirly carpets and hand-knit jumpers and three-piece velveteen suites, along with the glass-fronted cabinets of crystal, china and whimsical shepherdess ornaments. The pioneers of good taste imported their totems from Habitat in the UK (no IKEA then) and served exotic avocados as a starter (prawns optional) before an equally daring main course of spaghetti bolognese and garlic bread.
No one questioned the fact that a handful of people with connections in politics, business and law were the only ones who could afford villa holidays in Spain and France. The package holiday to Porto Vuerto was a luxury, and deep, year-round tans were considered the height of posh. Now that nearly everyone - or so it seems - can afford not just villa holidays but villas, the bar gets raised higher and higher. Pale is in. Cosmetic surgery, perfect teeth, ski holidays, marquees for children's birthday parties, children who can't afford ski holidays and clothing budgets of €300 per month thinking they're "poor", women with handbags that cost what a second-hand car used to, and "colour me beautiful" wardrobes. Everyone aspiring to have a lifestyle instead of a life.
Our children are so fed up with it that they're global travellers now, looking for a better life somewhere else the way green-shaded Irish-Americans used to do when they came here in search of thatched roofs and rundown castles, kind B&B ladies and turf fires. We don't want any of that. We look for surfing. The Australian gap year has become essential to Irish third-level students, who see the ads on TV with the Australian girl in the bikini saying, "Where the hell are ya?"
For the Irish, it's more a question of "Who the hell are we?" Dustin would doubtlessly accuse me of taking him too seriously and he'd be right. Who knows how the voting bloc formerly known as Eastern Europe will vote. They may just think, Ireland's lost it.
We need to lose it. Our institutionalised snobbery, our social climbing, our materialism, our tolerance of corruption. Because when we lose it, maybe we can make something better out of it. A silk purse out of a turkey's feathers, perhaps.
