INTO THE ABYSS?: In an edited extract from a new book, Michael Cronin looks at Ireland's shift from a country defined by geography to a country defined by time. For the Internet, travel, and business, speed is everything - but what are we rushing into?
What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning? Starting united both at normal walking pace from Beresford place they followed in the order named Lower and Middle Gardiner streets and Mountjoy Square, west: then at reduced pace with interruptions of halt, bearing right, Temple street, north, as far as Hardwicke place.
- James Joyce, Ulysses
The appearance of these leisurely, happy-go-lucky people sitting in the middle of the main street of the busiest quarter of the city banishes the tension otherwise inseparable from metropolitan thoroughfares. It is not merely that pedestrians sit or lounge about: the curious fact is that no one appears to walk fast on O'Connell Street.
- Chiang Yee, The Silent Traveller in Dublin (1953)
In Dublin, there's still an accident on Ratoath Road, near Cappagh. There's a minor accident on Thomas Street but it's not much of a problem. Now with his view of what's happening, it's over to Bob in the AA Sky Patrol : "So far, it's pretty much business as usual in Dublin. Firhouse very heavy but the real hot spot so far is the Lucan Road, which is extremely heavy inbound I'll have more details later from the AA Sky Patrol."
-Trevor Keegan, AA Roadwatch
James Joyce is commonly thought of as the architect of the word who would allow the city to be reconstructed sentence by sentence, street by street. He gives place a voice.
Chiang Yee's Dubliners, on the other hand, are secure not so much in a sense of place, as in a sense of pace. They progress leisurely through the main thoroughfare of the city, observed by the "Silent Traveller" in an O'Connell Street with no traffic lights.
The city viewed from the Automobile Association's helicopter, 50 years later, has been emptied of its happy-go-lucky flâneurs. Now, there are only vehicles and the obstacles to their progress. The acceleration of movement means that placenames are increasingly abstract junctions in the circulatory system of the city. What we are seeing is a shift from a city and country defined by geography to a city and country defined by time. Not only Dublin, but Ireland as a whole has been profoundly affected by the revolution in speed which has seen time take precedence over place.
For centuries, political conquest was as much a question of geo-strategic interest as material advantage. From the arrival of the Spanish in Kinsale to the appearance of the French in Killala, Britain felt that geography had done her no favours by placing an island of uncertain political loyalties to her west. It is surely appropriate that Ulysses begins on the top of a Martello Tower, a landmark of colonial geo-strategic nervousness, defining Ireland's place, in the British military scheme of things, as the back door, the exposed flank that must be guarded at all costs. When John Major declared in the Downing Street Declaration, in 1994, that Britain no longer had any strategic interest in Ireland, he was, in effect, declaring that geography was politically no longer destiny.
However, physical location did not only determine the political fortunes of Ireland, it also had far-reaching economic consequences. Physical proximity to a large market meant an over-concentration of activity in that particular market and over-reliance on low value-added exports of agricultural produce. In the absence of a large domestic market for goods, Irish export-led manufacturing was seen to be hampered by geographical distance from potential foreign markets. Hence, "peripherality" would become a key element in Irish applications for EU funding from 1973 onwards. Ireland's position on the edge of Europe was the commanding principle of economic disadvantage and EU structural funds were seen as compensation for distance.
Ironically, it was this funding that contributed to the undermining of the financial advantage of geographical disadvantage. A significant share of both European and central exchequer funding in the 1980s went towards the modernisation of the telecommunications network. A latecomer to technological modernity, Ireland was able to exploit the latest versions of telecommunications technologies to create a network-based economy. In other words, the combination of computer and telecommunication networks allowed the Irish economy to overcome the obstacle of insularity and peripherality.
In the case of a translator, for example, living at the base of Mount Errigal, in Co Donegal, using a fax machine or the Internet, they could send a translation as quickly to a client in Berlin as a translator physically located in the same street in the German capital.
The establishment of the International Financial Services Centre, the strong growth in call-centres, telesales, telemarketing and other allied services, are all based on a network model of economic development. Peripherality is no longer geographically but chronologically defined. It is defined by the speed with which information-rich (financial products, on-line support, telemarketing of producer and consumer services) and design-rich (popular music, web design, advertising) goods and services can be delivered to potential consumers. The comparative advantage of (small) nations is to take the waiting out of wanting.
If the Irish Pub has become a globalised product, appearing from Tallinn to Tokyo, the tipplers themselves appeared to have followed in their wake, moving backwards and forwards between Ireland and elsewhere. The diaspora have emerged as a metaphor for the nomadic dynamic of Irish globalisation. The Irish Pub may have gone global, but locals still exist, countless thousands of them, and they find themselves marginalised by economic circumstances.
Zygmunt Bauman observed in Globalization: The Human Consequences that what appears as globalisation for some means localisation for others; signalling a new freedom for some, upon many others it descends as an uninvited and cruel fate. Mobility climbs to the rank of the uppermost among the coveted values, and the freedom to move - perpetually a scarce and unequally distributed commodity - fast becomes the main stratifying factor of our late-modern or postmodern times.
More romantically-inclined travel writers often present the tar squiggles on empty west of Ireland landscapes as attractive studies in deceleration. To enter these landscapes is to change time zone. Travelling to Ireland means going far (backwards chronologically) without going far (forwards spatially).
So what of the inhabitants of the different time zone?
Siobhán Airey, in Challenging Voices, a report on poverty and marginalisation in the west of Ireland, noted that a theme that emerged was that of mobility. "Transport is critical to gaining access to services, and the \ region is characterised by poorly serviced country roads and an irregular and inadequate public transport service."
For the elderly or those without a family car, the choice is stark, either you pay for transport or you go without. Entitlement to free transport means little in the absence of an adequate system. As one elderly woman observed, it was like being given a saddle without a horse.
If one-third of the Irish population is at risk of poverty (with 9 to 15 per cent experiencing persistent poverty), two-thirds of the poor live in rural rather than urban areas. Of those living at or below the poverty line (60 per cent of average income), the position of households headed by women has disimproved continuously during the years of economic boom and speed revolution. Distance is less an external, objective given in any society than a social product. As Bauman notes, "its length varies depending on the speed with which it may be overcome (and, in a monetary economy, on the cost involved in the attainment of that speed)."
Tourists can now get to the west of Ireland quickerthan ever before and the construction of each by-pass on the Dublin-Galway road means urban elites can reach their holiday homes in a shorter and shorter period of time. For those living in poverty, however, the distances are still as great as ever. The tourists come and go but the poor remain. The locals in Seamus Deane's memorable phrase, stay quaint and stay put.
The mobility deficit in Irish society is expressed at two levels.
Firstly, if "geography" in yuppy parlance is "history" for the Irish nomadic elite, then history - past and present - for the disadvantaged is still largely a matter of geography.
Long, winding, pot-holed roads serving scattered communities are decorative details on postcards, but they do not make for economies of scale for a transport system. The revenue imperative thus curtails services and further isolates the already isolated for whom the shape of the landscape can be cruelly confining.
The second level relates not only to access to services and opportunities, but to mental well-being and positive self-image. Coping with permanent indebtedness is extremely stressful, but it is precisely those groups who are continually trying to juggle with money that have no possibility of going on a day trip or a holiday to allow them to relax or switch off for a while. In addition, in consumer societies, where mobility has become a supreme virtue, the immobile are the losers. Similarly, in the absence of properly-funded childcare facilities, many women who stay at home to rear their children find themselves doubly penalised.
Not only are they often not able to get out of the home to participate in leisure activities, but they frequently suffer from a poor self-image, linked to their real and perceived lack of mobility. Stasis is stigma. Those who are grounded by poverty, disability or prejudice are keenly aware of an isolation that is both social and geographical. They are Irish locals who can watch the Irish globals Riverdancing from Paris to Paraguay, but who find themselves trapped in the slow lane of neglect and indifference. A striking feature of the current situation in Ireland is that while the mobility of one group is celebrated as the outward sign of the competitive excellence, the mobility of another fuels fear, paranoia and suspicion.
The number of asylum seekers in Ireland as a percentage of the total population is very small (less than 1 per cent), but in recent years sections of the popular press and national media have engaged in a sustained campaign of scaremongering that has vilified asylum seekers as dangerous spongers.
Asylum seekers are on the move, it was argued, so they must be on the make. As Irish citizens find it easier and easier to travel abroad through the easing of border controls in Europe - and the waiving of visa restrictions in more and more countries - Ireland itself for non-nationals proves more and more impenetrable.
Mary Robinson on her election to the presidency, in 1990, asked the people of Ireland to come dance with her. The call to step forth appeared to be triumphantly answered in Riverdance, a seven-minute Eurovision intermission that has become a global phenomenon. For Irish media intellectuals, Riverdance was the incontrovertible proof of Ireland's enrolment in the chorus line of modernity.
Fintan O'Toole in "Unsuitables from a Distance: The Politics of Riverdance", an essay in his collection The Ex-Isle of Erin: Images of Global Ireland, sees Riverdance as a kind of post(modern) answer to De Valera's Crossroads. The stalwart lads and comely maidens in the Riverdance roadshow were the reality of an Ireland we had only dreamed of, "What made it \ more than an international business product was the way it liberated locked-up elements of Irish tradition, the way it became, quite self-consciously, a parable of the modernisation of Irish culture."
The parable of modernisation is a hymn to speed. Michael Flatley, we were told, was the fastest step dancer in the world. Moya Doherty, in the memo which detailed her original idea for the project, placed special emphasis on the importance of acceleration.
The tempo is indeed fast and the Irish sociologist Barbara O'Connor notes that, "\ne of the most striking characteristics of Riverdance is the fast pace of the dance which generates a sense of excitement and energy, and points to the virtuosity and skill of individual performances". But she adds, "the dancing is at a much faster pace than in either local or national competitive performance situations."
The slow lane of ornate variations in stepping technique and style are abandoned for fast-track footwork that maximises rhythmic sound.
The permanent troupes that are named after rivers - the Lagan, Lee and Liffey - flow unimpeded through global space. It was therefore highly appropriate that it was one of the Riverdance dance troupes that performed at the launch of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt.
The bank whose explicit aim is to remove any remaining obstacles to the flow of capital through the EU and that has resisted pressures to publically fund social legislation in member states could readily identify with the profitable velocity of one of Ireland's foremost cultural industries.
Frictionless circulation may be the Utopia of global financial capital but on the roads and streets of Irish cities, it is a car dealer's myth.
The unprecedented levels of traffic congestion in Irish cities threaten the fastest-growing economy in Europe, almost as if place too has perversely ambushed time. The Czech writer, Milan Kundera, once remarked that when people try to remember something, their step falters. They slow down on the street, brow furrowed, trying to tease out information from their reluctant memory. The faster you go, it seems, the quicker you forget. Maybe it is time that we decided to slow down and stopped trying to get whole sections of Irish society to belt up. In this way we might remember where we have come from and what other places we might be going to, and how we might re-invent the place that is Ireland.
Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the Global Economy, edited by Peadar Kirby, Luke Gibbons and Michael Cronin, is published by Pluto Press, price €25.80