Fintan O'Toole looks back at the year that destroyed our faith in Official Ireland and marked the end of the best times in our collective lives
Since, in 2002, the Republic finally marked the end of the long fusion of Church and State, it seems appropriate to look for a new iconic patroness to replace the Blessed Virgin Mary. The logical choice might be Blessed Viv Nicholson. Nicholson, a miner's wife, came to fame in England in 1961 when she won £150,000 (the equivalent of £3 million in today's money) on the pools. She made herself a modern icon when the papers asked her what she was going to do with the money and she replied: "I'm going to spend, spend, spend!". Which, in a blizzard of booze, men, fur coats and fast cars, she did. She ended up broke and with a serious drink problem, which surely makes her a suitable icon for the Ireland of 2002.
It is hard to think of a figure who better embodies Ireland after the boom. Cinderella after the ball, perhaps, hobbling along on one glass slipper, followed by a team of mice pulling a pumpkin. But Cinders was a sweet, modest girl, and Kathleen Ní Houlihan on the razzle-dazzle has been more like one of the vulgar, dolled-up Ugly Sisters. And there's no Prince Charming out there looking to save us.
This was the year when High Jinks turned to High Anxiety. In a Guinness/Amarach survey, published in March, a massive 44 per cent of people agreed: "I worry sometimes about how much money I have borrowed and whether I'll be able to pay it back."
It is a fair bet that by the end of the year, as the illusory nature of the Government's feel-good general election campaign became ever more obvious, that figure had slipped beyond 50 per cent. It was payback time, and we weren't confident of being able to meet the bills.
This was the year when it finally dawned on us that "Spend, spend, spend!" is not a sophisticated social strategy. In both the public and private spheres, the ability of our leaders to throw vast amounts of money down the drain was never more starkly evident.
We had the long-running farce of the Bertie Bowl - the first act being the bizarre revelation that the contract for the pool had been awarded to a shelf company that no longer existed, and the second the final abandonment of the rest of the project after the waste of hundreds of millions of euro. And, just to show that the private sector can screw up just as spectacularly, one of Ireland's leading companies, AIB, allowed an obscure trader in Baltimore to lose $691 million.
We have lived through the best years of our collective lives, with phenomenal economic growth, relative peace on the island, and virtually full employment. Yet we are left with the lowest life expectancy in the EU, horrendous levels of functional illiteracy, a quarter of children living in poverty, health services in constant crisis, many of our future citizens having their first encounter with the State in primary schools that are little better than slums, and many people with disabilities and their carers still consigned to a life of endless misery.
All of this at a time of fabulous affluence for the elite. The new gloom should not blind us to the fact that many people have done immensely well out of the boom, and are all set to continue raking in the cash. One of the most striking reflections of this other Irish reality was buried in the Commercial Property supplement of The Irish Times, which revealed that Irish investors spent well over €1 billion in the commercial property market in the UK in 2002, making Ireland the second biggest foreign source of commercial property financing there after the US.
Clearly, some Irish people have become so rich that a downturn in the Irish economy is a mere matter of detail. Virtually every property sold in London's exclusive Bond Street in the second half of the year was bought by an Irish investor. Even more strikingly, at least €250 million spent by Irish investors in the UK was in the form of cash. And the expectation is that this trend will continue next year.
If we find it hard to get our heads around this other reality, it may be because we have been talking about change for so long that it is easy to forget that much in Ireland, both in the physical and the cultural realms, is still new and raw.
Physically, the 2002 census showed us that 324,000 Irish people have been born since 1996, and in the same period we've had more than 150,000 more immigrants than emigrants. (Many of the immigrants, of course, are returning Irish emigrants, but many, too, are from Africa and central Europe.) Places that were small have become suddenly big. The population of Lucan, in west Dublin, trebled in the last six years. Rural communities all over Leinster have become suburbs and dormitory towns.
Culturally, we are still grappling with big changes. Divorce, which was slow to become a common phenomenon, is now rising towards 3,000 a year. The number of home Internet connections, is increasing towards the 300,000 mark. And most of all, we are still getting used to the fact that most of what we thought we knew about Official Ireland was wrong.
This was the year when the facades that have been weather-beaten and dilapidated for over a decade finally collapsed. The Ansbacher and Flood reports exposed the interior of the recent past and showed us definitively that it was not the poor-but-honest abode of public memory. Its rooms were occupied by magicians who could make vast wealth disappear into fantastical Caribbean realms, far beyond the grasp of the Revenue. And by fixers who could manipulate democracy with well-greased hands.
Yet these revelations have had almost no political effect. The general election in May showed that Bertie Ahern's popularity has not been damaged by his own connections with Charles Haughey or his extraordinarily cautious approach to corruption within his party.
Michael Lowry, who was found by the McCracken tribunal to have cynically evaded taxes and broken the exchange control laws, was comfortably re-elected in Co Tipperary. Beverly Cooper-Flynn, found by a jury of her peers to have colluded in tax evasion when she was a banker, strolled home in Co Mayo. John Ellis, who was given £25,000 of public money from Charles Haughey's party leader's account, had no bother in Sligo-Leitrim. Among the revellers celebrating the Fianna Fáil successes at the RDS in Dublin was the builder Michael Bailey, fiercely criticised in the Flood report.
One reason for all of this may be that morality has got such a bad name. One of the strange realities of Ireland in 2002, indeed, was that the public seemed more inclined to forgive politicians than churchmen. This was one of the worst years in the entire history of the Irish Catholic church. The increasingly pathetic response of bishops to the activities of paedophiles within the priesthood did more damage to the church than the Penal Laws of the 18th century.
Whereas the repression of centuries had served only to strengthen the bond between church and people, two TV programmes - BBC's Suing the Pope and Mary Raftery's Prime Time documentary Cardinal Secrets - stretched the loyalty of many Catholics far beyond breaking point. The resignation in April of arguably the most talented member of the hierarchy, Brendan Comiskey of Ferns, would have been earth-shattering a decade ago. Yet, in the church's annus horribilis of 2002, it was almost forgotten by the autumn amid the painful flounderings of the institution's leader, Cardinal Desmond Connell.
The scale of the church's humiliation can be measured by the fact that even a deeply distrusted political establishment had more public moral authority than the once almighty episcopal arbiters of faith and morals. Irish people's faith in the impartiality of State law may have been badly shaken, but set against the claims of canon law, there was simply no contest.
In the history books, 2002 will be remembered as the year when the informal but extremely powerful alliance of Church and State that had shaped Independent Ireland for 80 years finally collapsed. The widespread contempt of politicians for church attempts to hide behind canon law was one marker. The other was the failure in the abortion referendum in March of what must be surely be the last attempt to make Catholic teaching the basis for State law.
The defeat of the referendum showed that there is no longer political capital to be gained by courting conservative Catholicism. That is the one lesson that politicians don't forget. And the reason for that is simple: conservative Catholicism has lost the moral high ground.
What the child abuse scandals have done to the church is far more serious than the slow decline of religious practice over the last 25 years. Many of those who drifted away as an inevitable consequence of the emergence of a more urban and secular society were probably lukewarm to begin with. The people most deeply hurt by the failures of the last few years, on the other hand, are the core believers.
An interesting indicator of traditional, deep-seated devotion is the three-day penitential pilgrimage to Lough Derg. In her new book Irish Catholicism Since 1950, Louise Fuller gives figures for the annual number of pilgrims since the end of the second World War. It is striking that even in 1992, the number - 22,122 - was still pretty much the average of what it had been in the glory days of Irish Catholicism. Over the next 10 years, however, it suddenly collapsed. By 2001, at 11,079, it was down to half of what it had been. If the pilgrims are drifting away, the church is in real trouble.
With what used to be the great source of certainty so obviously at sea, we were left timid and anxious. The underlying theme of political life in 2002 was: "Stick with nurse for fear of worse". The Government bucked the trend of decades and was comfortably re-elected, not because we loved them, but because we hadn't the collective nerve to trust an unconvincing alternative.
There was an element of primitive magic in the superstitious belief that if the crowd who were lucky enough to be in office during the boom were still around, the boom itself might somehow continue.
Political anxiety manifested itself in various ways. We were suckered by Government promises and reassurances - hospital waiting lists to be wiped out by the end of the year, for example - not because they were especially convincing but because we desperately wanted to believe them. The voters returned a number of hitherto unknown family doctors, as if looking for the people who make you better when you're feeling sick.
And the heady rebellion against the Establishment in the first Nice Treaty referendum meekly petered out in the second. Blowing raspberries at the big boys in Brussels was all very well in the days when Charlie McCreevy's rhetorical champagne went to our heads. But in more anxious times, we were glad to shuffle shame-facedly back into line.
Amid the competing realities of wealth and squalor, of glaring failure unfolding in the afterglow of triumph, it was hard to blame the Irish for being deeply uncertain about what the past decade has actually meant.
An interesting snapshot of our collective state of mind as we emerged from the frantic boom times was provided by the Guinness/Amarach Consulting study, Quality of Life in Ireland. The survey underlying the study was carried out in November last year and published in March 2002. The economy was turning down at that stage, but since the feel-good factor has a long afterglow, this was probably, in psychological terms, the high water mark of the rising tide.
The study showed a fascinating ambivalence. On the one hand, the proportion of Irish people who felt "very satisfied" with life in general - 38 per cent - was no higher than it had been in 1980. The huge increase in national wealth didn't seem to make us much happier. On the other hand, the rise in the economy over the same period did make us much less miserable. It seems, in other words, that the boom stopped us from feeling sorry for ourselves, but didn't necessarily make us feel great.
Predictably, people's perceptions of whether or not their quality of life had improved in the boom years from the mid-1990s onwards, were heavily influenced by economics and geography. Nearly 30 per cent of people felt that their quality of life had not improved, and they were significantly more common in Dublin and in the poorer socio-economic classes.
The boom also made us much more selfish and less intellectually curious. In 1989, nearly half of Irish people asked what they would do if they had more money, said they would help a good cause. Now, that figure is down to a quarter. In 1989, 36 per cent of us thought we would use the extra cash to improve our level of knowledge. Now, just 28 per cent of us think that. Conversely, in 1989, 45 per cent of us thought we would use a bigger income to enjoy ourselves more. Now, that figure has soared to 57 per cent.
The survey also showed another striking ambivalence: we were more likely to be excited, but less likely to feel that we were actually achieving anything. In 1986, 48 per cent of us said that we had felt particularly excited about something in the last month. This rose in 2002 to 55 per cent. But the sense of having accomplished something in the last month declined in the same period from 68 per cent to 60 per cent.
This picture of more enthusiasm and less achievement could stand as a summary of what happened during the boom years. We changed our culture from relatively easy-going nonchalance to the frantic pursuit of money and pleasure. But for all the new get-up-and-go we were not always sure where we were going.
For vulnerable people, the psychological cost of living in this state of uncertainty and anxiety can be intolerable. Suicide, for example, has become an epidemic and it is getting worse. In the first half of 2002, 289 Irish women died from breast cancer. In the same period, 199 people, mostly men, died by their own hand - a significant increase from the 174 suicide deaths in the first half of 2001.
This is the sharp end of our confusions, but they were just as evident in more trivial issues to which we paid far more attention. Looking back, it may seem hard to believe that we spent half the year obsessing about Roy Keane. We did so, of course, largely as an exercise in sheer escapism. Yet in the drama surrounding Irish soccer's heroic villain, something else was being played out. It crystallised better than any other event our ambivalences and anxieties.
The Manchester United captain is the perfect exemplar of the new boom-time Ireland: rich, upwardly mobile and driven by a ruthless work ethic. He doesn't recognise the concept of heroic failure. He despises mediocrity and laziness.
This Ireland, however, is a recent and still rather raw phenomenon. Around it there is the lingering legacy of a relatively poor society in which it made sense to be grateful for small mercies. The attitude that Keane attacked in Saipan might have served as a national motto for the last two centuries: have a good time whatever the result.
Maybe we were so divided over Roy Keane because we're still not sure which of these attitudes best suits us. We've had the relentless drive towards riches, but it hasn't banished the spectre of unheroic failure. We've had the good times but we can't be too impressed with the result.