The most interesting year in Irish history in the past century wasn't 1916 or 1921 or 1939 or 1948. It was 1989. That was the year when the Irish people decided that it was time to rescue the Irish State from the pathological fiscal imprudence which had made us not merely the laughing stock of the European Community, but also, unless things improved, a colonial region to be run by IMF district commissioners.
But that is only one reason why 1989 is so important. There is another, but related reason. That year, without any advertising programme or commercial reason to explain it, the Irish people largely abandoned loose-leaf tea for tea bags. Up until 1989, the Irish were unique in Europe. Tea consumption was overwhelmingly of loose leaf: 80 per cent, against 20 per cent in bags. In 1989, the proportions switched: for reasons nobody can explain, 80 per cent of tea-consumption was by bag, and only 20 per cent by loose leaf.
Social instrument
This is deplorable, to be sure, for the tea-bag was always a useful social instrument, rather as the baseball cap on a car-driver is today. It served as a sort of health warning: this person is to be avoided. Well, that was the case, until 1989: the tea-bag announced that the person who used it probably also smoked in bed, used nylon sheets, watched day-time television, ate tinned fruit cocktail and very possibly even had a pink frilly toilet-roll holder.
All that changed in 1989. Suddenly all sorts of decent people you might even consent to be seen in public with started using tea-bags. It was all very confusing - because by definition, tea-bags are naff. They involve making a drink from invisible tea and glued paper, and since they tend to be used individually in cups rather than in a teapot, they are less social, less communal.
And tea, much more than alcohol, has traditionally been the great social drink, across all classes, and all times of year. In fact the relationship between the Irish people and tea is unique: Irish suppliers, even in the most impoverished periods of the 19th century, always paid the highest prices for tea in the international markets, such was the demand for quality at home. In one single year, that ancient reverence for tea, and the rituals for tea, was overthrown. How was that possible?
The hive-mind made it possible. The tea-bag seemed more businesslike, less frivolous, more disciplined. No sitting around finishing a pot of tea. One cup, and then it's back to work. We were no longer going to be the laughing stock of Europe, the comic turn for visiting British journalists. We were going to make something of ourselves. It was in part a conscious decision, but with all sorts of subconscious expressions; and the deplorable triumph of the tea-bag was one of them.
The hive-mind is a wonderful asset. It can transform societies, as we have been transformed since 1989, by a common act of will. But it can also be a stultifying thing, inhibiting debate or discussion or the development of reason; especially as in its present form, it appears to be no more than secular common sense.
Simple judgments
Within the hive-mind, simple, politically correct judgments - Catholic priests are child-abusers, we must close Sellafield, the peace process is universally good, the West should cancel Third-World debts, we must advance the feminist agenda - have become social norms and dogmatic pieties, beyond questioning. And anyone who does raise doubts about any of these hive-mind issues can expect jeers and intellectual coercion. In other words, stay with the hive.
The Sellafield issue is a case in point, which is now reaching scandalous proportions. It was bad enough that An Post should spend public money subsidising an utterly ridiculous write-in campaign to Prince Charles on this; but now the entire Irish World Cup squad is being expected to back the "Close Sellafield" campaign.
What if one of them asks the question which will not go away, but which the anti-Sellafielders never discuss in public? What is to be done with the lethal radioactive material which is already there? It will remain lethal for at least a century, perhaps for centuries, and if unleashed could cause a global catastrophe. Is it to be moved? How? Where? And is this safer than leaving it where it already is?
Wish it away
And some footballer might say, quite reasonably, that he loathes Sellafield, and wishes it had never been built. But it is there now. History has bequeathed it to us, and we cannot simply wish it away. Yet wishing it away is precisely the objective of the Sellafield lobby, using the worst kind of illogical and emotive rabble-rousing, to the point where it has been linked in with Chernobyl.
Our dissenting footballer might gently point to the fact that the expert advisers who are trying to make Chernobyl safe are from Sellafield; that to compare the two is like using the Tay Bridge disaster as evidence that one shouldn't build railway lines over rivers, or the Titanic as proof of the folly of going to the sea in ships.
But he won't be listened to. For the hive-mind is at work, and heaven help the footballer who dissents, who says: No, life is more complicated than that, especially in matters of nuclear science. The moral mob, uniquely sponsored by a semi-State company, is on the rampage, and anyone who even questions the wit or wisdom of its goals can expect the usual diet of coercion and sneers. For what keeps the hive-mind as one is, of course, venom.