You have to be a certain age to realise what an important event occurred 25 years ago this week. You have to have a memory which can reach back through the years and recall the world as it was before Margaret Thatcher, the greatest British prime minister of the 20th century, was elected, writes Kevin Myers.
For only those with a few years under the belt can understand the culture of dreary ineptitude in the pre-Thatcherite Anglophone Archipelago. Public service unions ruled both countries. RTÉ had about 28 unions, one of them the Seamen's Union, with two members at Montrose. Why? To climb the mast, of course. The ESB was worse. It had about 34 unions. Each union negotiated separately, and all negotiations had to pass through a vile thicket of "parities", "differentials" and "demarcations", appalling, toxic words which were worshipped like gods by the trade union movement. Management never ceased to negotiate, and negotiators developed tics in their eyes, as if they had been hooked by impatient anglers, and perhaps, twitching, might end it all by taking long walks from Dollymount Strand to Wales.
Twenty-five years ago, there were no good restaurants in Dublin. None. In 1980, the great Patrick Guilbaud arrived to bring light to the darkness, but his lantern burnt alone through the 1980s, simply because the market wasn't there for even a second good restaurant. Indeed, hotels were struggling: thus perished the great Royal Hibernian, and the Gresham moved resolutely down-market. We were a basket case.
As was the other half of the Anglopelago, even in the early days of the Thatcher regime. Indeed, because of the deeply entrenched nature of the problems in Britain, things were apparently going from bad to worse there. Corrupt trade unions effectively (so to speak) ran the newspaper and car manufacturing industries, though ineffectively for all, save their members and their hierarchies. When the proprietors of the Times tried to break the work practices that gave printers two or three times as much as journalists, they were opposed by - who else? - the National Union of Journalists.
This was stupidity mating with ideology to produce a deformed and moronic brontosaurus of an offspring. And because the NUJ didn't want to lose its membership in the Times, it allowed those journalists working there to remain as members, while "blacking" - ah, what fondly sinister memories that word brings! - the newspaper itself. NUJ members in The Irish Times were ordered by their union bosses in London not to print copy emanating from NUJ members in the Times. The editor, Douglas Gageby, responded by telling the NUJ that he would decide the contents of this newspaper. If they had other ideas, he would simply close the paper down until he was allowed do his job. He won.
Comparable battles were fought in countless factories across the Anglopelago, primarily in Britain. Often enough, individual managements were unaware of the broader battle under way, but fought the local fight because the only alternative was for the company to collapse. Both the Times and Independent Television were closed for months - but the largest and the most crucial battle was between the politically motivated National Mineworkers of Britain, which in 1974 had brought down Ted Heath's government, and Margaret Thatcher's administration.
Like all such social contests it was ugly and brutal, but it had to be fought, and won. Yet so unpopular were the stern measures Thatcher took in the twin battles to break union control of the economy and to drive down inflation, that but for the insane Argentine invasion of the Falklands, she would almost certainly have not been re-elected. The (admittedly, extremely unpleasant) nationalism the war aroused led to her re-election, thus giving her the time to create the Thatcher revolution.
There were awful sides to Thatcher, of course: her belief that you could solve the Northern problems simply by treating terrorists as common criminals, which they patently weren't, was utterly imbecilic and counter-productive. Yet paradoxically, the terrible hunger strikes opened up alternative strategies to the more questioning Sinn Féin-IRA leaders, which in time helped bring about the peace process.
As the British economy blossomed in the 1980s, ours stagnated: we were a wretched comedy, a sad and sterile Church-run backwater, in which condoms, divorce, pornography and abortion were all outlawed. Our best and brightest fled, as dismal government exchanged power with dismal government, even committing the cardinal sin of borrowing to finance current expenditure. Finally, the threat of the IMF taking over the economy caused a Fianna Fáil government to introduce discipline and vision in the management of our affairs.
It pains me to say this, but Charles Haughey was absolutely vital in this process; moreover, I was wrong on a previous occasion to play down the importance of his Financial Services Centre. It was a key element in the economic turn-round. And to be fair, our existing educational institutions, many of them Church-run, had laid the intellectual basis for the boom. Moreover, there was a cross-party Thatcherite consensus - to achieve growth, personal taxes had to be cut. No one used the T-word: but Ireland economically became the pre-eminent Thatcherite country in Europe.
The result? Bus queues in Darndale and Tallaght at 8 a.m. for people going to work, rather than lying in bed before shambling off to claim the dole, with thousands of people from a score of countries similarly queuing to partake of our miracle. Even the smallest communities in once-backward Ireland are models of bustling prosperity. No one else in modern, cool, right-on Ireland will say it, but I will. Thank you, Maggie.