ONE of the central concerns of the Irish people is that we are a nation of individualists, and behaviourally this is probably true - as anyone observing Irish traffic or Irish crowds cheerfully littering will confirm. But in terms of ideas, it is not true. Intellectually and politically, Irish life clusters around a median consensus, and is exceedingly intolerant of those who, stray too far from that consensus. Once the church so governed today we have a new liberal statist priesthood, wielding a new set of croziers to bash any little lamb straying from the flock.
Essentially the statist position is clustered around the central tenet that whenever possible, the State knows best. The utter absurdity of this position is no greater than the notion that the Catholic Church of 10,000 virgins was in a good position to give advice on sexual matters. The absence of evidence, indeed, the clear evidence to the contrary, is hardly relevant to the authoritarian ideologue.
One of our national characteristics is that we are uneasy with ideas which stray too far from the median cluster, and when individuals begin to wander from the cluster, we send out verbal sheepdogs to bring them back, nipping at their heels with abuse.
In the 1950s, the central position, of the pack was deemed to be right wing today it is said to be left wing. The words, left, right, in Irish political life mean nothing. They are merely a politically acceptable locus of piety.
Nonsense
David Andrews encapsulated this handsomely the other night when he declared that Fine Gael was so right wing that it was off the spectrum. Now this was such nonsense as not to require an answer, but he was, classically, exhibiting the pack nervousness of Irish politics. The heretic once came from the "left". Now he comes from the "right". And the ingrained intellectual timidity of Irish politicians - who with few enough exceptions treat a fresh idea with the baffled horror of an angler who has reeled in a rattlesnake - almost certainly means that the accused will rush back to the pack rather than boast of their isolation from it.
There are no really right wing or left wing parties in Irish life. There are largely consensus politics, and the commonest key to the consensus is that the State knows best. It clearly doesn't. With the spectacular exception of the Industrial Development Authority, which has absorbed the free enterprise ethos totally, in virtually all areas in which the State has authority, there is incompetence, inertia, mismanagement and unanswerability with these qualities being generally accepted as a norm about which there is no complaint.
The other day it was directed off the N81 by a garda diversion just outside Dublin, along with all other traffic heading south towards Blessington. No further sign had been erected to redirect us to where we could rejoin our route. As it happened, I was happy to go Naas instead. Visitors to Ireland, however, hoping to go to Wicklow would have found themselves wandering directionless around Tallaght. They are probably there to this day. Had a private company behaved with such slovenly arrogance towards the public, there would have been uproar but because it was a State agency which was responsible, and it behaved just as we expect it to, there is silence.
Incompetence
Worse than silence the instinct of the statist political consensus is to direct state money at problems created by State incompetence. We are planning to spend hundreds of millions on this Luas system in Dublin, even before we properly manage existing traffic and impose existing laws. Largely because of the steculture of sloth and bureaucracy, it is hardly worth the enormous time and paperwork for individual gardai to prosecute motorists who drive in bus lanes or who halt in yellow boxes.
And because statist culture excuses state organisations from fiscal rectitude, even something as potentially profitable for the State as parking fines remains a largely ignored and even undiscussed option. Parking fines are anyway ludicrously low and are an inducement to illegality - they are virtually the same as lawful parking fees for the day and cost more to exact than they actually raise.
What would the statists say if it was suggested that a private company be given the franchise for clamping and tow aways in Dublin? Would they be interested in its efficacy, or would they be solely preoccupied with it as a moral heresy, much in the way that John Charles McQuaid regarded the Mother and Child Scheme, not upon its pragmatic possibilities for thee poor but its potential as heresy?
Intellectual Heirs
How does that notion appeal to the statists who govern us, that they are the intellectual heirs to John Charles McQuaid? Yet in their intolerance of preepts in conflict with their own, that is precisely what they are. Once this State was tied up in the moral dogma of authoritarian Catholicism. Now it is tied up with the moral dogma of liberal agenda statism, with each dogma ignoring the evidence of its own bankruptcy by intellectual bullying and name calling.
It is not where statism rules, that we have growth. It is where the energies and the intellect of the Irish people are liberated by free enterprise that we are becoming economically the most vibrant people in Europe. If you want to grasp the intellectual and moral indolence of Irish statism, take a trip on the M51 around Dublin, which from the moment of its opening became a day long generator of half hour long traffic jams.
Do you think it possible that any privately owned Irish company could have got away with such grotesque incompetence, involving such a truly wicked waste of public money? More to the point, do you think any privately owned company could have as blithely escaped censure? As Catholicism once escaped an examination of its priorities and its motives, so now does statism, with the same indignant and effulgent sanctimoniousness, the same intolerance of doubt, the same anathemisation of doubters. John Charles McQuaid is alive and well in Government Buildings, and his pink faced theological acolytes preach statist conformism everywhere.