WORLD VIEW:THE PUBLIC interest. The phrase has become more central in Irish and international discourse, particularly since the financial and economic meltdowns this autumn eviscerated the appeal of neoliberal ideology, writes Paul Gillespie.
As Ray Kinsella pointed out in these pages during the week, public interest suffuses the recent banking legislation. Barack Obama reaches for the phrase to describe how his appointments will differ from the Bush administration's elevation of private interests. It is a central category in debates about the role of the media. And the death of Conor Cruise O'Brien reminds us of his career as a public intellectual in journalism, the Civil Service, politics and the academy.
The irritatingly vague meaning of the term "public" is best explored by contrasting it with the "private" interest promoted by the rapidly receding neoliberal tide. That systematically promoted private over public interests. Market discipline became the mantra, boosting self-regulation and the light touch over rules enforced by public authorities - "appropriate" rather than heavy, as Seán FitzPatrick put it in an RTÉ interview last year. Privatisation applied to health, social security, transport, education and culture captures the thrust of that project, hollowing out the state, commodifying media and widening inequalities.
Relations between state and market were transformed. The notion of public goods was minimised, the notion of the public good subsumed into an aggregation of private ones. Through this prism, state is seen as monopolistic, unproductive, inefficient and averse to risk, and markets are seen as the opposite.
Of course, the critique of the state promoted by neoliberalism over the last 30 years cannot be separated from its objects, whether this was actually existing state communism in the Soviet bloc or bureaucratised social democracy in the West. Many of the criticisms were valid. But in the process, the public interest came to be defined as statism, whereas in fact the two should be kept distinct. That is one reason why it can be so difficult to reach a satisfactory definition.
"Public" means in the open and visible. It derives from the Latin publicus, which comes from populus, the people. Res publica was first translated into English as "commonwealth". Republican thought originated in ancient Athens and Rome and flourished in Renaissance Italian city-states and then during the English, American and French revolutions, putting public participation, civic virtue and deliberation at the centre of politics.
Its modern manifestation as civic republicanism has been explored by Iseult Honohan of UCD in her book on the subject.
The substance of republican politics, she argues, "is based on interdependence rather than commonality, is created in deliberation, emerges in multiple publics to which all can contribute, and is not definitive but open to change". This approach very usefully broadens the subject beyond statism to the self-government of civil society.
Applying these distinctions to the Irish setting in a newly edited volume by her, Republicanism in Ireland, Confronting Theories and Traditions(Manchester UP 2008), Honohan writes that republicanism is better seen as opposing domination - whether by external or internal forces, by governments, individuals or sectional groups - than as requiring national independence or non-monarchical government. Irish republicanism is often more akin to nationalism based on an assumed pre-political community of ethnicity and shared values than on this type of constructed self-government.
The book examines some of the ways this more inclusive tradition can be applied to an Ireland in search of a public philosophy after the end of the Celtic Tiger.
Tom Garvin doubts there is in fact an Irish republican tradition, since our democracy has been "clientelist, localist, secretive and sometimes pathetically short-termist because Irish people were that way. To put it rather differently, many Irish people were not really all that republican." Gareth Ivory surveys recent writing on the subject, including in a journal, The Republic, published by the Ireland Institute, now succeeded by a new publication, The Citizen.
Garvin quotes a mock encyclopaedia entry of Cruise O'Brien's from his book Writers and Politics(1965) as follows: "Irish strategy, 1014-1945: The campaign and actions of Brian Boru, Owen Roe O'Neill, Marshal Browne, Commodore Barry, Wellington, Admiral Browne, General Sheridan, Field Marshals Alexander and Montgomery, and many others." That provocative note was typical of his life-long probing of Irish cultural assumptions, giving a continuity between his earlier radicalism and his later obsession with nationalism as a system of actual domination of the Republic and potentially of Northern Ireland.
In a separate essay last year "Imaginary Cassandra?:Conor Cruise O'Brien as public intellectual in Ireland" in Irish University Review, Garvin argued O'Brien felt, notably in his seminal book States of Ireland(1972), that "Irish nationalism had been lying to itself for generations; in O'Brien's mind, only one of its own sons could really tell it so and wake it up to its own self-deceptions."
That is precisely the function of a public intellectual. In the broader sense of the term, republican O'Brien too would qualify for the description.
Garvin recalls what Ernest Gellner said of O'Brien, that in his later writings on nationalism he disregarded the avalanche of academic writing on the subject as an ideological and sociological phenomenon. He was imprisoned by his own engagement with Irish nationalism. This obsession took from the critical spirit which propelled his best work.
pgillespie@irishtimes.com