I see Wicklow County Council has recently joined others, such as Clare and Kerry, in having to defend its policy of refusing to allow outsiders to build houses from denunciations of "xenophobia" and "racism".
Ho, hum. There are two basic reasons why this policy makes sense. Firstly, pressure of market forces in prime residential areas in the countryside means that it is now virtually impossible for young local people to live where they grew up. Secondly, the encroachment of holiday homes along the coastline means that many coastal communities are becoming lock-up neighbourhoods for most of the year.
Wicklow is particularly vulnerable. Being close to Dublin, the improvement of the road infrastructure has opened it up to overflow from the upper end of the Dublin housing market. Local people find themselves competing with the vendors of £1 million houses in Dublin 4, opting to commute and bank the differentials. Apart from the obvious injustice, the fact that people can sell up in the city for a handsome profit, and apply the distorted economic muscle they have acquired by dint of bad planning to areas which have remained unspoilt through the efforts of the indigenous population, is bad economics, bad planning and bad ecology.
But once the X-word, never mind the Rword, is employed, the argument is over. Who wants to be a xenophobe?
To talk of "racism" in this context is nonsense. Fundamentally, the argument is about economics: the inequitable relationship between external and indigenous spending powers. The primary emotion is not hatred but fear, not of the outsider, per se, but of the power the outsider has to exterminate the native. To suggest that self-protection in such circumstances is xenophobic is to say that money is the arbiter of morality, that spending power and market forces should decide everything about human affairs.
Although that economic order appears to be inverted in the wider continuing debate about immigration and "racism", a similar principle applies to the general context. I watched a television debate on racism last year, in which an audience member attempted to suggest that the State had a responsibility to care for the indigenous population before catering for those who came from outside.
He mentioned homelessness as an issue which needed to be dealt with before we could present ourselves as custodians of international welfare. The presenter demanded to know why he would make a distinction between the indigenous destitute and those who come from outside. Surely, inquired the speaker from the audience, those who are born, grow up and live in a society have a prior right to the protection of that society? The presenter appeared puzzled by this concept.
Is there no longer any merit in belonging to a place? Surely belonging is the core principle on which the cohesion of human society is based? Surely, if this order is reversed, there is a danger of genuine racism, as the anger of the indigenous population boils up at unjust treatment?
There is a sub-text common to the debates about local planning regulations and immigration which suggests that to favour the maximum accommodation of outsiders is the most humane, civilised and virtuous position. But to argue for an open door is also to argue for the unfettered market. It is to argue for the brunt of change and disruption being borne by the most vulnerable of the indigenous populations, whether in the sense of communities in attractive rustic locations or the more general context of global population movements.
It is strange indeed that such spurious arguments emanate now from the left at least as often as from the right. But the fact that indigenous people beleaguered by economic circumstances get no support from the Irish left is readily understandable once you perceive the ideological context. When left-wingers first started to warn about the ruthless mobility of capital, and the imminent encroachment of global values on local and national cultures, we assumed they believed these to be inauspicious phenomena.
But then it became obvious that the Jeremiahs had themselves become infatuated with the very thing they had railed against. In a short time, they were warning us that resistance to the market was a sign of backwardness. This has a particularly Irish context, arising partly from the confusion that exists here around the concept of "liberalism", and partly because of a special repugnance in Irish left-wing thinking towards anything faintly national or, worse, parochial.
Irish left-wingers always sought to present themselves as liberal in the socio-sexual context, and the desire for this appellation has led them to embrace all but wholeheartedly the concept of liberalism in the economic context as well. Resistance to nationalism was in Ireland a mainly left-wing phenomenon. It was therefore with the willing assistance of the Irish left that the high priests of globalism succeeded in selling the idea that cultural homogenisation and cosmopolitanism were synonymous. Partly because of an inability to adapt their politics, and partly because of their snobbish dislike of anything indigenous, left-wing intellectuals went from describing the pervasiveness of market values to acceptance of unfettered capitalism.
In the storm of outrage that greeted Charlie McCreevy's recent taunting of the left, the point was missed that "pinko" is not, in fact, a synonym for "socialist". Irish left-wingers pronounced themselves "proud to be pink", overlooking the fact that the description arises from the insinuation that they had diluted their erstwhile blood-red socialism. Perhaps we need an indigenous term for this species. I know: bandeargs.
jwaters@irish-times.ie