Theology and ethics in Ireland surfaced in ‘The Financial Times’ on Monday of this week in a review by David Gardner of Irish Times writer, Fintan O’Toole’s book “Enough is enough - How to build a new Republic”.
O’Toole suggests the Celtic Tiger frenzy filled the God-sized void left by the decline of the Roman Catholic church, and its quasi-theocratic control of sexual morality and social mores. He states,“The Celtic Tiger wasn’t just an economic ideology. It was also a substitute identity. It was a new way of being that arrived just at the point when Catholicism and nationalism were not working any more.”
Gardner comments, “Irish Republicanism is overlain with the history of struggle against English rule, the war of independence, the civil war that followed and divided nationalists into opposing tribes that still dominate the main parties, and, of course, the bloody campaign of the provisional Irish Republican Army to eject the British from Northern Ireland.
“It takes a brave man, then, to call for a new republic – with a small R, but big civic values – rooted in universal republican ideas and ethics
“After the monumental binge of the past decade, in which Ireland’s financial and political elites alchemically transmuted the real Celtic Tiger boom of the 1990s into a vast property bubble, Fintan O’Toole argues that “the republic is still an idea that can frame the search for public morality in a despairing Ireland”.
“Indeed, unless politics and public life are radically transformed, he believes, there is no way out of the financial pit Ireland’s cronyist elites have dug, which all too many Irish citizens happily leapt into. “Irish people have had a crash course in the nature of self-serving elites,” he says, with their “notion that no self-respecting patriot could be expected to get out of bed for less than €250,000 a year plus a pot of gold at the end of the pension rainbow.” To this O’Toole counterposes “a republican ethic of citizenship in which excess is not worshipped, rules are agreed to and kept and responsibility is taken – for ourselves and our society”.
“This is a trenchant critique, written with style and passion, fluency and sardonic wit. (O’Toole is an admirer of Swift, from whom he took the title of his best-selling polemic of last year, Ship of Fools.) A columnist on the Irish Times, O’Toole is an important voice in the debate reverberating across Ireland. Unabashedly on the social democratic left, he tends to polarise opinion in what is still a conservative country.”
Gardner’s review continues,”Now there is a new vacuum – the long-ruling Fianna Fáil is finished as a national movement if not as a party – and leadership, especially of the aspiring middle classes who had most to lose in this bust, is up for grabs. “There is a calculated judgment that the Irish people will take all the pain of shrinking public services, mass unemployment and forced emigration in order to pay off the gambling debts of their betters and that Ireland will remain politically stable,” says O’Toole. He does not believe this. “
For complete review and other O’Toole articles use search engine at:
http://www.ft.com/uk-edition
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