Something to keep you awake at night

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Ever since Obama won the election I’ve had an uneasy feeling that Sarah Palin is being underestimated by the US media and political establishments. Frank Rich has come to the same conclusion. “Logic”, he writes,

doesn’t apply to Palin. What might bring down other politicians only seems to make her stronger: the malapropisms and gaffes, the cut-and-run half-term governorship, family scandals, shameless lying and rapacious self-merchandising. In an angry time when America’s experts and elites all seem to have failed, her amateurism and liabilities are badges of honor. She has turned fallibility into a formula for success.

Republican leaders who want to stop her, and they are legion, are utterly baffled about how to do so. Democrats, who gloat that she’s the Republicans’ problem, may be humoring themselves. When Palin told Barbara Walters last week that she believed she could beat Barack Obama in 2012, it wasn’t an idle boast. Should Michael Bloomberg decide to spend billions on a quixotic run as a third-party spoiler, all bets on Obama are off…

The boys from the IMF

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The only Irish novelist with the range to encompass what has happened to Ireland in my lifetime is Colm Toibin, and so I live in hope that one day we will get a blockbuster novel from him about the Republic that wasn’t. In the meantime, his reflections on the current crisis are interesting. He begins by revealing that he got to know some of the IMF guys who came to sort our Argentina after its economic collapse, and in the process came to understand how they think.

I remembered my American friends this week as news came that a delegation from the EU and the IMF were to arrive in Dublin on Thursday. I think I have an idea how dedicated and serious-minded these fellows would be, especially on weekdays, and how little interest they might have in Irish history, Irish pride, Irish sovereignty or even Irish doublespeak. They like to get the job done and then get home.

On the night before these figure-crunchers arrived in the city, I watched a discussion programme on Irish television in which commentators, people younger than me, invoked the dead heroes who had fought for an independent Ireland, naming some of them, including patriots from the 18th century, and wondering how they would feel now were they to find out about the shame we Irish felt.

We had fought so hard for our freedom, they said, and now, with the arrival in Merrion Street, where the government is housed, of besuited stone-faced economists with German and Scandinavian names and number-crunching knuckles, we had betrayed our dead. Patrick Pearse eat your heart out, the Germans have arrived.

I hadn’t known that Toibin comes from a Republican background. His grandfather fought in the 1916 rebellion and was imprisoned afterwards. “I was brought up”, he recalls, “in the proud memory of his bravery. My uncle and my father worked all their lives for the Fianna Fáil party which has run Ireland most of the time since 1932 and which is in power now. I have never ceased to believe in their patriotism and idealism”.

But he puts his finger on what has always been wrong with our little Statelet:

The problem is not merely that there is no blueprint in Ireland now, no agenda, for how this might be done. The problem is also that it wasn’t there before the Celtic Tiger either, nor during its heady reign. In areas which really matter, such as health and education, Ireland has, since independence, been deeply divided.

There are two health systems here, for example. One is for middle-class people who pay health insurance and the other for those who can’t afford to pay. There are short waiting lists for one, and long waiting lists for the other. Often, both see the same doctors, who treat the first group in private hospitals, or private rooms in public hospitals, and the second group in public hospitals.

Everyone here knows that the difference can be a matter of life and death. Some of the doctors make a fortune. There has been no serious effort to reform this, but many efforts instead to copper-fasten it. This is one example of what sovereignty has done to us.

As for Irish “shame” about having to be rescued by “the Germans”, well, that’s also a bit rich coming from a country that has so manifestly proved unable to govern itself.

The more I found out about contemporary Germany, for example, and the more I travelled there, the more I came to admire it and the more I came to hope that some of its best qualities could come to influence and affect Ireland.

Thus when the Irish Times on Thursday mentioned “the German chancellor” I did not automatically feel that this person was in some way a malignant force in the world. Instead, I saw someone rational and prudent, sensible and deeply intelligent.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this in the last week. In the late 1970s I spent a year working in the Netherlands and it changed my life, because it gave me an insight into what a well-governed society could be like. Holland was devastated after the war, with its population starving and totally dependent on foreign aid. And yet out of those ruins the Dutch built a prosperous, liberal, humane democracy. So did the Germans, labouring under an even bigger psychic burden. What these societies did demonstrates what can be done with political will and intelligent outside assistance. That’s what Ireland needs to do now. And if the IMF and EU boys can get that process started, then more power to their elbows.

Some people can’t handle the truth anymore. (Could they ever?)

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Thoughtful piece in the Economist. It starts from the revelation by a new Pew Research poll which finds that 53% of Republicans say there is no solid evidence the earth is warming. Among Tea Party Republicans, 70% say there is no evidence. Pew goes on to point out that “Disbelief in global warming in the GOP is a recent occurrence. Just a few years ago, in 2007, a 62%-majority of Republicans said there is solid evidence of global warming, while less than a third (31%) said there is no solid evidence. Currently, just 38% of Republicans say there is solid evidence the earth is warming, and only 16% say that warming is caused by human activity.” The article goes on:

It’s one thing to hold the position that rising global temperatures are due to natural variation, not human activity. I consider that position wrong and dangerous, but it’s a dispute over the analysis. But it is simply a fact that the planet is getting warmer. That many people who previously knew this have come to un-know it indicates that people are busy at work promoting ignorance.

Reminds me of Daniel Moynihan’s wonderful principle: everyone is entitled to his own views, but not to his own facts.

Facebook, Google and the battle for the inbox

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This morning’s Observer column.

The trouble with email, as the parent of every teenager knows, is that it’s so, well … yesterday. I mean to say, you have to think of a “subject” and whether you’re going to start the message with “Dear” or “Hi!” or “Yo!”. And then there’s the problem of what you put at the end: “See you!” or “xxx” or “Gotta go…” And don’t even mention the issue of the ‘signature’ at the end of the message – you know, “Sent from my iPhone” and all that. And on top of that, there’s the fact that email isn’t synchronous. You could send a message and the other person might not see it for, well, at least five minutes.

Hopeless.

This is the context in which Facebook’s latest ‘messages’ initiative needs to be seen…

Richard Harper — whose new book I am enjoying — also has a nice piece about communications overload in the paper this morning. His conclusion:

Zuckerberg’s announcement has hit a nerve – but not because of the number of messages we now receive. It’s because his announcement is asking us to think about who we want to be and how we convey that through our communications. These are human questions, not technical ones, and all the more important because of it.

Geek talent wars

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Apparently, Facebook is now paying engineers more than Google. And BusinessInsider reports that it seems to be worrying the search giant.

Google offering $100,000 cash bonuses is so last summer. Now it’s apparently offering seven-figure stock payouts to keep engineers from defecting

Last week it was $3.5 million. This week, All Things D reports that one engineer ended a bidding war by taking a $6 million stock grant.

We’ve seem talent wars like this before. Microsoft was sued back in 1997 for poaching employees from database company Borland. Google returned the favor last decade, causing Steve Ballmer throw a chair across the room. Now, Google is trying its hardest not to end up on the losing end as the cycle repeats itself.

In the past, this kind of thing was usually a symptom of a bubble. Why should it be any different now?

Wasting a good crisis

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I’ve been reading Fintan O’Toole’s new book about the Irish banking catastrophe. As in his previous book — Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger — the analysis of why the disaster happened is spot-on: the Republic has had a dysfunctional political culture ever since it was founded, and the dysfunctionality became pathological over the last three decades. O’Toole thinks that the only way of ensuring a decent future for the country is radically to re-think the governance of the state, and he’s right.

For example, the system of proportional representation based on multi-member constituencies has been good at ensuring parliamentary representation that is proportional to the level of public support, but terrible at delivering good governance, because it favours sectionalism, clientilism, cronyism and parish-pump politics to the detriment of overarching national concerns. Most Irish TDs (i.e. MPs) spend most of their time attending to the detailed needs of constituents: if a haulier wants a contract from a local authority, for example, his first step will be to contact his TD who will in turn contact the authority in question; a developer who wants planning permission to build on the foreshore (which is forbidden by planning regulations) will write to his TD, who will then… You get the picture. Yet these are also the guys who, as ministers, are expected to regulate banks, negotiate treaties and generally run a modern state.

I remember a salutary example of how attentive Irish TDs are to their constituents. My father was a totally non-political person who never had anything to do with politicians. But one of the TDs in the (multi-member) constituency in which we lived happened to be also the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) at the time. Da died of a heart attack around 7am in the local hospital. At 7.30am a telegram from the Taoiseach arrived at the family home expressing his sincere condolences at our sad loss. Someone in the hospital had phoned the local Fianna Fail office and relayed the news of a constituent’s death. And that’s the way everything worked.

Ireland desperately needs better governance. It needs to re-invent itself as a truly modern Republic. The chances of it doing so, however, are close to zero. And yet, pardoxically, this is the time to do it. As the Obama crowd used to say: never waste a good crisis. The moment when people have been shocked into confronting reality is the best time to get them to take serious ideas seriously.

In his column in today’s Irish Times, O’Toole makes some really good points. “In their quiet, dark moments”, he writes, “Cowen [Taoiseach] and Lenihan [Finance Minister] must have been haunted

by the ghost of their political progenitor, Éamon de Valera. Dev’s moment of greatest national popularity came in May 1945, at the end of the war in Europe, when he delivered his magisterial reply to Winston Churchill’s bitter attack on Irish neutrality.

Remaining neutral may not have been the most noble of causes, but it was the ultimate declaration of Irish sovereignty. At a time when three great powers – Germany, Britain and the US – contemplated an invasion of Ireland, de Valera managed to maintain the idea that the State would make its own decisions. The quiet gravity of his broadcast embodied for Irish people of different allegiances what sovereignty is ultimately about: dignity.

This sent me hunting for the text of Dev’s radio broadcast, which makes an interesting read in today’s circumstances. de Valera was responding to a taunt in Winston Churchill’s VE-day speech about Ireland’s decision to assert its sovereignty by remaining neutral in the Second World War, and by denying Britain the use of the so-called ‘Treaty’ ports which Churchill (and the Allies) thought would be essentially to combat the U-Boat threat in the North Atlantic. “It is indeed fortunate”, said Dev,

that Britain’s necessity did not reach the point when Mr. Churchill would have [invaded Ireland]. All credit to him that he successfully resisted the temptation which, I have not doubt, may times assailed him in his difficulties and to which I freely admit many leaders might have easily succumbed. It is indeed hard for the strong to be just to the weak, but acting justly always has its rewards.

By resisting his temptation in this instance, Mr. Churchill, instead of adding another horrid chapter to the already bloodstained record of the relations between England and this country, has advanced the cause of international morality an important step-one of the most important, indeed, that can be taken on the road to the establishment of any sure basis for peace. . .

Mr. Churchill is proud of Britain’s stand alone, after France had fallen and before America entered the War.

Could he not find in his heart the generosity to acknowledge that there is a small nation that stood alone not for one year or two, but for several hundred years against aggression; that endured spoliations, famines, massacres in endless succession; that was clubbed many times into insensibility, but that each time on returning consciousness took up the fight anew; a small nation that could never be got to accept defeat and has never surrendered her soul?

Mr. Churchill is justly proud of his nation’s perseverance against heavy odds. But we in this island are still prouder of our people’s perseverance for freedom through all the centuries. We, of our time, have played our part in the perseverance, and we have pledged our selves to the dead generations who have preserved intact for us this glorious heritage, that we, too, will strive to be faithful to the end, and pass on this tradition unblemished.

Why do these words resonate today, so many decades after they were uttered? Simply because Brian Cowen leads the party that Dev founded. It probably explains the incomprehensible state of denial Cowen and Co have been in from the onset of the current crisis — to the point where it was left to an official — the Governor of the Bank of Ireland — to tell the truth about what was happening, in the process flatly contradicting his own Prime Minister. The current Fianna Fail leaders have surrendered the sovereignty that Dev prized so highly. So somewhere, deep down in even their bovine sensibilities, there must lurk a visceral sense of shame and failure.

“Ireland”, writes O’Toole,

is being placed under adult supervision. And that cuts right through to the most tender nerve of a former colony. What colonial overlords tell their subject peoples is: “You’re not fit to govern yourselves.”

That taunt is deeply embedded in our historical consciousness. Much of modern Irish history has been shaped by the attempt to disprove it. The Proclamation of Easter 1916 declares “the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible”. The struggle to assert this idea of popular sovereignty goes back at least to the United Irishmen of the late 18th century. Their revolutionary idea of the “sovereignty of the people” is the cornerstone of modern Irish nationalism.

And then, of course, there is the small matter of our relationship with our former colonial masters. During the roaring years of the Celtic Tiger, a new, unprecedented respectfulness on the part of the Brits entered the picture. O’Toole remembers George Osborne, then Shadow Chancellor,

writing humbly in the London Times about the Irish as the model for Britain: “They have much to teach us, if only we are willing to learn.” Osborne’s reasoning was daft, but for many Irish people there was still an extraordinary resonance to the idea of a Tory Old Etonian* with aspirations to lead Britain adopting such a humble approach to a former province of the empire. It was further proof that Ireland had definitively left behind its long history of failure and inferiority. There were no more forelocks to be tugged.

And now? Osborne is Chancellor who, at the meeting of EU finance ministers in Brussels, spoke in

the emollient, gently patronising tones of a disappointed but supportive parent: “Britain stands ready to support Ireland to bring stability.” We probably should be grateful for such support, and Osborne was obviously trying to be helpful. But it is hard not to cringe at tabloid headlines like “Britain ready to bail out Ireland with £7 billion”.

That’s a bit over the top. Osborne isn’t entirely the “disappointed but supportive parent”.** He’s realised, as the Financial Times pointed out yesterday, that the implosion of the Irish banks would have really serious implications not only for the Eurozone, but also for British banks.

Footnotes:
* Osborne is not an old-Etonian. He went to St Paul’s — which is presumeably why Boris Johnson & Co used to call him “Oik”.
** Here’s the really funny bit. Osborne has an Irish Ascendancy (i.e. protestants-on-horses) background. He is the heir to the Osborne baronetcy (of Ballentaylor, in County Tipperary, and Ballylemon, in County Waterford). Arise Sir George!

The wreck of the Republic

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The Economist has a wickedly funny front cover this week. It takes Gericault’s famous picture, The Raft of the Medusa, and Photoshops it to show the wretches on the raft holding Irish and other European flags, and adds, top-left, an RAF rescue helicopter winching in a particularly stolid-looking Angela Merkel to ‘help’.

The imagery becomes even more hilarious when you know the history of the original.

The painting depicts the aftermath of the wreck of the French naval frigate Méduse, which ran aground off the coast of today’s Mauritania on July 5, 1816. According to Wikipedia, at least 147 people

were set adrift on a hurriedly constructed raft; all but 15 died in the 13 days before their rescue, and those who survived endured starvation, dehydration, cannibalism and madness. The event became an international scandal, in part because its cause was widely attributed to the incompetence of the French captain acting under the authority of the recently restored French monarchy.

The references to cannibalism and incompetence are particularly relevant to Fianna Fail, hitherto known as “the political wing of the Irish construction industry”.

LATER: Lorcan Dempsey pointed me at John Banville’s essay in the New York Times:

It is the figures, mainly, that cow us into silence. It is estimated that the banking debt of this nation, which has a population of only 4.6 million, may be substantially more than 100 billion euros. That is 100,000 millions and rising. When we were at school it amused our science teachers to dazzle us with astronomical statistics — so many myriads of light years, so many zillions of stars — but the numbers that we are being forced to count on our too-few fingers now have nothing to do with the fanciful dimensions of outer space. They represent precisely the breadth and depth of the financial hole into which we have toppled headlong.

In the months after September 2008, when the Irish government, after a night-long crisis meeting, was forced to give a guarantee of some 400 billion euros — money we had no hope of ever having — to save the Irish banks from collapse, we used to say that it would fall to our children to pay for our financial folly. Now we know that it will be our children and our children’s children and our children’s children’s children, unto the nth generation, who will bear the burden of our debts, including the “substantial loan” from international lenders that officials now acknowledge is necessary.

There used to be a nice acronym that neatly expressed how the Irish people conceive of themselves: MOPE, that is, Most Oppressed People Ever. For a decade or so, when the Tiger was at its fiercest, we threw off the mantle of oppression, as once we had thrown off what used to be called “the yoke of British rule.” On Wednesday, the British chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, announced in Brussels that his government stood ready to help Ireland in its hour of need. Oh, bitter day.

All the same, life goes on, somehow. We are learning a new resilience. Humbled as we are, we might even begin to learn social responsibility, a quality in which we have been singularly lacking up to now. Who knows, we may at last recognize the irreplaceable value of public and private honesty. But let us not light the firecrackers just yet.