The Gist: The End of the 100 Year Government

The Irish State has spent most of its 100-plus years as both a startling success and an embarrassing failure. It’s important to acknowledge both of those things because if you ignore one or the other the behaviour of its electorate will always seem inexplicable. Because, in effect, we have been governed by the same political parties for that 100 years. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are in formal coalition now. But they always shared a common vision of how the state should behave, effectively acting as a single continuous government across that century. Ireland's 100 year government has delivered those successes and failures alike.

Let’s take its success first. Slightly embarrassingly, the Republic of Ireland is the oldest uninterrupted universal suffrage democracy in Europe. There were older ones, but they were interrupted by the 20th century’s various experiments with dictatorships. We just kept chugging away from 1922, granting women equal voting rights six years ahead of the UK. By comparison, Switzerland only finished giving equal voting rights to women in 1991.

This, in itself, would be a success story. But we have also managed some startling civic successes. Ireland’s education levels since the 1960s have skyrocketed, to the point where the country vies with Canada for the title of Most Educated in the entire world. We even managed to come up with a novel approach to political violence in the shape of the Northern Ireland peace process, a phrase coined by the late John Hume to convey the fact that, even when the arrow of Achilles hadn’t yet hit the Tortoise of Peace, there is value in its continued incremental journey.

Democracy, the educational uplift of the entire society, and progress towards solving intractable political violence are not nothing. In fact, any one of those might be enough to declare a state a success story, but all three of them would suggest an unalloyed triumph. 

Except the triumph was very alloyed. The precious coinage of democracy was debased by problems inherited and self-inflicted alike. Let’s look at the middle band before we get to the embarrassing failures. These are the achievements where the state failed one group in order to bring about success for another. Seán Lemass, the Taoiseach who triggered the biggest social changes in Ireland in the 1960s, said ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’. But, in fact, over its century of decisions, the Irish State has chosen to lift some boats at the expense of suppressing or sinking others. The state was run by and for a particular set of interests and where those interests clashed with the interests of others, so much the worse for the others. 

If there is a golden thread running through the history of the state, it is the primacy of property over everyone else. In the early days, this was reflected in the reinforcement of the social structures where the eldest son would inherit a farm while their siblings would be left to the choices of becoming priests/nuns, emigrating, or, for the daughters, marrying some other eldest son. It also ensured startlingly weak rights for renters, as landlords could effectively do as they pleased, resulting in decades of 19th-century tenement slums continuing well into the 20th century. 

Protection of the property-owning class has been the water that Irish politics swims through, invisible to its fishy participants but explaining nearly everything. It is why our housing crisis exists and why it cannot, apparently, be solved. Solving it would mean a political evolution on a scale of growing legs and lungs and actually climbing out of that water. 

Unlike the protection of property owners, emigration was famously acknowledged and discussed as one of the failures of the state. For decades, politicians of all stripes would wail that we were raising our children for export, like cattle. But, in truth, the emigration boat provided a critical safety valve to the pressure cooker of a political state so dramatically tilted against everyone who didn’t own property. Instead of having to mitigate or address the political agonies of renters or younger siblings who didn’t fancy being a priest, the state could just carry on, safe in the knowledge that even if they made their lives intolerable, their greatest social enemies would find it easier to leave than stage a revolution. 

But, while this was a clear failure if you happened to be outside that property-owning class, it was a shining success if you happened to be inside it. Imagine the level of entitlement and unaccountable power of being a member of the State’s favoured group. Courts, media, politics, and every single institution bending to your aid and presenting your needs as the common-sense default. It was the ability to deliver this patronage to its members that held Fianna Fáil in the dominant political position across most of the decades of the Irish State’s first 100 years, and unlike Fine Gael, it even offered something to those not in the property-owning classes through the mass provision of public housing, but at a level that never challenged the profitability of the private rentier’s holdings.

See this slightly rough chart below which I have built out of a number of different datasets online. It shows public housing output per 1,000 population. This adjusts for distortions delivered by absolute housing build numbers as the population grows, letting us see the response to the need of a particular population size, rather than just abstract numbers of bricks piled up. You may notice it shows the dramatic drop in 1989 when FG's class proxy, the PDs, entered government and again when FG itself took over from the 2010s.

Tangled in with this story was a competing Irish State, one which did fall to a revolution around the turn of the century. The Irish Catholic Church was a state within the state, its institutional power controlling property, money and people to a degree impossible to imagine now. Free education was held back decades by its control over schooling. State healthcare was held back by its control over hospitals. And women and children were fed into its machinery as another pressure valve for the State’s property-owning classes. If eldest sons were to inherit the earth, the entire twin state of church and Republic would ensure that having children was the most tightly controlled activity of all.

And that meant controlling women and, where the twin states wanted, seizing them and their children, as well and incarcerating them. The women could be worked without pay for as long as the church institution wanted to and the children could be taken, renamed and given or sold on. It's a story we're used to hearing now, but I think it is always worth just setting it out clearly so we don't lose sight of the sheer magnitude of wrongs our society was built on.

Finally, we come to the part of the Irish story where everyone agrees there was failure. Unsurprisingly, a society built around protecting the rent-collecting and property-owning class and actively oppressing everyone else does not make for an economic success. That grotesque, misshapen political tree could never bear any fruit. The fight was, decade after decade, generation after generation, for who could collect the most scraps, not how to make the pie bigger for everyone.

When there was an accidental boom (born of graduates hitting critical mass meeting a wall of cheap international credit) it was typically mismanaged to benefit the descendents of those eldest sons, the property developers, until the bubble of cheap foreign money popped and the whole country fell back down to earth.

We're in a second bubble of economic success at the moment, and again, Ireland's 100 year government of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are still reacting to benefit and reward their patrons. Except that during the bust, property owners stopped being the eldest sons of farms, or even their inheritors, the individual property developers. It became the stuff of international investor companies. At the same time, patronage flows the other way now, from the companies whose money stuffs the state's coffers, to a client state that actively adopts the needs of multinationals over those of any humans in the country.

How do you think you end up being cited as the world's main cautionary tale in a UN report on the dangers of uncontrolled data centre development? How does that data centre growth consume your entire renewables effort and more? Why prioritise gas you have to import over renewables you could generate yourself, except because those data centres want to run on gas and need the state to ensure the supply of it into the future, climate be damned.

Democracy, education and experience of addressing the threat of political violence. These are the successes of an independent Ireland. They're also the tools it will need to address the state's failures, including the consequences to come of the failures of today. Climate change isn't going to wait for another 100 years of the same approach. Changes are going to be forced if they aren't chosen.

Ireland's 100 year government can't make those changes, or address those failures, because to do so would be to admit it caused them in the first place. In fact, it would have to admit that some of the things it did were bad, at all. It refuses to do that.

If there is one thing the last decade has taught us, from electing the wrong guy as President to holding a referendum which leads to massive national self-harm, it is that the failure to acknowledge a mistake is the surest way to be destroyed by it.