In praise of Ireland
Richard West
Dublin Each time I visit Ireland I am more amazed by its affluence; indeed the Republic seems caught up in a spending spree comparable to Macmillan's England or the United States at the end of the Twenties. People are not only getting rich, but like to be seen getting rich. They boast of how much they Paid for their house or their yacht or their car; indeed since the present government imposed a car tax only on large, expensive and petrol-wasting vehicles it has become a Matter of pride to be such a tax-payer. The latest smart restaurant, the Mirabeau, Where the simplest dinner for two costs £40, IS booked out weeks in advance and yet, as a friend of mine sourly remarked, 'you get some fellers in there so dumb they couldn't solve the crossword in the Evening Press'.
The visiting Englishman is filled with awe, indeed envy. Not only are salaries greater — journalists for example get roughly twice as much as in England — but costs tend to be lower. It is true that income tax is slightly higher in Ireland but rates (which absorb one seventh of all my earnings) have been abolished, while one can get health insurance for all the family at about half what I pay in stamps to our own broken-down health service.
Prosperity is by no means confined to the east coast. Down in the south-west, whose Peasants only a hundred years ago lived like India's, the farmers are rolling in money thanks to the Common Market price arrangements; land sells for several thousand an acre; the amount of investment in banks is three times as great as on the east Coast, although this may be due to the fact that the new rich have not yet acquired the sPendthrift mentality of an inflationary age. There is a still greater contrast between England and Ireland in what is now called the quality of life' although, praise be to God, the Irish still seldom use such ugly expressions. The capital and the smaller provincial centres have escaped wholesale development (although Dublin has lost a few fine buildings and streets), new towns, vertical living in tower blocks, and all the Other horrors inflicted by planners on England during the last thirty years. Law and order, in spite of the trouble up north, is not a major problem by English standards (the very word hooligan derives from an Irish family of that name who lived in south-east England); there is a high respect for education and still, though this may be Changing, a low respect for such quack modern sciences as psychiatry and sociology.
Are the pleasant things about Ireland to disappear in the current spending spree? I think not, for the present Fianna Fail Government which was returned to power last year has now, like a great many Irish people, sobered up and promised last week to decrease public expenditure, especially on the social services. There was further good news, this time from Ringaskiddy in Co. Cork, suggesting that Irish people have now woken up to another menace facing both our islands — the sacrifice of both human beings and nature to foreign industrialists.
For the last ten years or so, oil and mining companies have met little resistance in Ireland from what are now called conservationists. A big chunk of the Midlands was dug up for zinc; an oil spillage fouled a great stretch of Bantry Bay and an aluminium company threatens to clutter up Shannon, but all such things have been largely accepted because they produce jobs, albeit only a very few. The publicists 'for these foreign companies have been eager to point out that much of the opposition came from the local Anglo-Irish or English gentry, playing on ancient enmity, as they have done with equal success in Wales and Scotland. The Trades Unions and the Labour Party have been, as in Britain, outstandingly obsequious to the foreign industrialists.
Perhaps for this reason, the Raybestos company of the United States expected little resistance to the establishment of a brake-lining factory at Ovens in Co Cork until it became known that the scheme involved dumping masses of possibly dangerous asbestos waste. The people of Ovens itself protested successfully at the dump; another village nearby refused but finally, after Raybestos had promised stringent safety precautions, a dump was approved at Ringaskiddy. At the beginning of last week however, a large number of Ringaskiddy people blocked the road to the asbestos lorry, resisted orders to disperse and finally came to blows with the police.
The friends of Raybestos, in particular the trade unions, accused the protestors of provocation by sending children into the front of the barricade. In turn the 400 people who crowded that evening into Ringaskiddy village hall, accused the police of 'unforgivable brutality'. The case of the protestors was strengthened when it was learned that 711 former employees of the Raybestos plant in New Jersey are suing for two million dollars each because of alleged asbestos-related damage to health.
The original and most heartening aspect of the dispute is that the Ringaskiddy protesters, far from being retired English gentry, are working-class Irish, as TV viewers gathered when one woman was heard on TV shouting very rude words indeed in a rough accent. As all Ireland becomes more prosperous, so the Irish are coming to understand that their country does not have to become a quarry or refuse tip for foreigners but can in itself be a source of wealth. The coastal people, for instance, at last seem to have woken up to the fact that off-shore fishing, at present prices, is much more profitable a job than working for one of the oil installations that threaten to wipe out the fish.
The rise in prosperity of Ireland can in part be explained in terms of Britain's decline. Britain after the second world war was still a great economic power, but her industries tended to be old-fashioned, monopolistic, too big. The conservatism of management was too often matched by entrenched power and restrictive practices on the part of the trade unions, with the results that we know all too well.
Moreover the British, above all the working-class, still do not realise that they have no empire, and therefore no means of protecting British wages and jobs against competition. British trade unionists used to prosper at the expense of Asians and Africans who were not allowed to work in the same kind of industry. Today, faced with competition, Britain's old industries are either dead or dying.
Although Ireland was never a colony, like Nigeria or Malaya, she was until 1800 the victim of legislation to stop her goods competing with those of Britain. The Irish, therefore have never acquired the habit of thinking that all the world, or at least a large chunk of it, owes them a living. Unlike the British, they know instinctively that if a steel works or car factory ceases to make a • profit, it must go under. This goes as much for the northern Irish who during the 18th century suffered still more than the Southerners from British tariffs because they were more industrialised.
It is significancthat while the once great shipyards of Merseyside, Clydeside and Tyneside have been destroyed, largely by trade union folly, the Harland and Wolf yards in Belfast continue and even, in some years, prosper. Its workers may be almost exclusively Protestant but they are also Irish and know that one must work to live.
Some people prophesy a United Ireland caused by the desire of the North to share in the new prosperity of the South. It may come about for the reverse or negative reason: the desire of the North to at last cut its ties with a kingdom of spendthrifts and skivers.
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