Huddled Round The Primordial Fire

At Hallowe’en, we frighten ourselves with pretend ghouls and goblins. But in modern Ireland, there are more than enough real horror stories out there to keep us awake all night.

The annual firefest is cracking and thumping around me as I write. Lord knows, we sure do love our bangers and flash. It may not be how the old pagan Irish gave thanks for a good harvest and waved away the summer, but it works for us.
They, at least, had many things to be thankful for, whereas we have few. Or so we are led to believe.
Our forebears, Vikings included, clung closer to each other on dark winter evenings, honing their myth-making and storytelling winter upon winter. From their fears and nightmares came the ogres and evil spirits about whom they warned their children.
The tradition continues. Jasus, we’re beset with baddies and bastards and ghoulies.
There’s a thread running through many of the awful things we hear these days. It’s that those who should have been keeping watch for evil djinns and crooks and thieves and child abusers, and all the other creepy crawlies that seem now to overrun our lives, were derelict in their duty.
– There’s the failure of the HSE to protect vulnerable children, as revealed, again, in the report of the case of the Roscommon family.
– There were the crazed cavaliers of the banks who left the entire country more or less bankrupt.
– There’s the planners and parish politicians who threw all planning logic out the window to dish out rezonings and planning permissions right, left and centre, to the extent that we now have more than 43,000 ‘homes’ lying vacant, many in a raft of unfinished and/or unoccupied ghost estates the length and breadth of the country.
There are many levels to horror stories. The story of the Roscommon family concerns just one family but is so dreadful that it draws in everyone who hears even the published details, and one assumes that there’s more that has not been made public.
The story of the banks is much wider in its reach. It affects everyone. So too the story of the public finances. These were built on receipts of Stamp Duty and planning applications and sales taxes and income taxes from people building, buying or selling houses in the boom, including the 43,000 ones that now lie empty.
In other words, it’s a different problem to the banks. But it’s no less horrible for everyone, huddled as we are around the winter fire and listening as the myth-makers and storytellers warn of catastrophe and terror and forces of darkness and monsters and creepy crawlies… and who charge us for the compliment as well.
Do we actually know any more about dark forces than did our ancestors? Yes, of course the terrors themselves are different. But the process of terror and manipulation and creating a shared fear of ogres and baddies is pretty much the same, isn’t it?
Humans haven’t really evolved since the Stone Age, certainly nowhere near as far or as fast as their technology, so the same basic patterns hold.
We exchange one set of demons for another. We dump the church, its priests and shamans and replace them with journalists and commentators. The altars may be different but the sermonising is the same.
So, where are we now in the Story Cycle?
Ah yes, the Budget, the Four Year Plan and, revealed at last, the full €15bn.
Well, it’s an epic saga, you have to give it that, worthy of the old Norse or the old Gaels. We’re in the darkest hour, the Time of Fear and Moaning and Howling in the Dead of Night.
The thing is, even in the darkest hour you want to have some hope, don’t you? But even more than that, you want to have some sense of community, some shared social glue that binds everyone together and helps them turn towards the hell that waits.
And I still don’t see it or hear it. For all the talk of how ‘we’ did this and that and now how ‘we’ have to take the consequences fair and square, it’s not actually working out like that. The ‘we’ who are going to shoulder the burden are, to a very large extent, the unemployed and lower paid, the middle classes, families, small enterprises who are starved of credit…
When property is taxed, you’ll find that rich folks can dodge an awful lot. (Which reminds me, why not have a levy on household property insurance? It’d be one way of extracting a capital/property tax from the art and jewellery and other non-residential valuables that people hold and, given that really rich folks have much more of these than the rest of us, it’d be socially progressive as well…)
Of course, nobody sat down and planned the relentless barrage of bad news as a primordial process of creating a shared sense of danger and unity of purpose. But that’s what it is.
The thing is: if it’s to work, whether intended or not, everyone has to be seen to pitch in.
Remember, not everyone who made a lot of money in the boom lost it. If himbos borrowed billions to buy property, they did so to give to others who owned it. So from whom did they buy it and where have they put the money?
Like, to take just one wafer thin example, Sean Dunne bought Jury’s and the Berkeley Court from the Doyle Group for €370m…
So, when the lowest-paid civil servants say that they think change should be seen to start from the top, they have a point. But so too have the unemployed, the low paid in general and the small and medium sized enterprises that are so central to the recovery that – we hope – is to come.
But none of these carry a lot of clout. You don’t hear too many politicians saying that they are of systemic importance and setting about changing things, so they are bailed out like the banks.
Until they do, not everyone will be huddling around the primordial fire this winter. More likely, they’ll be thinking about what might be added to fuel the flames and how it might burn baby burn…