Who Are The People?

So, the Magnificent Seven are away. Come Watson, the game’s afoot. Thankfully, while farce has been in the air, the presidential election has not yet descended into a reality celebrity contest. But that could come. After all,it’s the dominant characteristic of the age.

In some respects, all are now imprisoned on an island and being made to endure successive torments while always smiling through. Some of the Seven have promised to be the people’s president, or have thus been styled by their adherents. One accepts that a candidate for this office has to have a well-founded ego, but there’s something particularly vain in this claim. And vainglorious, in a peculiarly Irish way. There will be much jostling to show who is the most ordinary of all, that is, the least exceptional… even though each must be exceptional to be elected.
But it also begs another very complex question which is this: who are ‘the people’? The electors? Those who choose to vote? Those who live here but can’t vote? Those who don’t live here but can vote? Those who claim ancestral links? Liveliners? Frontliners?
Things are changing. We’re in the middle of a demographic revolution. The people in 2011 are quite different from the people in 1991. And all will be further changed in 2031.
Let’s take an example. A search for “Irish man arrested with drugs in Brazil” yields almost 400,000 results from all over the world, from the USA, Europe, Korea, basically everywhere. All tell of a drug mule caught with over 800 grams of cocaine contained in 72 swallowed capsules. Pictures from CT scans showed it all in graphic detail.
They all call him Irish which, since he holds an Irish passport, he is. But he was born in Nigeria and his name is as far from the Os and Macs as you could possibly get.
Increasingly, our notion of what is Irish is being challenged. No harm at all in that.
In her game-changing presidency Mary Robinson made a great deal of the Irish diaspora, and rightly so. Back then, in the early 1990s, we saw this was a matter of closure, of coming to terms with our history, making our wild geese welcome home.
Well, since 2007 the diaspora’s been growing again. Recent figures show 76,000 people leaving the country in the year to last April, of whom 40,000 were Irish.
Yet, at the same time we ourselves are host to other diasporas. You can see it everywhere but especially on Dublin streets, a Babel to rival any, in the best sense. While down on previous years, we still had over 40,000 immigrants last year.
So, we’ve a paradox. On one hand, there’s the great worldwide web of Irish. In this narrative, Irishness is something carried across the world in the hearts and souls of emigrants, something handed on from generation to generation in touch, song and story. In this tale, those who live here are the custodians of a heritage, a culture, a way of life and, above all, an identity on behalf of the global population of ‘Irish’.
Alternatively, there’s the view that Irishness is gained not by blood and cultural inheritance but by location, that is, by living here. Come and we’ll adopt you.
For about two decades we’ve embraced both of these beliefs. That means there’s an awful lot of people with a legitimate claim to being Irish. Come one, go another, as long as ye come from or to Ireland, there’s a welcome on the mat…
And you know, it’s more complex than just coming and going. For all the 800-years-of-oppression we still hear so much about, Irish people largely migrate to other Anglophone territories, the USA, Australia and the UK. Yes, yes, I know there are exceptions, but in the main…
At the same time, apparently, German employers, all offering very good jobs, wonder why is it that they get so few applications from Ireland (among others). The EU was supposed to facilitate free movement of expertise and labour. With cheap flights, they say, Irish people could even commute on a weekly basis. Instead, they find themselves recruiting Eastern Europeans (who have taken the trouble to learn German).
Even in Ireland each year, although we lose tens of thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of other jobs also become vacant and many of the 40,000 immigrants are coming to fill those jobs. Quite a few Irish-based enterprises have been complaining of the difficulty, finding Irish people to fill many vacancies.
So, powerful patterns of movement and displacement are in play. The ‘people’ are changing and the next President will encounter an increasingly globalised society in which Ireland and the Irish are an important but decreasing presence and through which a constant river of skilled and unskilled global citizens will flow.
This also means that an increasing proportion of the people, if not the electorate this time around, will have no knowledge of what happened in 1913 nor its significance. The anniversary of the Battle of Clontarf will mean nothing to them. Even 1916 is likely to largely pass them by, citizenship tests notwithstanding.
Some polemicists claim that Ireland has become an economy or an enterprise (Ireland Inc) rather than a society. But also, slowly but surely, it’s becoming a place and a system rather than a culture and set of shared meanings and values. Our culture and villages, insofar as either still exist, are increasingly virtual and imaginary, dreamed not real.
That’s the way of the world in the 21st century. There may be much to lament in this change. But there will also be much to savour. In any event, there’s nothing to be done about it, so we may as well lie back and enjoy it. In the meantime, anyone claiming to be of ‘the people’ ought to be clear about what and who ‘the people’ actually are.