Independence in a Vassal State

4 8 April 2016

n his 1976 poem, ‘A Part of Speech’, Joseph Brodsky

says Russian narratives of the future and of history

are informed by language, not facts.

“... and when “the future” is uttered, swarms of mice

rush out of the Russian language and gnaw a piece

of ripened memory which is twice

as hole-ridden as real cheese”.

Current events in Ireland import his observations to

our own milieu.

March and April mark the peak of the Centennial cel-

ebrations season in Ireland - the months of

remembering, interpreting and occasionally re-writing

the already troubled historical narratives of the nation

to reﬂect the distant 1916 Easter Rising. The ripened

memory is hole-ridden by interpretations and narra-

tions, though the factual history of the event could

easily be explained in simple timelines.

Thus the focus of many analysts has drifted from the

original Easter Rebellion to the future. The culmination

of this was a rather simple, yet far-reaching, observa-

tion by President Michael D Higgins that modern Ireland

is a society that has yet to achieve the core perceived

objectives of the Rising: the

story of Ireland is still being told.

This notion of Irish sovereign

incompleteness, one hundred

years from the Rising, is an

important and complex one.

To some, extracting relevance

from the Rising means project-

ing historical myopia into an

evolving future: the ideal of

national independence deﬁned

by physical boundaries. Nation-

alist rhetoric, historically apt,

but backward-looking, has been one of the signiﬁcant

themes in the Centenary. For others, including myself,

relevance is less about the ideals of the original

Rebellion, and more about

the nature of the Irish state

and its elites within the con-

text of the modern reality,

framed forcefully by the memory of

the Global Financial Crisis.

Put simply, irrespective of the wishes of the 1916

leaders and the generations of Irish national leaders

who followed them today’s Ireland is, economically-

speaking, a vassal state, dependent on fortunes,

choices and policies determined well beyond our

shores.

Perhaps the saddest part of this truth is that this

state of affairs is the direct outcome of the willful co-

opting of Irish elites by our external masters: the

technocracies of Europe and the Multinational

Corporations.

As in 1916, today Ireland has little control over its own

destiny. And just as in 1916, there is only a small minor-

ity of the Irish people willing to confront this reality.

No matter what the Irish President declares about the

‘Irish story’ being a continuing saga, we are subjects of

the world order that our leaders, aided by the silent

majority of us, have not the will to alter. Still less the

capacity.

Over the hundred years that separate the Easter

Rebellion and today, Ireland has travelled an impres-

sive path of economic growth - a path that is still new

but which is celebrated today as our major achieve-

ment. However, attributing the economic success of

today to the struggle for independence in the past is a

false narrative. Apart from the fact that on average Irish

citizens were doing well before the Rising, asserting

Ireland’s economic independence from the UK required

a period of painful and exceptionally protracted misery

that stretched from the Rebellion into the early 1970s.

When we ﬁnally did get growth to ﬂourish, we squan-

dered its fruits. And though we have growth it has not

yielded independence.

The economic renaissance after 1973, attributed to

Independence

in a Vassal State

Racing to translate 1916 into the

future we ignore our subjugation, not

to empire, but to debt, European

technocracies and MNCs

OPINION

Constantin

Gurdgiev

INTERLOPER

COLUMNS

For me, contemporary

relevance is less about

the ideals of 1916 and

more about the positioning

of the Irish state and its

elites in the post-Global

Financial Crisis world

April 2016 4 9

TK Whitaker-promoted economic openness and

FDI-focused development, did not mark mean-

ingful economic sovereignty for the country.

Rather it represented a shift in Irish economic

dependency from reluctant participation in UK-

centric trade, investment and labour markets

to an enthusiastic embrace of the EU as an

opportunity for the beggar-thy-neighbour

model of tax arbitrage policies and to compre-

hensive prostration to corporate markets, ﬁrst

represented by the ‘civilised’ foreign direct

investors, lately – by the blackmail-wielding

bondholders and vultures.

The overall outcome was belated prosper-

ity, but also atrophying leadership.

Economic growth came with policy deﬂa-

tion through Social Partnership, the

perceived and real demands of FDI,

and reliance on the importation of

social, cultural and economic

ideas (and institutions) from the

EU. A nation once subjugated to

the UK found itself subjugated

to a virulent blend of national-

ism and religion and, ﬁnally, to yet another set

of hegemonies.

By the end of the 1990s, the Irish model of

commerce, traditionally deﬁned by the triumvi-

rate of the local councilor, local priest and local

bank manager presiding over economic

resources gave way to the Social Partnership

model where those three agents were supple-

mented by a motley crew of social and business

groups and state bureaucrats whose sole pre-

occupation was to make sure that the wishes of

the MNCs and Brussels were not trampled by

mere local selﬁshness.

The fruits of 100 years of striving for inde-

pendence is an economic culture of dependency.

Which, in cold and impersonal language of eco-

nomic statistics, looks like this:

In 2014, Ireland spent more than the EU and

euro-area average as a percentage of GNP -

0.87-0.88% - on social housing, against the

Euro area’s roughly 0.72%. In return, we got a

spiralling homelessness crisis and a ratcheting

length and duration of social housing queues.

We posted the second highest GDP per capita

ﬁgure, based on EU purchasing power parity,

but only average (for the euro area) levels of

actual real individual consumption. We got the

fastest growing economy in the EU, with OECD-

topping investment ﬁgures.

But we also have average or below average

growth rates in construction spending

(+3.1% in the ﬁrst nine months of 2015

compared to the same period of 2014)

and our companies’ investments in

machinery and equipment was

down almost 18%. In fact, January-

September 2015, total

investment growth, excluding

intellectual property - domain

of smoke and mirrors gener-

ated by the tax-shifting MNCs - was down 9.5%,

just as ofﬁcial total investment ﬁgures for the

economy were up 26.8%.

Consider the following simple exercise. We

used to believe that the true state of the Irish

economy was described by our Gross National

Product (GNP) because, unlike GDP, it ‘accounts’

for proﬁt expatriation out of Ireland by our

hyperactive MNCs. Ofﬁcial national accounts

tell us that in 2015 Irish real GDP and GNP grew

by 7.8% and 5.7% compared to 2014. Stripping

out the increase in Intellectual Property invest-

ments over the ﬁrst nine months of 2015

compared to the same period of 2014 implies

GDP growth of 3.3% and GNP growth of 0.5 %.

That’s right: GNP growth, if MNC-led

‘domiciling’ of foreign patents and research and

development outputs into Ireland is stripped

out of our national accounts, implies the Irish

economy remained basically ﬂat.

In human terms this manifests itself in fami-

lies losing their homes to vulture funds - a

process actively facilitated by our sovereign

leaders. It looks like patients in hospital corri-

dors and on trolleys and names on years-long

waiting lists, as investment increases are swal-

lowed by inefﬁcient management practices

which are actively facilitated by our sovereign

leaders. The state of the economy above is

attested to in lavish though somehow jaded

bank adverts and property promotions once

again commanding our media, while the banks

prolong their clumsy extend-and-pretend dance

around mortgages arrears. Credit to the real

economy shrinks and the cost of private credit

rises relative to ECB funding rates and govern-

ment debt yields, as our leaders toast their

governance successes.

President Higgins is correct: one hundred

years after the Easter Rebellion, Ireland remains

a sovereign project still in progress - incom-

plete, and increasingly likely to remain so over

the next hundred years. Hegemonies change,

vassals remain.

Or, as Brodsky said in the same poem:

“Life, that no one dares

to appraise, like that gift horse's mouth,

bares its teeth in a grin at each

encounter. What gets left of a man amounts

to a part. To his spoken part. To a part of speech”.

And the part that remains is certainly not

macroeconomic statistics – dodgy ones.

Stripping out the increase

in Intellectual Property

investments implies GDP

growth of 3.3% and GNP

growth of a paltry 0.5 %

The master has changed but the supplication is the same

EUROPEAN FEUDAL SYSTEM

Peasants

Knights

Nobles

King