Dublin Opinion

I have The Wire on play pretty much all the time these days. I get to the end of season five, I go back to season one. I’ll watch two or three episodes a night, more if I’m travelling. I’ll put a season on the laptop and watch it on the train. If it’s by bus I’ll put them on my tiny Creative and scrunch up in the seat with the headphones on and a screen not much bigger than a mobile. Its characters are etched on my brain. Stansfield, Barksdale, Bodie; Bubs, Omar, Friedman; McNulty, Carcetti, Bunny; burners, yellowtops, WMDs. We used to make shit in this country. Build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket.

The show’s investigations into the social and economic class relations of a modern American city, (or a post-industrial American city, as David Simon sees it), are well documented and, indeed, well discussed and analysed. I can’t say I’m formulating a thesis while I’m sitting on the bus at 10pm, coming back from an oral history interview in Derry or Wexford or Cork, but I am thinking about this world that The Wire captures so well: the corruption and symbiotic collapse in public services; the resignation of those so used to a broken world, finding strange solace with the newly marginalised in American cities - police lieutenants, teachers, and journalists; the search for the ‘Dickensian aspect’ in fictionalised narratives, while real stories of redemption and acceptance are missed by those in search of ‘the truth.’ There are some comparisons with Irish society, and if you were to suck all the charisma, charm and humour out of Clay Davis, leaving nothing but a grey, corrupt, anonymous suit, you could end up with a Liam Lawlor or George Redmond.

But you’d have to suck a lot of charisma out of Davis. An awful fucking lot.

Then there’s the thing about post-industrial. The Irish economy has not collapsed, although NAMA, if passed, will see to that. And there is an industrial core to the Irish economy, even if that core is foreign-owned and non-dependent on the Irish market for survival. One million people could leave Ireland in the morning, and not one percentage of Irish exports would be affected. The Irish boom, if you want to call it that, occurred because of what was happening in the local economy. It’s very telling that Ireland’s unemployment rate is now at, shock, 1996 levels. But wasn’t 1996 one of the Celtic Tiger years? Unemployment only began to significantly drop when the local economy took off, not when exports took off. Whatever “post” we’re in now, it’s “post” whatever drove that local economy. We could take Frank Sobotka, the union leader of season two, and translate him into Irish society. We could even keep a lot of his mannerisms and frustrations, his desire to achieve something right by doing so many wrongs. We could even have Sobotka in an office talking to a lobbyist and trying to pass bribe money onto him. We would have to change the punchline, though. As the lobbyist grabs his suitcase and heads for the door, Frank could still stop him with a rhetorical question, but it would have to be like this:

D’you know what the trouble is, Brucey? We used to sell land in this country. Speculate on land. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket.

The problem, though, is the “we” part. Did you speculate on land? I certainly didn’t. Nor do I know anyone who did. I know people who bought a house for themselves, but the Irish housing market has been slowly privatised since the 1960s. In order to have a house, you had to buy a house. Long-term rental as a viable option is now gone. Privatised away. Yet the very act of purchasing a house in Ireland in the past fifteen years - purchasing a fundamental human need, that is, shelter - somehow made you a speculator, up there with the bright and bravest: the entrepreneurs, the razzle-dazzlers, the AIB builders and Sindo celebrity shakers. The message was carried through conduits such as RTE property porn, Irish Times supplements, and fuckwit economists - indeed, it continues to be believed in some measure as NAMA is being sold on the premise that there will be an upturn in property speculation in the future, along with the idea that the economy was brought down by Gardai and nurses’ overtime. Bring back one and cut the other, the conduits say, and we’ll be back on track again - that somehow if we can only start selling land again, speculating on land, we won’t have to put our hand in the next guy’s pocket.

Analogies are like underpants: stretch them too far and they lose their shape. Property speculators, well, stretch them as much as you want and they always get their shape back. But it’s something that’s never really brought up in all of this: why do we have property speculators, and why do they have such a say on the economy?

I don’t want to get mono-causal, but the template for the modern Irish economy was set under Whittaker and Lemass. I’m simplifying here, but the growth pattern was based on getting foreign companies to set up in Ireland, and indigenous capitalists to make their millions on providing greenfield sites for the factories, and then constructing the warehouses, buildings, and office space for the foreign investors. The accompanying population move from the land to the cities - which is stark for anyone who’s ever looked at the census reports from 1956 to 1971 - provided a need for greater amounts of suitable housing. More greenfield sites, more re-zoning, more speculation. It couldn’t last, and it didn’t. The first economic miracle fizzled out by the mid-1960s, and the credit frenzy in the lead-up to entry to the EEC soon imploded post-membership. Under these structural deficiencies - created with the blessing of Whittaker and Lemass, both lauded today, without any sense of irony, as the creators of modern Ireland - this state entered the oil crisis and the mid-1970s.

Foreign companies based in Ireland source relatively little of their materials from Irish suppliers. And Irish sales of their produce account for a small percentage of their overall sales. The argument that exports will save Ireland - that Ireland needs to export or die - is simplistic at best, misleading at worst. Export sales benefit companies which, well, export, as well as companies which import the materials used by those exporters. Outside of that circle, the benefits to the Irish economy are quite limited: one, because of the structural deficiencies with regard to development and supply of material for export products; two, because very little of that export/import circle is taxed because of a combination of low corporation tax and extensive tax-breaks (not to mention wholesale tax avoidance); and three, because the jobs in foreign companies are subsided by the Irish taxpayer, to an average cost of €13,000 per job.

Cattle production, financial providers, and property speculation: these powerful interests, which emerged over the period from the 1870s to the 1960s, are central to any understanding of the rhythms and dynamics of indigenous Irish capitalism. In season one Lester Friedman says “You follow drugs, you get drug addicts and drug dealers. But you start to follow the money, and you don’t know where the fuck it’s gonna take you.” Well, in Ireland, follow the money, and sooner or later it comes back to cattle, banks, and property. Two of those interests were decimated in the past twelve months, but they’re going to walk away relatively unscathed, while the rest of us… oh well, you know.

I’m loathe to finish on property speculators. such a cuntish way to finish a thought these days.

So anyway.

Yesterday, a friend of mine came up to me in the National Library and said oh, do you want to grab a coffee? So we went downstairs to the café and it turned out that my friend wanted to ask me about what it’s like to research full-time outside the academy as an ‘independent scholar’. Well, I said it’s do-able, of course, but I think you’ve got to keep yourself sharp by producing peer-review articles and presenting conference papers. Keep that up, and keep in touch with your peers, and if you can afford the hit in terms of income, then yeah, go for it. There’s the little joys, of course, such as watching The Wire on a portable player on an intercity bus at ten at night, having secured another couple of hours of memory and testimony for the future. There’s also the enormous intellectual freedom which comes with working outside the academy, and while it’s not quite viable in the long term - it’s only so long before you end up carrying TESCO bags of discarded newspapers around with you and smelling of bad uncles - at the moment it sits easily on the shoulders. I said to my friend that I think I’d find it difficult to research working class history and culture within the academy, even to use such language, and my friend said why? Didn’t think that was the case at all. In fact, my friend mentioned a couple of funding opportunities which might just suit what I am doing. Got me thinking that maybe I’m getting close to smelling of bad uncles already. Maybe it’s time to step back in again.

Anyway. Time for some music. There was a standing joke in Sean’s Show from the 1990s where every time the phone rang Sean Hughes would put some jazz on the stereo, turn it up, and then answer the phone “SORRY I CAN’T HEAR YOU. I’LL JUST TURN DOWN THE JAZZ.” and for years afterwards I shirked from ever playing jazz for fear of being pretentious. Then, just as I was getting over that, The Fast Show came along and did their “hmmm, nice” sketch about a jazz club where the guys always played really crappy Jazz-Funk fusion while the presenter nodded and stroked his chin. Again, knocked me for six. And although I do listen to jazz these days, if there’s any song I’d play before I’d answer the phone so I could turn it down, I think it would be this one - not because it’s in any way pretentious, but because it’s so damn good.

Enjoy.