Irish Politics

Anyone who has recent-ish Irish ancestry may be interested to know that Ireland’s National Archives are putting up the data from the 1911 Irish census. At the moment, only data from Dublin are available – but this was enough to allow me (after a bit of foostering around – the data was under “Mac Neill” rather than “MacNeill”) to find the census data for my great-grandfather and his family (not including my grandmother, for the excellent reason that she wasn’t yet born).

Indeed.

You never know who you’ll run into on the way from Brussels to Kerry. In the check-in line at Zaventem, I met John Bruton, former Fine Gael Taoiseach and now the EU’s ambassador to the US. On Wednesday night, he had treated the Brussels branch of Fine Gael to his pungent and witty take on US/EU relations, and he was still in flying form. In the lounge, I was gently ribbed for my blueshirtedness by Fianna Fail MEPs Sean O’Neachtain and Liam Aylward. Both MEPs had been reading The Four Glorious Years, 1917 – 1921, an institutional account of the foundation of the Irish State by a civil servant of the time. They warmly recommended the book, saying you wouldn’t know the writer was a Dev man till the last chapter. Now this is something I just love about Irish politicians.
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Like Henry, I’m part of the last generation of Irish people to date for whom fleeing the country was a standard career path. I emigrated in 1995, coincidentally the year that the boom in immigration really began, and the era of significant net migration arrived. My usual impeccable timing, in other words. The scale of Irish emigration throughout the twentieth century is astonishing. From 1926 to 1961, the rate of emigration was sufficient to at least equal and usually significantly outweigh the natural rate of increase in the population, so that overall population numbers either stagnated or fell. Thus, despite the fact that the country’s Total Fertility Rate was over three until the early 1980s, there were fewer than 150,000 more people living in Ireland in 1979 than there had been in 1901. The government conducted 14 censuses between 1926 and 2006. Of these, only four have shown positive net migration from the previous census, and three of those periods are since 1990: 1971-79 (+14 thousand), 1991-96 (+2k), 1996-2002 (+26k) and 2002-2006 (+42k).

Bill Sjostrom tells me via email that the 2006 Irish Census figures are out, and that 14.7% of respondents weren’t born in Ireland. This is one of the reasons that I don’t blog very much about Ireland any more; the country has changed dramatically since I left. I departed in 1993 at the tail-end of the economic slump, when no self-respecting immigrant would want to come near the country (over half of my university class emigrated as best I remember; I imagine that most of them have since gone back). According to Bill, 0.6% of Ireland’s population were born in the US; a pretty significant reversal of the previous trend. This picture from the Irish Times suggests that changes are afoot in the North of Ireland too.

The caption reads:

The Free Derry Wall gets a coat of paint for the gay and lesbian Foyle Pride Festival. Members of the gay men’s health promotion agency the Rainbow Project painted the wall for the festival, which starts on August 13th.

Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries have used wall-slogans and murals (often quite detailed and extensive) as a means of marking off their territory and scaring off outsiders for decades. To have gay activists start doing ‘em over in pink suggests that things are … a little different than they used to be.

I’ve been feeling a bit guilty about not blogging on the Irish election, but only a bit; unlike Maria, I’ve mostly lost touch with Irish politics. But for those who want to follow what’s happening minute to minute, Irish Election is yer only man (and indeed its level of technological sophistication seems to be impressing the tech-politics folks in the US too).

Update: It looks as though Michael McDowell, who was Deputy Prime Minister (and more to the point, Maria’s and my uncle) has lost his seat and is leaving public life. While we had very different political positions on a host of things (he’s strongly to the right), I’m very sorry about this, and not only because of my obvious personal affection for him – he brought a level of intellectual and argumentative clarity to a political culture that has all too often been based on ambiguity and obfuscation, and did more than anyone else to hold Sinn Fein’s feet to the fire when they looked likely to enter normal party politics on the nod and the wink.

Things aren’t looking too good for the rainbow coalition of Fine Gael, Labour and possibly the Greens. Yesterday’s election had a very high turnout and Fianna Fail, the leading party in the most recent coalition has about 41% of the vote.

Right now, all indicators are that the next coalition will be led by Fianna Fail. But who will the junior party be? The Progressive Democrats, Labour (despite their pre-election pact with Fine Gael) or even Sinn Fein.

I’d hoped to get home to vote, but work didn’t permit. In Brussels, only Irish civil servants and their spouses are permitted to use a postal vote. I’ve no serious complaints. If our diaspora was allowed to run the show, the provos would have been in years ago.

Fantasy Ireland is a long-running cultural trope in America and a few other places (including, at times, Ireland itself). In the old days, it was a bucolic paradise, with a surfeit of pigs in the parlor and an absence of indoor plumbing, which Irish-Americans imagined they could visit in search of their roots. But its content has changed in recent years and it has popped up in various places this past week. Wil Wilkinson brought up Tom Friedman’s Fantasy Ireland, a neoliberal paradise of fast growth and low regulation, in conversation with Henry the other day.

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Rather worrying news from Ireland where figures from the last quarter of 2006 show that, as expected, new building is declining, but also that exports dropped by 10% when they’d been expected to rise by more than 2%. [click to continue…]

Wonderful news; power-sharing in a devolved Northern Ireland administration will begin on 8 May. I’m rather surprised, as it looked to me as if the DUP would delay agreement at least for a few days. I suspect at least part of the reason the UK could make a credible ‘now or never’ threat was the fact that Gordon Brown was more than willing to cut the purse strings to the assembly. Bravo to one and all.

Last night I was talking with fellow Blueshirts about Irish politicians’ reluctance to think about energy policy in a strategic way, or to look further ahead than the next election at issues that have a 20-30 year horizon. Ireland’s not even on the end of a pipeline, and any deal Germany makes with Russia isn’t going to concern itself with us. We are still opening peat burning stations with relatively high CO2 emissions, and our gas supply is running out. To diversify, we’ve got interconnectors with the UK - current and planned – and in the next decade or so, we’ll have an interconnector direct into the French national grid. Which is striking, given how sniffy Irish people are about nuclear power. [click to continue…]