History may be popular in Ireland, but the recent past is not. We are among the least nostalgic countries in the world.
In 2021, when the polling company Ipsos included Ireland in its Global Trends study, it identified the two countries among the 25 it surveyed where people were least likely to agree with the proposition that “I would like my country to be the way it used to be.”
One was China – which, considering the repeated horrors of 20th-century Chinese history and the very recent memories of dire poverty, is hardly surprising. The other was Ireland.
This is a both a measure of progress and a mark of the relative grimness of the recent past. In spite of the stuttering and unevenly shared nature of growth in recent decades, most of us can still append to “things ain’t what they used to be” a hearty “thank God”.
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And the news cycle keeps throwing up reminders of the bleakest aspects of 20th century Ireland: the Kerry Babies, the Mother and Baby homes, the delayed traumas of widespread sexual abuse in schools, institutions and organisations. The return of the repressed keeps the recent past creepily alive.
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There is not much evidence of a golden glow in recent representations of 20th century Ireland. Self-harm, sexual abuse and suicide in Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin. The harsh, unloving birth family of the young girl in An Cailín Ciúin. The shadow of the Magdalene Laundry in Claire Keegan’s superb Small Things Like These.
Even Colin Farrell’s lovely jumpers don’t do much to cloak the forbidding nature of the backward glance. If the Irish past is another country, our artists are not exactly selling it like Bord Fáilte as a lovely place to visit. It is best seen from the safe distance of fiction.
In the crash of 2008, the fatalists turned out to be right. If you do not believe in sustainable progress towards a better future, you create a bubble that eventually bursts
(It is rather weird that the nearest thing to nostalgia in recent Irish popular culture is Derry Girls, set during the Troubles.)
On his visit to Ireland last week, Joe Biden repeated a line he also used at the White House on St Patrick’s Day: “You know, I often say: We Irish are the only people in the world who are nostalgic for the future.”
Actually, there’s nothing especially Irish about the phrase “nostalgia for the future”. It’s been used repeatedly in the titles of films, albums, books and art exhibitions around the world.
But what does it mean? I suppose it suggests the idea that there might be a progressive kind of nostalgia, a longing to create the better futures that previous generations have desired but not been granted.
Biden himself seemed to hint at this meaning. On St Patrick’s Day he used the term in the context of an insistence that the point is “not to live in some romanticised version of the past, but to remember what’s possible – as we recommit ourselves to the unfinished work that lies ahead of all of us”.
There’s surely something in that: remembering the possible. And perhaps it is worthwhile to think about the Irish past, not just as a place most of us are glad to leave behind, but also as a history of unfinished work.
One of the problems with Ireland’s relationship to ideas of the future is that so many of the aspirations that fuelled the creation of the State quickly curdled into pious rhetoric at odds with reality. The future was just an attic in which we dumped all our present failures.
Some day we would end emigration. Some day we would unite Ireland. Some day we would all be speaking Irish as our daily language.
This thwarted idealism went hand in hand with cruelty and repression, driven by a desperate need to compensate for the failures with a grandiose exceptionalism in which poverty was proof of spiritual power, ignorance was innocence and paralysis was faithfulness to our glorious past.
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It’s easy to see why talk of large-scale possibilities induced cynicism. It was better to settle for pragmatic and piecemeal progress, for getting by while, perhaps, just about getting better.
Yet, too often, this pragmatism tipped over into fatalism. The Celtic Tiger period was marked by an odd feeling that, since the future was unknowable and uncontrollable, we might as well enjoy the windfall of good fortune while we can.
And of course, in the crash of 2008, the fatalists turned out to be right. If you do not believe in sustainable progress towards a better future, you create a bubble that eventually bursts.
Yet fatalism has now become literally fatal. In the era of the climate crisis, if we do not believe that we can control the future, we won’t have one.
Ireland functions as a small but largely respected democracy in a world where democracy is under both external and internal attack
Ireland also has to start believing in its own luck. It has to finally silence the inner voice that tells us that we shouldn’t get too attached to success because it won’t last.
The truth is actually the other way around: success doesn’t last because we don’t believe in it enough to do what’s necessary to make it sustainable.
So here’s the challenge: can we somehow recover the sense of aspiration about the future that animated the creation of the State, without falling into the hollowness of empty dreams?
It’s a good thing that Ireland is relatively free of the nostalgia that, in recent years, has fed reactionary movements around the world. But the downside of that freedom is the absence of any connection to the deeper sense of possibility that made previous generations want to have an independent country in the first place.
The demographic decline that blighted their hopes has been reversed – the devastation of the Great Hunger will finally be undone in the next 20 years. Ireland has the best-educated population in Europe.
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The successful handling of the threat from Brexit showed that Ireland has, as generations of patriots dreamed, “taken its place among the nations of the earth”. It functions as a small but largely respected democracy in a world where democracy is under both external and internal attack.
It has no excuse for just bumbling along, or for congratulating itself for not being nearly as bad as it used to be. It can be as good as it wants to be.
The best kind of public memory is the memory of what’s possible. It encompasses the bitterly hard-won knowledge of what cruelties and stupidities we are capable of.
But it must also embrace that nostalgia for the future in which the sense of possibility becomes the fuel for public policy and collective action.