A Time of Change:
What challenges?
Peadar Kirby
Schumacher summer school,
14th June 2012
Introduction
 About the only thing we agree on is that we are in
crisis:
 But what is the nature of this crisis or crises?
 What are the causes?
 What should we do about it all?
 Need to focus on the specific dimensions of the
crisis as it manifests itself in this country
 Place it in a wider historical context that keeps a focus
on the island as a whole
 Challenge us to imagine a very different future for
Irish society
This talk
 In this talk I propose to:
 Distinguish various layers of the present situation
 Identify the causes
 Argue that they signify a time of fundamental
historical change
 Place these in a wider historical context
 Suggest some possibilities that might emerge
 Hopefully this will help to inform our discussions
and learning
Crisis, what crisis?
 Part of our crisis we share with our EU neighbours
but a large part is very particular to Ireland
 Immediate origins are in a financial crisis which has
generated a wider and very deep economic recession
 But these crises derive from a deeper crisis of a
particular model of development:
 A neoliberal or free-market model:
 Low tax road to development
 Reliance on free market, especially on global capital
 State’s role to create an attractive environment so
regulation kept very light
What is particularly ours
 Two dimensions are uniquely ours:
 The crisis of our model has revealed a crisis of our
political and administrative systems that have proven
incapable of managing change
 This crisis coincides with another major crisis
deriving from the collapse of the authority of the
Catholic Church:
 Undermines not just a core institution of our society
but our central system of values and identity: who are
we?
Causes
 A tendency to moralise:
 The greed and shortsightedness of elites
 Problems with this reading:
 Exonerates us, the society, from any blame
 Individualises the problem and neglects its structural
nature
 Encapsulated in arguments for a ‘second republic’ and a
developmental social democratic model
 On this reading, we need a new beginning
Key challenges
 Crises point to a moment of fundamental change:
A new polity and political economy model
Requires a new culture and practice of politics
Begs the question of what are our fundamental values
Brings us back to something akin to nation building
again
 All in the context of the enormous twin challenges of
climate change and peak oil:



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 These are remarkably absent in public debate but their
imperative will become ever more demanding on public
policy and on social practices
Historical context
 Back to settlement of 100 years ago:
 Established a society based on two antagonistic
nationalisms strongly based on religious identities:
 A Catholic nationalism versus a Protestant unionism
 Both are now in terminal crisis for somewhat different
reasons:


More fundamental collapse of dominant institutions in
Republic: FF, Church, banks
But North faces challenge of weaning itself off British
subvention in context of political settlement
 Forces pushing both states together may be becoming
stronger than those that pushed them apart for 100 years
 Fundamental question both face is what model of
development might serve them best
Possibilities I
 What new identity can bind Irish society?
 Difficult to see it based on religion in any central way
 Framework for conceiving of how new can emerge:
 Ideas: from where are they emerging?
 Interests: what models are seen as best serving
people’s interests
 Institutions: how to build institutions embodying
these models
 Nexus between ideas, interests, institutions cluster
around models
Possibilities II
 Main struggle can be conceived of as being between
three different models:
 Re-constituting the neoliberal model:
 State playing a subservient role to private capital,
whether national or global
 Implies weak social outcomes: poverty, inequality
 Moving towards a developmentalist social democratic
model:
 State playing a more active role to foster an innovative
domestic economy generating sufficient resources for
robust social development
 Create a more equal society and stronger public space
Possibilities III
 Peak oil and climate change place huge question
marks over viability of these models
 Challenge us to develop a new model, moving
beyond the model of industrial society
 Towards a ecological or ethical socialist model:
 Principle of local provisioning
 Strong state involvement to restrain market and make
it conform to ecological imperatives
 Strong democratic and participatory mechanisms to
hold state in check