It seems clear that the Eurozone crisis has been stabilized, for the time being, on terms dictated by Brussels, Frankfurt and Berlin. The price that has been paid to preserve the single currency and sustain a dysfunctional banking system hardly needs recounting here: from Athens to Dublin, mass unemployment remains a crippling burden. Yet, to paraphrase Tolstoy, all bail-out countries are unhappy in different ways. Greece has witnessed the stormiest opposition, with the emergence of Syriza as a potential, if fragile, counter-hegemonic force. In Spain, years of street protest have begun to leave their mark on the political system, and there is a gathering storm over Catalan independence. Rolling strikes in Portugal have seen public-sector wage and pension cuts blocked by the constitutional court. In Ireland, however, where the economy has been bled dry to reimburse the bad loans of British, French and German banks, resistance has been muted. Cabinet ministers have boasted of their ability to impose ‘remarkable’ cuts in public spending without provoking social unrest.footnote¹ For their part, European officials have repeatedly held Ireland up as an example of good citizenship to its unruly counterparts on the Eurozone periphery, much to the delight of local media outlets.

But if mass protests have been comparatively few in Ireland, it is not for lack of spirited polemical broadsides against its ruling elites by native writers. Pre-eminent here, in terms of impact and visibility, has been Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole, the country’s leading public intellectual. Published in the immediate wake of the crash, O’Toole’s Ship of Fools (2009) was a coruscating attack on the crony culture and bubble economy fostered by Ireland’s political leaders, soon followed by Enough Is Enough (2010), another onslaught on the myths of the Republic, which proposed a comprehensive reform programme with fifty action points. Is there any writer in another eu—or oecd—country who has produced such a comprehensive indictment of the ruling establishment’s record, in such damning detail and in such sparkling prose? O’Toole’s latest works form part of a cycle dating back to the 1980s that testifies to his formidable range as a social commentator. In seeking to explain the ‘Irish exception’, it may thus be helpful to explore O’Toole’s writing in more depth: what distinguishes the critical character of his work, what causal explanation does it offer of his country’s predicament, and what light can it shed on Ireland’s post-crisis trajectory?

Born in 1958, O’Toole spent his early years in Crumlin, a working-class housing project on the fringe of Dublin’s inner city, one of several constructed by Fianna Fáil in the 1930s as part of its slum clearance programme. Built on the cheap, the new district was largely devoid of social infrastructure, with the revealing exception, as he later recalled, of ‘a magnificent granite police barracks overlooking the estate, easily Crumlin’s finest building until the permanent church was erected’.footnote² O’Toole’s father was a bus conductor with a passion for literature whose hero was George Bernard Shaw; his schooling came from the Christian Brothers, a clerical fraternity whose traditional diet of mawkish nationalism and social conformity was sharply at odds with the temper of the times:

While the students of Paris were on the barricades, and my father and the other busmen of Dublin were on strike, I was reading in Our Boys about Maurice, who got a nice girl, joined the Saint Vincent de Paul Society, and became a good boy: ‘He was getting on better with his boss. Before, he had always been pushing for more pay, or looking for easier work, or something. But now he didn’t mind getting the toughest job—and the dirtiest—and he was always willing to change his shift to suit someone else.’footnote³

O’Toole took his degree at University College Dublin, arriving in the mid-70s when the campus ferment of earlier years had already begun to subside. The political and social landscape that confronted O’Toole as he began his career in journalism was easily the most conservative of any country in Western Europe. Long-established reactionary power structures had crumbled in Spain, Portugal and Greece, with left-wing parties and militant unions spearheading resistance to dictatorship, and generational revolt transforming national cultures. In the Republic of Ireland, however, the twin pillars of conservative hegemony, secular and clerical, appeared to be unshakable. National politics still followed the pattern established in the early years of the state, with two right-wing parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, often harvesting more than 80 per cent of the vote between them, while a small, anaemic Labour Party struggled to break the 15 per cent barrier, occasionally serving as a coalition footrest for Fine Gael. This ‘two-and-a-half’ party system derived from a split in the movement for national independence over the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921: the pro-Treaty camp emerged victorious in a brief civil war, and ruled the Irish Free State for its first decade. Their political vehicle, Cumann na nGaedheal, later rebranded as Fine Gael, retained the mark of its origins as a party of clerics, businessmen and strong farmers.

Fianna Fáil, on the other hand, had become the principal home for anti-Treaty holdouts by the end of the 1920s, and cultivated a much more populist image, winning support from farm labourers and the urban working class. Yet on taking power for the first time in 1932, the party would follow the main lines of economic policy laid down by its opponents, tinkering with the ultra-conservative Free State rather than transforming it. All but ten of the years between 1932 and 1981 saw Fianna Fáil in sole possession of government office. There was little room for explicit class politics in this configuration. A modest economic boom in the 1960s boosted industrial militancy—for a time, the Republic had the highest strike rate in the developed world—and briefly emboldened the Labour Party to advance its own claims, promising to break the conservative duopoly. By the time global recession had plunged the Irish economy into steep decline from 1979 onwards, such impertinence was a fading memory: Fine Gael–Labour coalitions would alternate with Fianna Fáil during the 1980s, both presiding over deep cuts in public spending, high unemployment and mass emigration.footnote⁴

A second distinguishing feature of the Irish scene was the powerful hold of a ferociously authoritarian church over the Republic’s social and cultural mores. Gramsci once claimed that ‘nobody attaches himself to Catholicism as a norm of life, even when calling himself a Catholic. An integral Catholic, one, that is, who applied the Catholic norms in every act of his life, would seem a monster.’footnote⁵ It was the peculiar, monstrous achievement of Irish Catholicism that it should have attempted to do so and succeeded for a time, at tremendous psychological cost to vast swaths of the country’s population. Over the course of the nineteenth century, a rigidly puritanical code was grafted onto a peasant society that had traditionally been far more relaxed in its approach to religious observance. This became one of the defining attributes of the new Irish state in the decades after independence. By the 1970s, the Church’s grip was being contested by brave liberal and feminist vanguards, who challenged the prohibition of divorce, abortion and contraception. In the following decade—energized by the papal visit of 1979, which attracted a third of the population to gigantic outdoor spectacles—defenders of Catholic power launched a counter-attack against social liberalization. The 1980s were dominated by a bitterly contested war of attrition between the clerical-conservative bloc and its secular opponents. A constitutional ban on abortion—already proscribed by law—was imposed by referendum in 1983, while attempts to legalize divorce were beaten back in a plebiscite held three years later.footnote⁶