Ireland’s political class has spent the past few years assuring its counterparts in the rest of Europe that no burden is too great for the local population to bear. In 2009, Finance Minister Brian Lenihan bragged about ‘our capacity to take pain . . . in France you would have riots if you tried to do this.’footnote¹ Lenihan’s Fianna Fáil party may have been wiped out at the 2011 general election, but the new Fine Gael–Labour government kept on whistling the same tune. However deep the cuts might be, there was no danger of civil unrest: that simply wasn’t the Irish way. Troika officials mingled the barbs directed at turbulent Greeks with half-ingratiating, half-contemptuous remarks about the solid, dependable Irish, who would do as they were told and ask for nothing in return. The eruption of autumn 2014, which saw huge numbers mobilizing in a struggle against water charges, took these complacent voices entirely by surprise. The emergence of a real anti-austerity movement, making use of a wide range of tactics, from electoral campaigns to civil disobedience, and putting down roots in working-class neighbourhoods all over the state, came just as talk of an Irish recovery was reaching fever-pitch. How can we explain this apparent paradox, and what impact might this sudden upsurge of protest have in the long run?

The Republic of Ireland was being held up as a model to the rest of the Eurozone at a time when its economy was still mired in recession. Over the past year, however, such talk has become more insistent, as the latest figures appear to give substance to a comforting morality tale. The Irish people sinned (‘we all partied’, as Brian Lenihan put it); they did their penance, swallowing the Troika’s harsh medicine; and now the rewards are beginning to materialize. The headline figures for gdp and gnp that are cited to back up this argument require careful scrutiny, however. us corporations use Ireland as a tax haven, moving vast sums in and out of the country: in 2012, service-related exports from such companies amounted to €91 billion, but almost €40 billion of that was accounted for by transfer pricing.footnote² Insofar as there has been real growth in the Irish economy, it certainly cannot be attributed to greater compliance with Troika diktats. The Fine Gael Finance Minister Michael Noonan has repeated the mantra ‘Ireland is not Greece’ at every possible opportunity over the past four years. Noonan’s boorish chauvinism obscures the grain of an important truth, for the structures of the two economies are radically different. Ireland has long had one of the most open, export-reliant economies in Europe, and its efforts to attract foreign investment have borne fruit irrespective of Troika-mandated austerity.footnote³ Ireland is part of the Atlantic region, sharing a language with Britain and the us, and benefits from growth in those much larger states; Greece enjoys no such advantages.

In any case, we have to look beyond questionable gdp statistics to see whether things have actually been getting better for the majority of Irish citizens. Unemployment, one of the few trustworthy benchmarks, has fallen since it reached a peak of 15 per cent in 2012: by the summer of 2015, the figure was a little under 10 per cent. Mass emigration has kept the dole queues down, with almost 475,000 people having left the country between 2008 and 2014 (the total labour force in 2014 was a little over 2 million). Ireland swapped the highest net immigration levels in Europe for its highest rate of emigration after the crash, overtaking Kosovo and the Baltic states. 17.5 per cent of Irish-born people over the age of fifteen now live abroad—the highest proportion in the oecd, greater even than Mexico’s; without this safety-valve, unemployment would have been close to Spanish or Greek levels. But there has been some genuine relief on this front for those who remained behind. Domestic consumption, on the other hand, actually fell in relative terms—from 87 per cent of the eu-15 average in 2013 to 85 per cent the following year—while registering a very slight increase overall.footnote⁴ So far, there has been a partial and tentative recovery, whose benefits have not been felt by much of the Irish population.

All talk of ‘recovery’ must, of course, be set against the backdrop of what came before. From 2008 onwards, the Irish state was saddled with the most expensive bank bailout in European history. The infamous, now-defunct Anglo Irish Bank chalked up losses of €35 billion; aib was not far behind, with a €28-billion hole in its finances (Irish gdp in 2014 was a little over €180 billion).footnote⁵ The greater part of this burden was simply passed on to Irish citizens. ecb figures released in April 2015 show that Ireland’s share of the European banking crisis was grossly disproportionate: while the average cost of bank bailouts across the Eurozone was 5 per cent of gdp, in Ireland it was 37.3 per cent.footnote⁶ Most of that money will never be recovered, having been spent on toxic assets and bank recapitalization. Under severe pressure from the European Central Bank, and from the us Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, Dublin has continued to make regular multi-billion euro payments to foreign bondholders who invested money in Irish banks on the strength of hocus-pocus assessments by the ratings agencies (and whose identities have never been publicly disclosed). Interest payments on the national debt will rise to €9.2 billion in 2016—one-fifth of all tax revenue—and an additional payment of €5.7 billion annually will be needed to bring Ireland into line with the eu’s fiscal compact when that comes into effect.footnote⁷

To pay for this crushing burden, deep cuts in public spending were imposed, just as unemployment was beginning to soar, in a country already graced with the second-highest levels of poverty and inequality in the developed world. From 2008 to 2014, austerity budgets took €30 billion out of the national economy: two-thirds of that figure came from spending cuts. Every budget was talked up by government ministers as the last of its kind before Ireland ‘turned the corner’, only to be followed by further cuts in social expenditure. The official deprivation rate shot up from less than 12 per cent in 2007 to 30.5 per cent in 2013.footnote⁸ These headline figures cannot fully convey the impact of the recession on a society under deep strain. Behind every cut stands another group of people who rely upon benefits for much or all of their income; each ‘belt-tightening’ exercise in the public sector tightens the screws on those who cannot afford to go private.

The first stage of the recession was presided over by Fianna Fáil, which paid the electoral price, plunging from 41 per cent of the vote in 2007 to 17 per cent four years later. The 2011 election brought huge gains for Fine Gael and Labour, who went on to form a coalition government with Enda Kenny as prime minister. Both parties had strongly criticized the bank bailout and pledged to impose losses on bondholders. Labour in particular called for a sharp break with the policies of the Cowen government, and with the programme imposed by the Troika at the end of 2010; ‘it’s Labour’s way or Frankfurt’s way’ became the most memorable sound-bite of the campaign. This rhetoric melted away like snow in the sun once the election was over.

There was indeed a break with Fianna Fáil’s style of crisis management, though not the one promised by Labour: after 2011, economic policy became much more regressive. Up to that point, austerity budgets had taken proportionately more from the top layers of the income scale than from those at or near the bottom. Under Fine Gael and Labour, the trend was reversed: in successive budgets from 2012 to 2014, those on the lowest incomes came out worst.footnote⁹ This was accompanied by victim-blaming rhetoric directed against single mothers and the unemployed, with Labour cabinet ministers showing particular gusto on this front, and gestures of national abasement that would turn the strongest stomach (Kenny has sometimes allowed European leaders to pat him literally as well as figuratively on the head). The 2015 ‘post-austerity’ budget offered income gains to the top 40 per cent of households—the richest 10 per cent benefited the most—but continued losses for the remaining 60 per cent.footnote¹⁰ Kenny’s government has declared its intention to prioritize the comfortable classes when resources become available, dressing up a cut in the top rate of income tax as much-needed relief for an imaginary ‘squeezed middle’.footnote¹¹ Meanwhile, a health service starved of investment and struggling to cope after losing more than a tenth of its staff has been told to prune another quarter of a billion euros from its budget.footnote¹² The Labour leader and social welfare minister Joan Burton has lately begun to attend the opening of food banks in ebullient form, with no apparent sense of shame or irony.