Sparkling new office buildings crown the south bank of the Liffey river, east of Dublin’s historic center. They are mostly the product of European Union investment, and there are signs affixed to construction sites that tout the funding. I saw the same signs in southern Italy, Spain and Portugal in the last few years, as capital from the north of the EU fills in the periphery. Judging on the high quality of road and rail, I’d call this construction an unalloyed success, and the Dutch, Germans and French must take comfort on their holidays that the money is well spent. The historically threadbare areas of Europe, like Ireland, are graced with skyscrapers and superhighways. Poverty seems to be disappearing.
Still, every transaction comes with some downside, at least from the standpoint of the natives. Those buildings house the vanguard of the Brussels and Berlin business world, and prominent corporate logos are affixed and glowing. No longer a sleepy backwater, Ireland hosts the most powerful of multinationals: Novo Nordisk, SAP, Siemens. LVMH and its luxury brands are prominent on Grafton Street in Dublin, and the Americans are here too, a bit more downscale: Timberland, North Face, and of course Starbucks. Which is to say Grafton Street doesn’t look much different than the Champs Elysees or the Milan arcade, or, for that matter, Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles.
The native response to all this imported sameness is to package the local into its own offsetting brand, and that is the case in Dublin, as all the multinationals pale on poster and wall compared to Guinness and Jameson. The high spirits on high street are apparently the product of high spirits, and indeed, Temple Bar was spilling out of the pubs and into the streets as early as six PM on a Friday. I would have stuck around to watch the revelries draw into the late hours but I had arrived that morning and was jet-lagged. Early enough, nonetheless, to witness the first volumes of aboriginal vomit to grace the gutters. That was my virgin encounter with Ireland, with a few local Irish whiskies also in me: against globalization, getting drunk is an act of national resistance.
Whatever amusement I took in that fact was offset the next morning at lunch as I watched a couple of young guys fall off their stools in an upscale restaurant. It was noon, and they either had kept drinking all night, or, from the looks of it, had started that Saturday morning. They would not make it to the afternoon, and they weren’t alone: the waitress dismissed their harassment by saying, “that’s just the Guinness talking.” I had the sense she used the line a lot.
It seems unfair and prejudicial to open a travelog about my first visit to Ireland with a vignette about drunks, but Wikipedia tells me that 70 percent of Irish men have a drinking problem and 24 percent engage in “heavy episodic drinking” at least once a month, so the statistics seem to align with my perception that alcoholism is a health crisis in Ireland.
It’s not just a health crisis, of course, and nothing new — the drunk Irishman has been a staple of English-speaking culture for centuries. But the centrality of alcohol on this island is remarkable. Alcoholic beverages are one of the country’s largest exports, worth over $1.5B last year, and employing over 92,000 people. Brands like Guinness and Jameson stamp the hospitals and libraries and museums as well as the pubs and roadhouses. Benefactors and owners of generous charities: At Jameson’s we were treated to a long disquisition on the centrality of their industry as a responsible employer and key civic contributor. I’m sure I would have heard the same at Guinness, but I couldn’t get in — the tours were sold out. Their factory is a bit like Disneyland for drunks, with lines out the door and their merchandise scattered in every window. It’s a big, profitable business with social throw weight.
Given the statistics on Wikipedia and the obvious excesses of the weekend, it felt to me like the alcohol industry had an analogous relationship to Ireland as does the gun industry to the United States — something so unique and characteristically local as to mark the nation with its profits and pathology. Even more: it has the same corrosive hold on national notions of masculinity. If Americans cannot imagine their male heroes incapable of handling guns, then the Irish cannot imagine a real man who cannot hold his liquor. And as hellish as is the gun violence in America, the domestic violence that attends Irish men living up to their reputation as hard drinkers must be equally frightful. There are surely millions of abused women and children, suffering before some red-faced bully trying to live out the inebriated notion of a strongman. All I know of this is my Irish-descended grandfather didn’t trust a man who wouldn’t get shitfaced and I’m pretty sure there are still a lot of Irish grandfathers pushing this dross on the next generation. I will say in my grandfather’s defense that the point of these masculine trials was to push yourself to the limit with both booze and guns but ultimately settle into the position of using both responsibly. That millions of men do not do this he and his generation wrote off as merely unfortunate.
Well, whiskey separates the men from the boys. And that of course was the point of its introduction to Ireland, and to every other colonial frontier where Europeans paired their importation of firesticks with that of firewater. Alcohol was a profound social corrosive, designed to disrupt native societies in their most intimate connections. Booze is a prime tool for social isolation. It begins in camaraderie and ends in paranoia and pathos. You’ve probably had that bar conversation with a friend that suddenly turns to “so is that what you really think of me?” as their eyes go beady and they slump in their chairs. Among the alcoholics I’ve known there is always a turning point that sees them obsessing over their very real — if common and forgivable — vulnerabilities and weaknesses; an obsession that inevitably ends with the bottle as their only friend. But again, think of this less as human tragedy and more as a form of social organization and you’ll get its full dimension. Booze is a perfect instrument of work discipline, given that even hungover men could tend mines and factories. Hard-drinking men make for great laborers in their twenties and less so in their thirties and they are dead or used up by their forties and fifties. Drunk men are chaotically organized at best and shambolic at worst and every working-class movement in American and Irish history has suffered from the bottle. About the only thing drunk men can organize well are lynchings.
I’m not pushing temperance here, but you don’t have to be a teetotaler to understand just how useful alcohol has been in the colonial enterprise and in the service of the status quo. And the Irish are, in many ways, the original subjects of the colonial project, so much so that after the British invaded North America they often compared the Irish to the native Americans, and dismissed both, as in Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (1642), as “savages” and “barbarous.” By that point the British applied the techniques of subjugation they developed in Ireland to the natives of America. In Ireland they bought off the local oligarchs in a process they called “surrender and regrant (lands).” They launched genocidal war under Cromwell and advanced the mass expropriation of land under the Ulster plantation system. And they passed the Penal Laws, which applied ruthless punishments for the most ephemeral of transgressions in order to assert dominance. But by far the most successful techniques were those that got the natives to adopt a mindset of defeat and subordination. These psychological techniques were cheaper and for the most part self-regulating, and the pathologies were manifest at the personal level and never at the political. So yes, at the outset of the British colonial epoch they pushed gin, rum and whiskey on whatever locals they could and gained the benefits in social corrosion and quiescence. And yes, they introduced a hard-drinking culture where men drank themselves to insensibility and (political) impotence. And the sheer power of that technique is pretty clear when you consider we are living with the consequences of that project in alcoholism and toxic masculinity five centuries later.
I thought a lot about these things in Ireland, because for an American, the context of that country’s history is always in part the emigration experience and the narrative of Irish progress in America. There are, after all, almost five times more Irish in America than in Ireland, and they brought with them the conventions of their oppression. We’re Irish on both sides of my family. My mother’s father was a Shamley, and my father’s mother was a Donehey. Both were built on the reputational toughness of the Irish. He was a veteran of Pearl Harbor, and she was a relentless striver with an acid tongue. Both had parents that abandoned them as children. My grandmother ended up in a kind of indentured servitude, working for a rich family she detested, and denied access to her brothers. The experience pretty much ruined her life and she could never really take pleasure in anything. She believed there was an inevitable violence and force behind even the most innocuous situation. Such are the wages of a brutal upbringing: you become so tough you can enjoy nothing.
This is as intended. The colonial project was most certainly economic, but even as it stripped resources from the vales and plains of new continents, it was stripping happiness from the lives of the oppressed. And this cruelty wasn’t a by-product of neglect, but an active sadism that was constantly reinforced with ceremonies and displays designed to abase common people and insist that their meager lives were, and would always be, stripped of glory and beauty. It was designed to tie their aspirations to things tangible and within sight, but forever out of reach.
I was reminded of this in Christ Church in Dublin before a baroque and imposing mortuary statue of Robert Fitzgerald, 19th Earl of Kildare. The Fitzgeralds of Kildare were among the earliest of Irish clans to sell themselves to the British, so much so that they became active participants in the British army. This particular Fitzgerald wasn’t one of them, but a descendant known for his religiosity. Given the statue, he must have cut an impressive figure, and one can imagine him as central in the civic ceremonies of his day, a rich man, a member of the landed gentry, of the Irish Parliament, symbolizing that any Irishman can succeed among the British if only they capitulate. After the English reformation, the Angelican captors of Christ Church would occasionally allow a Catholic ceremony within their walls, and this statue would have assumed a prominent place. The semiotic of it is compelling, with his wife and children posed in grief. Robert Fitzgerald was clearly loved and had done amazing things with his life, and all anyone can ask of time is to be so remembered. As no Catholic farmer or workman viewing that statue would be. On such fine art are hopes dashed.
The Catholics, of course, had their own version of the family, and for women especially it was a deeply conservative institution. This too was part of the colonial project. While Catholicism during the English Reformation helped focus Irish resistance, after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the defeat of the Catholics at the Battle of Boyne (1690), Irish Catholicism was forced to choose between political activity and survival. Irish christianity had been born in monasticism, and so the Church leveraged that and developed an almost ascetic vision of the family, separated from the public sphere, one in which the family assumed the form of a static mythology removed from historical and political progress. The Church would be apolitical and focused on the family. No divorce (by contrast to Gaelic practice), and for women, the neverending jeopardy of forced childbirth through centuries without sanitation. For men, a patriarchy that deferred to the authority of the Church fathers, and so defined by submission and service. Protestant men submitted to an authority open to interpretation, but Catholic men submitted to an authority confirmed by ritual and sacrament, with a father’s power depending on submitting his family to those rituals and sacraments, to the unending sorrow of generations of Catholic daughters. The family in this equation is less a liberating than an oppressive space, especially since the Catholic obligations to family are precedent to piety and individual salvation. In Ireland, Catholicism became another psychology for political monasticism. It was the social equivalent of a good drunk.
My grandmother despised Catholicism, mostly for its stance on divorce. And it is another sign of the strength of these colonial holdovers that no woman I met among my colleagues in a week of work had anything good to say about the Church. Just the opposite: without prompting, they would volunteer how much they hated it, and how much punishment it had visited on the nation.
Both Irish men and women I spoke with also looked back on the history of their country as one of never ending tragedy and sorrow; they too, would come to the great emigration to America and judge it as understandable and merited. “Those were hard times,” they would inevitably say, and then ask about America, as if there were some magic in the place, and treat me to a drink for my grandmother. This was the thing I didn’t expect in Ireland, that American exceptionalism was still alive and well, but not in the form common to America itself. In the United States, especially among the right wing, American exceptionalism is the idea that America is God’s land, with a special evangel for the world. It’s not so different from the rationale of the British imperialists or that of the French mission civilisatrice. But that is not what the Irish consider American exceptionalism.
In Ireland, America is about a third way. Stuck for centuries between British oppression or Catholic submission, America was a way out, just one Atlantic sailing away. A place where you could choose your family and choose your path and where the authorities weren’t warlords or priests who were constantly conscripting your behavior or your conscience; where your only escape was drink. And I don’t think that was particularly Irish or that this third way is unique to America. People all over the world are constrained in ambition and choice between binary authorities, both of whom are bad. They want a third choice. They want an opportunity. Half the bartenders in Dublin are Spanish or Polish and are there for the main chance; Cork, where I spent most of the week, is peppered with schools of English, at capacity with people from across the EU, Asia and Africa. One of my most memorable lunches was with a Georgian criminologist who had made her way from Georgia to Italy to Ireland and wanted nothing more than to make it to America. She grew up with the Russians waging a colonial war in her country and wanted another option than being colonized. Her travels were audacious and beautiful and imbued with a desperation that comes from knowing how many options are closed out for so many around the world. The day I left Ireland, for example, the Taliban brought back stoning women as punishment for adultery in Afghanistan.
All of this makes me appreciate the project that is the European Union. Are the companies and brands rooted in the EU–really rooted in Western Europe and especially Germany–colonizing and globalizing the world? — Sure, but they are also creating space for local companies to grow into global powerhouses. Ireland’s greatest export right now is pharmaceuticals, and companies like Medtronic and Steris are becoming world leaders. Just how widely and deeply that good fortune is shared with Ireland, however, is the colonial question. We can judge success by the extent by which the wealth produced by these companies and their employees opens opportunities for all sorts of people–including the desperate people trying to get into Europe from Africa and Asia. If it does not provide for them, then it is just Corporate leveling–a Gleichschaltung–and a 21st century chapter in the continuing tale of rich men predating the poor. And if the EU cannot expand its membership and open its borders it will fail.
It makes me profoundly sad that the United Kingdom has already decided to close its borders and rake over its population.This is the colonial impulse cannibalizing itself. Objectively Brexit is an abject failure and the UK is on a fast path to poverty. Liz Truss’s discredited budget gave the game away: the British ruling class is hell bent on colonizing their own people. It will not end well, even if–as the BBC was reporting when I was in Ireland–the conservatives lose the next election.
In America, the situation is more dire because one of the national parties has taken the very best thing about America–its openness and opportunity, its embrace of the immigrant–and turned it into a slur. I’m not so poor a student of American history as to see this as unprecedented. ”Irish Need Not Apply” goes back a long way. But we were and are better than that, and even today, people are clamoring to get to America, because their options at home are between bad and bad. And we should be able to remember that. Because when you go to Ireland, and mention your family, the Irish do.
