Misery Hill: Is Ireland Prepared for Post-Liberalism?
More and more there’s a sense of the Ozymandian whenever I walk through Dublin’s Silicon Docklands. It almost feels like two years of NPHET and a land war on the European Continent has soured 2010s Irish liberalism as the NGO infrastructure that gave us #Repeal and #YesEquality begins to rust.
Sometime between Simon Harris being lauded by abortion activists on-stage at Dublin Castle and the outbreak of anti-asylum protests in East Wall it feels like we crossed into a new era yet are without the lexicon to express it.
The post-liberal era has come for Ireland.
Tony Holohan’s daily COVID orations have given way to a world where the economic, geopolitical, and social conditions that nurtured Irish hyper-liberalism have entered into reverse with a society and leadership caste ill-prepared for what comes next.
For that reason, this week’s online bust-up between EU Commissioner Thierry Breton and Twitter boss Elon Musk should be treated by us as akin to an Edwardian hearing murmurings of ethnic tensions in the Balkans.
A looming confrontation between Washington and Brussels now looks poised to shatter the economic goldilocks zone that the Irish economy has been resting in and no amount of shamrocks in the Oval Office can pave over the cracks.
A safe zone for American capital replete with all the benefits of EU membership and a peace dividend Eastern Europeans would literally kill for progressive Ireland has sat unbeknownst to itself at the centre of the Venn Diagram for post-Cold War liberalism that made economic prosperity a near certainty.
Irish hyper-liberalism and the clownworld it has produced was simply a symptom to the fact we were able to effectively govern on easy mode the past thirty years even as issues such as an endemic housing crisis hinted at a wider technical flaw beneath our economic hood.
Dublin was able to embrace the babyish nadir of California campus politics while the IDA kept the money flowing and the RAF guarded the skies leaving the machinery of state to atrophy.
This contrasts with Eastern Europe where liberalism in Poland or Estonia exists to the extent that it can react with force of arms at any given moment to a Russian invasion.
Even when most of our domestic oligarchs hit the skids with the Crash, a new budgetary bonanza arrived to replenish the Exchequer in the form of Google and friends washing their profits through energised white collar networks adjacent to Fine Gael.
Now while inertia-ridden government departments play whack-a-mole against communities around a collapsing asylum system the tectonic plates begin to shift under the feet of Ireland’s lauded economy.
Right-wing populism may be a work in progress in the Republic but all the marco factors point to the fact that the easy times are ending and Ireland is without a statecraft to mount the upcoming challenge.
‘Strategic Europe’ and the Biden’s IRA
Far from going up in a puff of racialised smoke as was thought by many in the dark days of 2020’s BLM riots, America is entering into a more combative stage of global hegemony as it entrenches and prepares for a probable scrap with Beijing by mid-century.
Trumpism merely accelerates an inevitable process whereby American capitalism consolidates in the homeland through a return of naked protectionism and prepares all guns to be turned on China. Manufacturing is returning to America to the detriment of Europe’s industrial base courtesy of the real New IRA as two centuries of German economic might unravel.
Supply chains from microchips to basic foodstuffs are beginning to be weaponized. The Global South from Mali to Bolivia is in ferment as neo-colonial relations with the West are assessed. Drone technology perfected on the battlefields of Donbass and Kursk is ready to be turned against the cities of East Asia with Ireland’s Atlantic quadrant being scooped out quietly as a potential theatre of war down the line by major powers.
As the countdown begins for Taipei, American capitalism is mutating with the times and a diminished Irish-American caucus is unlikely to protect their ancestral homeland should the orders come to up-sticks from a future White House.
Absent a euro-critical UK and with a deep sense of jealousy having been upstaged by NATO and Poland in Ukraine the EU is making a mad dash for federalisation at the behest of France aiming to complete the European project before the forces of multipolarity.
It's now or never for the EU.
Either complete the federalising process or prepare to be stomped by a chaotic return to nation state primacy and outside power competing on European soil.
The free trading Europe of the Common Market and ever expanding liberalism is shedding its skin in favour of a decidedly dirigist endeavour where Brussels thinks nothing of disciplining member states who stray from the script whether through ‘rule of law’ procedures or utilisation of financial instruments through a politicised ECB.
Ireland’s Atlantic economy and Europhilia are on a collision course with Brussels ready and willing to swat Dublin’s self interest the moment the equation shifts.
Breton’s clash with Musk prefigures a wider rumble between EU regulators struggling for global relevance as Europe’s proportional share of the market shrinks and young money from Silicon Valley.
Despite the censorship wars of the past decade a coalition of Big Tech and national protectionists in the form of a second Trump administration will be going to commercial war against Europe leaving Ireland’s business model as the battered child in a failing marriage.
Against this emergent chasm where the Irish economy could well fall into genuine national leadership is required. The slavish dependence on multilateralism to which the Irish state has both profited and suffered from will naturally have to stop in this new world of Great Powers.
Whereas before Dublin was the belthole for multinationals, now we are set to become the censorship capital of the world highlighted by the city becoming the primary regulatory agent for the Digital Services Act, specifically designed by the EU to cripple American platforms.
The atrophied muscles of Irish capitalism which was never motivated to industrialise in the first place and was allergic to national independence will have to prepare itself for when the likes of Google, Intel and Apple up stick amid a transatlantic tariff war.
The likes of On The Ditch justifiably take swipes at Ireland’s sycophantic comprador economy without the foresight to realise only a return to national economics can revitalise our collective holdings.
The good-boy-ism we have shown at the European Council may have to be sunsetted in favour of a pragmatic prepper attitude to the EU where the Irish population must be ready to eject from the EU eventually should the federalist project become all consuming.
Regardless of one’s opinions on NATO, basic military competency is needed to defend our ports and waters lest outside powers do so.
No guarantee but my hope is that the moment the Irish state is wrought by real disaster by its legislative laziness it will be forced to sideline some of the progressive policies that have brought the country at large to the social brink.
The only alternative to becoming a semi-serious state is vassalising fully into one of the three rival powers (EU, UK or U.S.) present on the island.
Amid a future existential trade war or war in the Atlantic will the Oireachtas have time to legislate transgender story hour or stuff in Algerians into international protection. Like a spoiled child kicked out of the family home and forced to iron shirts and budget for itself Irish hyper-liberalism will be blunted as the state is gradually forced to get real about its capabilities and ability to actually govern the nation.
Dublin: The Los Angeles that Failed?
As the titans clash it is worth reflecting on where this new post-liberal era may take our capital by surprise considering the past decade of schizophrenic development, mass migration and terminal stasis.
Walk five minutes from Facebook’s European headquarters on Misery Hill near the Dublin docklands to appreciate how the Republic’s economic model has burst the banks of what ultimately is a regional city in size.
An uneasy urban arrangement is present between native Dubs on Pearse Street and apartments of Indian tech workers as those in the economic middle are squeezed out of the capital. Disputes about whitewater surfing and even hellish consultations over the postponed Metrolink point to a city that has outlived its economic model.
The student flatland around the inner city that my parents matured in and which I caught the tailend of going to university is now a thing of history replaced by effective migrant favelas and overpriced crash pads for international students and tech workers.
The husk of Georgian Dublin from Portobello to Phibsborough rots and waits to be bulldozed in favour of sterile apartment blocks catering to non-nationals with migrant slumland entering the vacuum as planning laws hold up construction.
Indeed, gentrification is the social background music for the recent East Wall standoff as locals are priced out of the city akin to the plight of displaced English Cockneys. Courtesy of an overcharge of human and financial capital Dublin is eating itself with refugee tent encampments the most visible reminder that this equilibrium between mass migration and natives in the city is shattering.
Ireland is without the racialised banlieues typical of Continental Europe but such a phenomenon is showing early signs in the West of the city where gangland crime is transferring from native Dubs to second generation migrants.
Concrete islands of Dubs in the form of the flats are left in a diversifying city consciously trying to push them out. Similar to the attack on urban Catholic communities in South Boston during desegregation these communities will have to be politically, socially and economically smashed if the government is to continue its migration policies and therein lie the struggles of the next decade.
All the aspirations of Los Angeles but without a metro Dublin even with its grimey reputation does feel to be entering a spiral of decay not seen since the fall of Gratton’s Parliament.
A white collar strata of accountants and Big Four consultants may have benefited from the influx of Big Tech into Ireland but even among FDI workers the dividends are declining.
What happens when the music stops for the rules based global order Ireland has piggybacked on?
Like departing Anglo-Irish elites will the migrant ecosystem of Dublin vanish into the wind or instead will we be left with the social wreckage of a deflated global city but without the cash to support it.
Dublin bears all the developmental scars of centuries of tortured colonial rule followed by a century of lazy independence and an aesthetic sense derivative of an American suburb. If this new post-liberal era really does cave in our economic fortune I fear the Fair City will bear new social scars from the easy years of hyper-liberalism and ones which will stay with us long after Google has moved on.