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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:
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