The old Irish habit of begrudgery didn’t disappear, it just turned in another direction |
“The Irish”, said Samuel Johnson, “are a fair people – they never speak well of one another.” “Out of Ireland have we come./Great hatred, little room”, wrote WB Yeats 150 years later. Mutual resentment was, for a long time, the subsoil of Irish life. In the bestselling Irish history book of the 1980s, Joe Lee’s Ireland 1912-1985, the distinguished historian thought it necessary to explain a flourishing national pastime: begrudgery. He argued persuasively that the Irish culture of begrudgery was sustained by the perception that advancement was a zero-sum game.
Prosperity and prestige, he wrote, were seen as static quantities. “The size of that cake was more or less fixed in more or less stagnating communities and in small institutions. In a stunted society, one man’s gain did tend to be another man’s loss. Winners could flourish only at the expense of losers. Status depended not only on rising oneself but on preventing others from rising. For many, keeping the other fellow down offered the surest protection of their own position.”
This attitude was everywhere, not just in economic life but in academia and the arts. Success, either within Ireland or on the international stage, was strictly rationed – there was only so much of it to go around. If you were getting more than your fair share, it meant there was less for me.
This changed in the 1990s. The waning of........