Nostalgia - it ain't what it used to be...

When I left school at 18, I spent a year in Perth, Western Australia, as a "gap year" student/ dosser prior to heading on to university the following year. I had a pretty good deal, working as a sports coach (an Irishman teaching Australians to play cricket - obviously) and English teacher at a nice public school on the outskirts of Perth - accommodation and food taken care of, and about $50 Ozzie a week to pay for a few beers. I was out there with a good mate of mine, who was also Irish, and both of us played some rugby in the not-so-competitive local leagues. We met a few other Irish expats out there through the rugby, and found ourselves involved in the local Gaelic football leagues pretty quickly, even though neither of us had ever played the game back when we lived in Ireland. The usual weekend routine was rugby on saturday afternoon, and Gaelic football on Sunday morning, followed by a few pints in "Fenians", the comically named Irish pub opposite the WACA cricket ground in Perth.

The expat Gaelic-footballing playing Irish lads, were typically guys who had left Ireland in the mid-to-late 80s, during some pretty rough times in their nominal homeland. They fled the country in search of work and greater opportunity, as so many Irish people had done in the generations prior to them. Perth, where these guys had fled to, was starting to develop as a mining town as China's growth spurt had led to exports of iron-ore and nickel from the region, and jobs related to that industry were pretty easy to come by. All in all, these guys seemed to have a pretty good deal; Perth had a cracking climate, the cost of living wasn't too high, and job security seemed pretty intact.

It was interesting to talk to these guys after a few beers on those Sunday evenings. As is standard for Irish-themed pubs around the world, there was a hackneyed Irish band playing the Wild Rover or similar in the background, with the gaps between songs typically filled with the lead singer lamenting the distance between himself and the "old sod" (Ireland). The same sort of laments would be heard from the lads we played the football with, and the odd "collection box" would be pushed around with the funds being sent back to fight "the cause" that these guys had long lost the understanding of 10,000 miles away. They had almost become more "Irish" than they ever were when they lived in the 3rd world country they had left behind. There was definitely a case of remembering things with rose-tinted spectacles, as I'm pretty sure even during the good times that Ireland couldn't have provided these guys with the same quality of life they enjoyed in Perth. This isn't a specifically Irish trait - expats in faraway lands tend to associate themselves with their fellow country-folk and reminisce enthusiastically about what they've left behind. What maybe is an Irish trait is the depth of the passion that goes with it.

On the flipside, it would seem that those who stayed in Ireland ironically don't like the place anywhere near as much as those who've left it. That certainly seems to be the message flowing through the domestic airwaves currently. Following, albeit from abroad, the problems Ireland is having on the economic front, it seems that "the Irish" are desperate to excoriate each other for the mess they think Ireland has been turned into. Ireland certainly has its problems, perhaps more so than most, but the willingness of its people to write itself off is a level above anything you'll find elsewhere. It hasn't taken long to forget where Ireland was when my Gaelic-footballing friends in Perth fled the country in desperation.

To put this all into perspective, over the past 24 years GDP growth in Ireland has averaged 5.5% annually, with the pace increasing in the last 8 years. Unemployment was reduced from 15% to 4.5% over that time and public debt was reduced from 130% to 30% of GDP. This literally took Ireland from 3rd world to 1st world. The per capita GDP has risen from nowhere to literally being in the top 5 in the world. These are backward looking statistics, granted, and not enough was done to force real change in public services while the sun was shining, but I can't believe that the current economic doom mongers think that Ireland is heading back to its early 80's level of destitution. For a small, open (in the trading sense) country there seems to be an amazing ability to convince itself that its problems are peculiarly "Irish" in nature, as though the economic health of the country is part of a grand conspiracy of the Irish people against themselves.

The fact is that there is little that is peculiarly Irish about the problems there. Of course there are major issues in Ireland, but the domestic view seems to be that "the Irish banks" and the "corrupt Irish politicians" were responsible for the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the US subprime market and the interdependence of global money markets; I'm impressed that these relatively small parts of the world order apparently manage to wield such power. In my view, regardless of how the economic maelstrom plays out, Ireland has clearly progressed from the 1980s in the fundamental fabric of its institutions; there is no great conspiracy of corruption any more. The problems are not peculiarly Irish; they are just an Irish brand of the same issues that can be picked up, perhaps even in starker terms, in the Sydney Morning Herald, The Daily Telegraph, or the Times of India.

On the Irish Times newspaper website this week, one of the "most read/ most commented" articles was from a guy called Brendan Landers, who left Ireland in the eighties, and took up residency in Canada. His article is entitled "After 16 years in Canada, I came home to Ireland. Big mistake. A really big mistake." He discusses how the development of the Celtic Tiger, and the Irish brand had appealed to him - that the Irish government had sent emissaries throughout the diaspora, asking "us" to come home and take our place in the new Ireland, with the promise of jobs, prosperity, vindication and a proud place in a new Ireland. "And we poor fools, chose to believe them."

He goes on - "Things were good at first. We found jobs that paid well. So what if the houses cost a fortune - all our savings went into the deposit and we still had to borrow a small fortune - weren't the universities free for our kids and won't they have a wonderful life without the shadow of emigration hanging over their heads? And weren't the old-age pensions going up? And wasn't this a grand new country after all its troubles?

Question: What's different about this that separates it from any other nation that you can think of? Not a lot in my view. The same gung-ho attitude to personal debt, that can be found in any number of countries.

He goes on: "We baulked when we saw the subversion of progressive initiatives like the Freedom of Information Act and the Equality Agency". Try the Blair government out for size matey, or the Bush government/ Fox news approach to broadcasting political opinion. Nothing unique here.

"We gaped in disbelief as successive ministers for finance behaved like lumpen proletariat lottery winners, squandered billions of euros in budget surpluses and pumped up inflation." Look around buddy, nobody can beat the speed at which spendthrift Gordon the Brave went through the UK's tax revenues as Chancellor of the Exchequer, or Dubya reversed the US surplus into the biggest debt burden the US has ever seen. Around the world, governments spent like the world order had changed for good. Nothing "peculiarly Irish" about any of this.

He goes on: "But the final nail was hammered into the coffin of our disenchantment when the financial crash came and the Government's first instinct was to make the poorest and most vulnerable sectors of society pay for its mistakes. We finally had to admit to ourselves that the golden circles hadn't gone away, they'd just put on new coats." On reading this I was thinking, honestly, dry your eyes mate and get some perspective.

As it turns out, my reaction wasn't anything like the norm. There has been an outpouring of praise, sympathy and to be honest, collective apathy as to this "woe is us" approach to the Irish end of the financial crisis. The only response that I read that I liked was the one from "John, Ireland" - "I agree with you Brendan, maybe you should re-emigrate, it's all you are good for!"

Ireland has its problems, no question. Right now, perhaps most notable is the story of the deposit shennanigans between Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Life & Permanent, which reads like the old-style corrosive practices of a Charlie Haughey government - i.e. a return to the eighties style of unaccountable and at worst corrupt governance. Nonetheless, even this tale will be and has been replicated across the financial globe. Rightly, or more probably wrongly, banks across the world were using all manner of tools that shift assets and liabilities on or off balance sheet at different times to make their accounts look better. Not breaking the law in the process, but certainly not making it any easier for shareholders to see "the real picture".

Who knows. But there is nothing particularly Irish about this issue, or in truth the vast majority of Ireland's problems. As bad as things may be, a little dose of perspective wouldn't go amiss. Something that perhaps the Irish as a race aren't genetically modified for. We're far better at nostalgia, which as they say, "ain't what it used to be".