THERE are two strands of the Irish story that have served it well.
The first is that most things can be blamed on the British and the other that there is no class structure in Ireland.
In the early days of the collapse, number one was rearing its head when a Fianna Fáil TD objected to Mathew Elderfield becoming the new Financial Regulator on the grounds that he was an Englishman.
In the light of what we now know about some of the home-grown villains involved in the country’s economic demise that crass Brit-bashing sounds even more ludicrous than it initially did.
But the ‘blame it all on the Brits’ clause is one we all know and have all heard again and again.
The one that is even more pernicious though is the ‘Ireland has no class system’, the ‘we’re on the one road’, the ‘it’s only the Brits who have a class system’.
Of course, it was not so long ago that John Major and the private school educated Tony Blair were assuring us that even Britain was now a classless society.
How is that sounding now under David Cameron and George Osborne, under the guidance of Eton and St. Paul’s, under the privileged telling the many how to cope?
Of course, it is not like that in Ireland, is it?
Remember there is no class system there.
So it hardly seems worthwhile to point out that many of the main players involved in the economic collapse of the country went to fee-paying schools.
That major media figures in Ireland who might be expected to question those business and political figures all went to fee-paying schools.
Is it worth noting that the rugby hero, Brian O’Driscoll, is unanimously praised and that his football equivalent or even superior Robbie Keane is not?
And if so is it worth noting that Brian O’Driscoll attended one of Ireland’s most expensive fee-paying schools and that Robbie Keane is from Tallaght?
Is it worth pointing out that in classless Ireland those who went to fee-paying schools are two and a half times more likely to end up in charge of a company than those who didn’t?
Does anything about those facts suggest that there just might be a class system in Ireland after all?
My mother is one of 13 and my father one of five. Despite cousins in Britain and the USA most of my cousins are in Ireland and there are a lot of them. Not one of them attended a fee-paying school. Now I would suggest that is fairly typical of Irish families, of the Irish families I grew up with and the Irish families I know.
Whatever else about them, most of them did not have the disposable income that would have allowed them to pay for their children’s education.
In fact only roughly 10 per cent of Ireland’s pupils attend a fee-paying school even though they are heavily represented in the professions and in the media and in politics. Which sounds to me just a little bit like a class system.
Now, I’m not suggesting that Ireland has a class system embedded as much as Britain’s is. But to suggest that there is no loading towards those of a particular background here in Ireland seems to me plainly wrong.
And it is the denial of that fact, the assumption that it doesn’t exist that has helped a certain section of society to avoid most of the ravages of unemployment, poverty or emigration whilst appearing to be part of it merely by being Irish.
We do ourselves and our history a disservice by perpetuating the myth of Ireland as a classless society. We let a lot of people off the hook.
The truth is that a lot of our business, political and media elite are the same kind of people they have been since the foundation of this state. The truth is that we are not and never have been ‘all on the one road’.
Some of us have always been on a road that has a strong tendency to detour to the boat and some of us are on one that leads out of a fee paying college and always has done.
The truth is we have a class system as many know full well. And so too does Robbie.
