Varadkarism

From the Taoiseach:

"Seeing the world's leading tech companies represented here tonight reinforces my belief that we are on the way to becoming the tech capital of Europe.

From being an inward-looking country at the edge of Europe, Ireland has become a multicultural and globalised country, a melting pot of nationalities, proud to engage with the world." 

This is as succinct an exposition of the ideology of Varadkarism as they come. The ideology of Varadkarism is of course bigger than Leo Varadkar the person; it is the culmination of many decades of state, social and economic policy in Ireland. In Varadkar, though, we have the embodiment of its very essence in one person. He is the face, the symbol, of the Zeitgeist. His political positions and outlook, his personal identity and story, the timing and international context of his regime, all serves to create this.

In the quote above, we see the two delusions at the heart of the ideology. The first concerns the laughable notion that Ireland represents some sort of tech capital simply because tech multinational giants are locating their operations here. This in itself is a metaphor for the fallacy at the heart of Irish economic model more generally, i.e. that when it comes to measuring economic development, the presence of foreign capital here is effectively the same thing as the successful cultivation of a native capital class and industry. If Dublin was truly a tech capital, we would see native companies leading the way in innovation. There is a big difference between a company that has its ultimate brain and soul in Silicon Valley, and one that has its brain and soul here. I don't mean to suggest that Ireland produce its own facebooks, twitters and googles - that is obviously unrealistic - but certainly that it produce a significant bulk of small to medium enterprises which aggregately employ people in large numbers. Yet, it is the multinationals that still employ the big numbers.

Varadkarism - and again it predates him personally - does not see the importance of the distinction between being dependent on foreign global capital and cultivating home grown native capital. And so, it equates international capital in Ireland with economic progress, when in fact it is closer to  a form of colonial subserviency.

The second delusion is so extensively propagated and so widely accepted that Irish people barely recognise it as a positive belief anymore and see it as a natural self-evident truth. It comes in many forms with many variations, but it is essentially the idea that Ireland was once a bad place and is now a good place, or a least a much better place. There is a usually a binary opposition between the way we were bad and good, and the binary opposition you use will depend on the context. So, if we were to talk about sexual freedom for example, we would say that Ireland in the past was repressed, prudish and victorian whereas Ireland in the present is open-minded, liberal and non-judgmental. If we talk about culture, Ireland in the past was stagnant, monocultural and inward-looking. Today, Ireland is dynamic, multicultural and outward-looking.

Why this berating of the past? There are two reasons. The first is that any ruling regime which is insecure about its legitimacy and authority will always first set out to denigrate its predecessor. The logic behind this is not difficult; by making the old rulers look bad, you automatically look better. You also create space for yourself and a narrative to give your regime meaning. So if we say that Irish society in the past was anti-intellectual, a present day regime can market itself as a champion of free inquiry and creativity. The second reason is that the particular features of Ireland's past, namely nationalism, Catholicism and agrarian democracy are so unfashionable in the world today that a past that contains them has to be berated. In the age the global metropole, these are quite simply dirty ideas that must be shamed at every turn.

But they are also unfashionable because they were dangerous. The Ireland of the past, characterised by a robust rural middle class, the effective ruling class, was too independent-minded and obstructive to capital markets. It's exactly the kind of place the plutocratic West fears. No matter, today we take it for granted that we are a people who have seen the light and have never had it so good.