I recently posted a satirical response to An Taoiseach’s call for poets to do the state some service, and I would now like to return to the question in a more direct way. The call was widely reported because it coincided with the installation of Harry Clifton as Ireland Professor of Poetry, most notably it was echoed by journalist Enda O’Doherty in an Irish Times piece entitled ‘Why Shouldn’t Poets Do The State Some Service?’

The line was first spoken by Othello, of course, a Moorish general serving, effectively, as a mercenary to the State of Venice, the merchant state supreme of the time. Having murdered his wife Desdemona in a fit of jealousy, and now, made cognisant of the trick played on him by his trusty lieutenant who gulled him into thinking Desdemona unfaithful, he realises that he has ‘thrown away a pearl richer than all his tribe’. Charles Haughey quoted the speech in his resignation as Taoiseach in 1992 and I suspect it is by this route, rather than the Shakespearian one, that it entered the cognitive field of Fianna Fáil. No doubt they think Charlie coined it, ever a man for the good line. Perhaps they did not know the end of the speech, usually rendered thus:

… In Aleppo once,

Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk

Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,

I took by the throat the circumcised dog

And smote him, thus.

(Stabs himself)

As far as Charlie is concerned, of course, the malignant, turbaned and circumcised Turk was all extraneous material, though important in its time, but he must certainly have felt as though he were gutting himself. His Fianna Fáil compatriots look back on Charlie as an embarrassing phenomenon, the very model of the hard man, the cunning devil, the cute whoor that the Party is forever hoping to find in its ranks when the time is needed, but one who perhaps went too far, or who was found out, and, besides, one who never recovered the majority won by his predecessor. Bertie Aherne was a hero in the same mould, also a failure in terms of majorities, Brian Cowen an attempt to lose the cute whoor side. Ironically, Othello is an absolute mismatch for this archetypal Fianna Fáil character - courageous, absolutely honest, completely loyal to the state and to his wife, easily fooled, at home only among soldiers. Iago, on the other hand, has everything - Iago the cunning, ruthless, lying, devious, jealous, brutal, crude, party man. We see him at his best in the pub where he has everyone singing along to his party-pieces, laughing till they cry at his jokes, but always wary of him too.

But leaving aside the original source of the phrase, why should the poet not do the state some service? The answer depends entirely on the definition of the term “service”. It is clear from the Taoiseach’s reference to “Brand Ireland” that he has in mind something like an extension of the function of advertising agencies. He wants us to stop moaning about Ireland. He means much the same thing as the reader means when she says (mine anyway), “not another dark book please”. He wants us to celebrate the good things about this country, which for Fianna Fáil is a long list that includes hurling and Gaelic football, the West of Ireland, the pub singsong, the community spirit, the Ploughing Championships, horse racing, the Clancy Brothers, poems we learned at school, the Church, the peace process, the welcome on the mat, the War of Independence, the Celtic Tiger and the low rate of corporation tax. The ideal collection of poems would cover all of the above and whatever you’re having yourself. Novels, of course, will be complicated by the necessity for conflict, but could reasonably be expected to be about either (A) the War of Independence (B) country life or (C) the Celtic Tiger. Thematically there is tragedy in the heroic struggle for freedom followed by the internecine strife of the Civil War, the model of community spirit provided by the meitheal, the power and glory of the merchant princes - what more could you want?

But at a deeper level the Taoiseach’s call demands that the writer give assent to the system of which the Taoiseach himself is a part. What is the system? Firstly, it is a form of capitalism known nowadays as neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is best exemplified by the United States of America (where poor people, if they have a job, try to have two or three) and, what comes as a surprise to most people here, Ireland. It is characterised by a determination to reduce the state’s involvement in health care, elder care, education, transport, waste disposal, communications and just about every other field in which we expect the state to participate. It achieves this small government, as it is laughingly called, by the simple expedient of selling everything at a knockdown rate. Here in Ireland Eircom is the classic example. Hand-in-hand with this commitment to the redaction of the public sphere goes a valorisation of character traits that are normally despised in ordinary human intercourse - cunning, deviousness, ruthlessness, gambling, exploitation, conspicuous consumption and reckless waste, boastful flamboyance, pretension and gross over-accumulation. When I speak of valorisation I’m thinking of the kind of language used by that most Celtic Tigerish of advertisements - The Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year Awards (alas, the advertisement is no longer available, or at least a diligent search on the Internet did not turn it up):

‘In business everything starts with the Entrepreneur; they imagine, they create, they fan the sparks of imagination turning ideas into reality. In short, they make it happen. If you’d like to salute and reward one of these unique individuals, if you’d like to see them acclaimed in the Irish Times, if you’d like to watch their achievements being televised by RTE, if in fact you’d like to be Ireland’s Entrepreneur of the Year, then make it happen. Call Ernst & Young on 014750575 for a nomination form, that’s 014750575 to salute, support and reward our outstanding entrepreneurs.’

The emptying out of language represented by “they imagine, they create”, “fanning the sparks of imagination”, “turning ideas into reality”, is appropriately matched by the inflation of already empty clichés - “salute and reward”, “unique individuals”, “make it happen”. But the kind of locker room self-congratulation represented here (‘watch their achievements being televised on RTÉ) is exactly what An Taoiseach wants us to emulate - in a poetic way of course.

Now the Ernst & Young entrepreneur competition is a worldwide one, and recently they asked their winners what the role of government should be, and the Turkish winner put it succinctly: “the duty of the government is to create a climate which is suitable for businesses”. This view is probably a widely held, though not a universal one in the Irish business community. Many business people would agree with their non-entrepreneurial fellow-citizens who tend to have a more comprehensive view of the role of government. They expect the state to protect them from assault or theft, to keep them from destitution, to guard such rights as the people have abrogated to themselves, to provide certain services that are regarded almost universally as a public good (medical care, education, transport, communications etc), to act to the good of communities, and to enact laws that will ensure or increase the probability of all these things. Providing a climate that is suitable for business is at best a secondary consideration, though few people object to it once the other important things have been dealt with as the most urgent priorities.

Government, on the other hand, or at least our government, begins with the business end. Everything in the state must be made suitable for business - hence the elaborate preparations for the selling off of state assets like Aer Lingus, Eircom and shortly Bord Gáis and all the others, together with increasingly opening up areas like education and health care to exploitation (just think about the drive to replace blackboards with ‘interactive whiteboards’ - the business of supplying schools with them, the business of supplying the software and the upgrades, the maintenance business, the virus protection business, the cost of software updates, upgrading the hardware, etc Blackboards are relatively inert, from a business point of view, but nevertheless effective.). This is what the entrepreneur demands. This is the kind of society envisaged by the government. Does Brian Cowen agree? The very vehemence with which he would deny such a charge indicates that he regards such values as reprehensible, yet the mealy-mouthed defence of privatisation goes on daily in the media with politicians trotting up to the microphone to suggest, one way or another, that every human interaction is capable of being turned to profit by someone - and that is the only way out now for a country they have already reduced to beggary. Nevertheless, his request for poets to ‘connect’ with ‘Ireland as a brand’ is an attempt to co-opt those poets into a system that he genuinely believes in. During his stewardship Ireland developed the second largest rich-poor gap in the world in the world. The truth is that, distasteful as he may find the term capitalism, it’s what he wants writers to support. Many writers simply reject the values of capitalism, others accept them but find them distasteful and still others will be happy to put their shoulder to the wheel. Nevertheless, most would reject the idea that the role of the writer or artist is to help make a tiny minority of people rich at the expense of everyone else.

Journalist Enda O’Doherty took up the call in a rambling and not very logical piece for The Irish Times. He approvingly quoted An Taoiseach: “Ireland is a brand. Our country, her landscape and her culture, are known the world over. We must connect with that brand now and use it to give us the competitive advantage in a globalised world that is increasingly the same.” Irish writers , O’Doherty suggests, would be churlish to refuse this call to arms. After all, writers had always accepted the necessity for political patronage - look at the example of Duke Ercole who made the little city of Ferrara a cultural centre for the renaissance. Now, Ferrara is indeed one of Italy’s most beautiful cities, an undiscovered pearl in many ways, and Ercole was a great patron of the arts (albeit one who succeeded to the throne in true Fianna Fáil fashion, by beheading the heir apparent, his nephew), but several hundred years of history have seen the erosion of monarchical power and the virtual disappearance of the patronage model. Nobody, except perhaps Enda O’Doherty, seems to want it back. His argument seems to be that artists didn’t mind toadying to the rich and powerful in the 15th century, so why should they mind it now? To which we reply, that the duke’s subjects in general considered it necessary to toady to him in those days, but the development of political consciousness and, in particular, republicanism has seen off the Duke Ercoles of this world and good riddance. Nobody needs to toady to the rich nowadays, nor do we want to return to that position.

His second example seems to be even more irrelevant, if such a thing is possible. He cites Eamon De Valera’s speech about maidens and athletic young men and crossroads dancing. He fails to apply the reference except to say that Dev’s imagery represented a brand. However, writers in the Ireland of the time rejected that cosy image of the joys of rural living. One need only consider Kavanagh’s ‘Great Hunger’ as a riposte to the prevailing image of Ireland to see that writers have never considered themselves as the cultural wing of the establishment. Nor did the political establishment welcome his vision - the Gardaí seized all copies of the magazine in which it first appeared. In those days poetry made things happen.

A glance at the list of Irish writers we consider ‘great’ will show that none of them considered themselves to be cheerleaders for the capitalist class or the reigning politics - Yeats, Joyce, Synge, O’Casey, Clarke, Kavanagh, Flann O’Brien - aside from the more obviously engaged writers such as Peadar O’Donnell or Sean O Faoláin - all crossed swords with the political and economic powers of their time. O’ Brien’s At Swim Two Birds and An Béal Bocht, for example, are savage satires on the very image that O’Doherty characterises as the 1940s Brand Ireland. It is not until the arrival of Seamus Heaney that the anti-establishment link is broken.

Writers and artists are widely regarded as serious people (and most of them are) and many are now asking themselves the simple question: Why is it that when the country had money it didn’t matter what we wrote, but now that the arse has fallen out of Brand Ireland we’re suddenly expected to sing off the same hymn-sheet as the IDA? Or to put it another way: Why is it that during the boom years it was fine to be studiously apolitical, but during the bust we have to come out as fighting capitalists?

Enda O’Doherty observed that during the hey-day of the Celtic Tiger ‘many Irish poets, writers and artists were at best ambivalent about the track the nation was on. Indeed, some appeared to take extravagant pleasure in being mortally offended by the vulgarity, materialism, philistinism and vacuous triviality of their fellow citizens.’ Leaving aside the trivial sarcasm of ‘extravagant pleasure’ and ‘mortally offended’, the fact is that much of the art and literature that came out of Ireland during the Celtic Tiger years took no notice at all of the ‘vulgarity, materialism, philistinism and vacuous triviality’ that was going on - most of it, it must be said, by people whose boots we are not fit to polish. What’s more, if it had, nobody would have taken issue with it. Books only matter to those who need them, and Ireland’s politicians and entrepreneurs, by and large, have no need of books. They’re busy people, they don’t know where the time goes, their families are always asking for quality time, there’s so little down-time and there’s golf and everything that goes with it, and even at that, sure when do we get the time to play a round nowadays? I have yet to meet an entrepreneur in a bookshop, though I meet swimming instructors, caretakers, civil servants, carpenters, farmers, waiters, teachers, secretaries and almost every other profession and trade - but maybe the entrepreneurs order online.

I agree with Fintan O’Toole’s argument - the traditional one - that books about the past are really about the present - but with this caveat, that they are indirect and safe ways of engaging with social questions and that the strategy was formulated in times and places where censorship was brutal and immediate. They are not necessary now. A list of the ‘big’ Irish novels of the past decade must include The Master - based on the life of Henry James; The Sea, set mainly in the thirties or forties; Sebastian Barry’s The Whereabouts of Aeneas McNulty and A Long Long Way, both set during the War of Independence; only John McGahern’s magnificent That They May face The Rising Sun is set in present day Ireland, and that is an elegy to a lost way of life. Another list might include Anne Enright’s The Gathering (mainly about childhood trauma, but set in the present) or Colm McCann’s Let The Great World Spin (set in New York). Only Sebastian Barry’s books can be considered political, and those politics are largely reactionary and relate to the old nationalist obsession with the Irishmen who fought England’s wars. These books, each excellent in its own way, had vast sales and international success. They did not take extravagant pleasure in being mortally offended by the vulgarity, materialism, philistinism and vacuous triviality of their fellow-citizens. None of them was likely to start a hare in political circles, none was controversial, except in the sense that The Sea and The Gathering were surprise winners of the Man Booker Prize, itself virtually a measure of what is palatable to the middle ground. O’Doherty’s swipe at artists, but mainly poets, is on the level of The Sun or the News Of the World - though the latter might at least have taken the trouble to tap a few writers’ phones to find out what they have to say in private. Writers have not been carping about philistinism, not, at least, until An Taoiseach asked them to write for Brand Ireland.

At his installation, and seemingly in reply to An Taoiseach, Harry Clifton declared that poetry needed to be defended against ‘the university ideologue, the modulariser, the smurfitiser, the harvardiser’, a sentence glossed thus by O’Doherty:

What seems to be suggested is that poetry - and perhaps, by extension, literature as a whole - does not require interpreters or commentators; that it can do without being taught in the university; and that culture does not need to be endowed by wealthy individuals or institutions

But Clifton, who has himself taught in universities could never have intended such a shallow interpretation, nor indeed is what he said difficult to understand: he specified the idealogue, the administrative division of poetry into modules, the business school argument that culture can be monetised, the tendency to confine the arts to elite colleges. This is the view that sees the arts - and education and all cultural endeavours - as an element in so-called ‘human capital’, a kind of repository of social goods that can be banked and turned to profit by those who make such profits, mainly as a way of attracting inward investment. This is where O’Doherty, flummoxed for an argument in favour of elitism, monetisation, the reduction of poetry to administrative value and its subjection to political ideology takes flight to the 15th century and the exemplary rule of the usurper Ercole of Ferrara - ‘if taken to its logical conclusion it would impoverish us all. Poets, in traditional aristocratic societies, etc.’ This nostalgia for the days of aristocracy where poets knew their places and whom to thank for their ‘uncallused hands’ is more indicative of what O’Doherty believes to be the true role of the artist rather than the waffle in the concluding paragraph about holding ‘his nose, [and giving] the gift of his person to the commonality’. Though it may be remarked in passing that giving the gift of your person to the commonality is usually referred to as prostitution.

So who should we write for? The impression might easily be gained from O’Doherty and An Taoiseach that Irish writers should mainly write for tourists and CEOs of companies planning to locate here, or for businesses in Ireland that might profit from them, or for politicians who might be able to give copies of our books to visiting dignitaries. I think we might be unanimous for once and tick ‘None of the above’. Not only do we not write for them, but we would all, I think, be astonished if any of them bought, much less, read anything we had ever written (this is especially true of us poets who take a baleful view of the prospect of selling more than a couple of hundred copies). Nor do we write for The Arts Council, not even to receive grants from them, nor have they ever asked us to do so. The vexed question of ‘the audience for literature’ or ‘the readership’ is something I have mentioned before. I have taken the view that each of us, in fact, writes for an imaginary perfect reader of our own creation, one who has read everything we have read, and everything we have written. This will not do for An Taoiseach or Enda O’Doherty, however. We should have our eye not just on the market, but on how that market might be manipulated into thinking happy thoughts about a country ruled by the most reckless, least accountable and most compromised government in Europe, one furthermore, ruled by the same party for most of its existence. Our role, in the view of An Taoiseach and Enda O’Doherty is to puff up this country that has been turned into a banana republic by its rulers. On the other hand, writers might be justified in thinking that such a course would be dishonest and would break faith with their communities which expect of writers, for entirely traditional reasons, some kind of truth whether personal, political or philosophical. The truth about Ireland is that the country is fucked. People expect, on the one hand, that writers will, in their own way, now or in time to come, reflect that reality in the ways and styles that they are capable of, and on the other hand that they will lift their spirits. The more courageous among them believe that the truth, no matter how grim, is catharsis in its own right. They do not expect us to become copywriters for Fianna Fáil or the IDA, especially now when people feel betrayed by those organisations, and if any writer should become such a lowly thing they will be punished for breaking faith in a way that will make the contempt of the elite seem like a slap on the hand.

So, how best can poets and writers do the state some service? Firstly, it must be said that the state is not equivalent to the people, much as O’Doherty and his ilk would like to conflate the two - writers are unlikely to make such an elementary error of category - and in our present circumstances the state is merely the damned in waiting. The people, if its courage holds, will pass final judgement on it as soon as it presents itself for trial. Writers, as citizens, have that same prerogative. They too will vote, if they can find anyone worth voting for in their constituency. In the meantime they can best serve the people of Ireland by trying to tell the truth about what has happened. One way or another, sooner or later, that is what writers try hardest to do. Finally, I would argue, that writers have a duty, as citizens of a republic, to engage in any way they can with the politics of the situation. I have argued this at length elsewhere. I will not repeat myself here.