Vandalised Which Ireland?

The Globalisation of Anti-Globalisation

My neighbour gave me a book.

“I want to lend you this,” she said. “I hope we can still be friends.”

Before she showed it to me, I asked if it was Mein Kampf.

It wasn’t.

It was Vandalising Ireland, by Eoin Lenihan.

The cover depicts Ireland apparently on fire. There are flames scattered around the country, an EU flag, an NGO flag and a Union Jack in the North. The title, VANDALISING IRELAND, occupies most of the sky.

The subtitle is not especially coy:

How the Government, NGOs, Academia and the Media Are Engineering a New Globalist Ireland.

I turned it over.

Ireland, I learned, had become a “faceless globalist experiment.” Mass immigration, dependence on foreign direct investment and the erosion of democracy had transformed one of Europe’s most culturally assured nations. A government-funded network of NGOs, academics and the national media was “conspiring to radically reshape the country.”

Those aren’t descriptions supplied by the book’s critics. They come from the publisher’s own description of the book.

The outrage machine was already running, and I hadn’t opened it.

I tried.

I scanned a few pages. There were familiar strands of Irish history and arguments about sovereignty, immigration, foreign investment and national identity. These are all subjects worth discussing.

But I couldn’t get past the title.

Vandalised which Ireland?

Before the vandals

Vandalised is a wonderfully useful word.

It doesn’t mean merely changed. If someone vandalises a building, there was a building in an identifiable condition before the vandal arrived. Something valuable existed. Someone damaged it.

So presumably, somewhere in our history, there is an Ireland before the vandals.

I would like a date.

Was it the Ireland of the 1980s, when unemployment and emigration once again sent large numbers of young Irish people abroad?

Perhaps the 1950s?

Earlier?

The first decades of independence gave us sovereignty, but also civil war, economic weakness and a society in which the Catholic Church acquired extraordinary influence over education, health and private morality.

Earlier still?

British rule.

Before that, conquest, plantation and confiscation.

The Normans?

The Vikings?

At some point we are going to arrive in a damp field containing several Celts who have not yet been vandalised, and one of them will presumably have to serve as the control group.

Ireland has been being vandalised for the better part of a thousand years.

That doesn’t mean nothing has been lost.

Culture matters. Community matters. Continuity matters. Immigration changes societies. So does emigration. Globalisation creates winners and losers. So does resisting globalisation.

But if Ireland has been vandalised, a logically prior question remains:

What did Ireland look like immediately before the damage began?

I have a particular interest in the answer.

I grew up in Ireland in the 1950s.

People were dirt poor.

That’s the simplest way I know to describe it. This isn’t an Ireland I discovered later in history books or photographs of bicycles leaning against thatched cottages. I remember it.

There was warmth, humour, community and a strong sense of place. There was also poverty, deference, limited opportunity and the extraordinary power of the Catholic Church over how people were expected to live.

As I grew older, I did what generations of Irish people did when the opportunities available at home weren’t enough.

I left.

In my case, I left Ireland three times.

So when someone talks about the Ireland that existed before it was vandalised, I don’t become angry.

I become curious.

Which one?

At this point my neighbour’s book became much more interesting.

I stopped reading it.

And read the publisher instead.

Western Front

At the bottom of the back cover was a name:

Western Front Books.

I confess this did not immediately reduce my curiosity.

Western Front describes itself as an imprint of Wise Path Books, publishing from a “Western, Christian worldview.”

It seeks contemporary writers alongside works from earlier ages, from a time, in its words, “before the West had fallen and its wisdom was largely forgotten.”

There was that word again.

Before.

Before the fall.

Before the vandalism.

Before something valuable disappeared.

Apparently Ireland wasn’t the only civilisation with a missing golden age.

So I followed the publisher.

That took me to Austin, Texas.

Joseph Dindinger

Wise Path Books is a small Christian publishing operation. It describes itself rather charmingly as a “family and friends venture” and has roots in keeping editions of the nineteenth-century Scottish Christian writer George MacDonald in circulation.

Associated with the operation is a man named Joseph Dindinger.

Joseph Dindinger.

His name reminded me of a character from a Kurt Vonnegut book.

Dindinger is involved with Wise Path as publisher, editor and annotator. But there was another name in the corporate information that caught my attention.

To A Finish LLC.

Wise Path identifies itself in its own publications as:

“Wise Path Books, a division of To A Finish LLC.”

To A Finish is also in Austin.

Naturally, I looked it up.

It is a software company.

More specifically, it makes software for Salesforce.

I read that sentence twice.

Salesforce

To A Finish develops applications for the Salesforce ecosystem: address verification, electronic signatures and other tools used by organisations running Salesforce.

The same corporate entity that contains a publishing operation producing a book about the damage globalisation has done to Ireland also participates commercially in one of the most significant technological ecosystems enabling globalisation.

It would be easy to call this hypocrisy.

It isn’t necessarily anything of the sort.

People live inside systems whose consequences they question all the time. Companies participate in global markets while their owners worry about what globalisation does to communities. None of us gets to observe modernity from somewhere outside it.

What interested me was the architecture.

The book opposing globalisation had itself emerged from the machinery of globalisation.

And there was one final irony.

Salesforce has been in Ireland since 2000. Dublin is its EMEA headquarters and its largest office in Europe. Salesforce says it employs more than 2,700 people there.

When Salesforce announced another major Dublin expansion in 2019, the Irish government welcomed the investment as evidence that Ireland was one of the world’s most “globalised and open economies.”

The vandals, it seemed, were everywhere.

The globalisation of anti-globalisation

None of this required a conspiracy.

An Irish author writes a book critical of globalisation. A Christian publisher in Texas publishes it. The company behind that publisher also develops software for Salesforce. Global distribution systems carry the book back across the Atlantic. American technology platforms help people discover and discuss it.

Eventually it turns up in Charlie Byrne’s in Galway, one of those wonderful independent bookshops where almost anything might be found.

A copy eventually reaches my neighbour.

Then she gives it to me and tells me she hopes we can still be friends.

Nobody needed to design this network.

Everyone involved could be entirely sincere.

Governments pursue jobs. Companies pursue markets. People pursue opportunity. Institutions respond to incentives. Ideas find audiences.

And then people try to explain what all of it means.

Each decision makes sense locally.

Put enough of them together and something emerges that nobody designed.

We look at the result and ask:

Who did this?

Sometimes the more interesting answer is:

Nobody. We did.

The conspiracy theorist sees the pattern and searches for the architect.

The constructuralist sees the pattern and searches for the architecture.

Globalisation has even globalised opposition to globalisation.

An Irish author can criticise globalisation, find a publisher in Texas that is itself commercially involved in globalisation, and distribute the resulting book internationally.

This isn’t hypocrisy.

It’s architecture.

The network opposing networks is itself a network.

Which Ireland?

And so we return to the burning map.

Ireland has changed enormously during my lifetime.

Some things have been lost.

Some things have been gained.

There are serious arguments to be had about immigration, integration, housing, national identity, multinational corporations, NGOs, foreign investment and the extraordinary economic model Ireland has built.

We should have those arguments.

But there is one word I have become suspicious of:

Before.

Before immigration.

Before globalisation.

Before secularisation.

Before multinational investment.

Before Europe.

Before modernity.

When we go looking for the Ireland that existed before, something peculiar happens.

It keeps moving.

Every Ireland turns out to have been constructed from the ruins, compromises, achievements, failures and accidents of the Ireland that preceded it.

There was no pristine Ireland.

There were Irish people trying to make lives inside whatever arrangement history had handed them.

Some prospered.

Some endured.

Millions left.

Some of us eventually came back.

Perhaps that’s why I find it difficult to mourn an Ireland that supposedly existed before somebody vandalised it.

I remember it.

And while there are things about it I miss enormously, I don’t want it back.

The past is a source of evidence, not an available destination.

My neighbour will eventually want her book back.

She will probably ask me what I thought of it.

I’ll have to tell her the truth.

“I didn’t read it.”

“Why not?”

“The backstory was better.”

And so it goes.