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Pastimes : Let’s Talk About Our Feelings about the Let’s Talk About Our -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: average joe who wrote (3682)	11/26/2006 8:47:03 AM
From: Tom Clarke	Respond to of 5290

The Price of Modernity: A Letter From Dublin by Srdja Trifkovic On my last visit here 22 years ago, Ireland looked and felt pre-modern, charmingly as well as annoyingly so. It is a vastly different place today. Late-model BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes glide past my hotel window (metallic silver is de rigueur). Georgian terraced houses across the street are immaculate outside, remodeled inside, and sell for three million apiece. The term “economic miracle” is entirely appropriate to the Celtic Tiger’s performance over the past decade—a fortuitous mix of low corporate taxes, low wages, good public education, Anglophone culture, US economic strength, foreign investment, stable national economy, prudent budget policies, and EU membership. Economists are still debating the relative importance of each of those factors, but taken together they have interacted to transform Ireland into an economically vibrant, rich modern country. In 1987 Irish GDP was a mere two-thirds of the EU per-capita average; it is 140 percent today. Unemployment fell from one-fifth of the population in the mid-1980s to 4 percent—one twenty-fifth—in 2003; and government debt shrank from 112% of GDP to just over 30 percent today. Ireland’s per capita income exceeds that of Great Britain—a feat unimaginable a generation, let alone a century ago. The cultural price of prosperity could be predicted with mathematical precision. Between 1975 and 1995, Ireland’s fertility rate declined from 3.55 (Europe’s highest at that time) to well below replacement level of 1.87. This represented a decline of almost 50 percent within one generation, comparable to what happened to Spain and Italy in the 1970s and 1980s. The freefall is still continuing, and—unless checked—will halve the country’s already ageing population in the next four decades. Ireland’s rapid decline in birth rates was the net result of dramatic changes in social mores. Marriages and marital fertility rates are collapsing, with over a third of all Irish babies born out of wedlock. The Church, having grown stale and complacent after decades of state patronage, is unable or unwilling to address the challenge of multiculturalist mammonism. When Pope Jon Paul II died, even Castro declared three days of mourning—but Ireland had none. The business community opposed it because of the cost of a day’s idleness, while the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) opposed it on cultural grounds, declaring that Ireland was no longer a Catholic but a multicultural society. Yes, Ireland is just another postmodern country now, and that includes high-speed internet in my room (so you get these musings in real-time), as well as collapsing birth rates, dysfunctional families, rising crime, ubiquity of global mass-cultural uniformity. The number of unassimilable immigrants and “asylum seekers” is rising rapidly—their influx inevitably coupled with the imposition of ideological and legal mandates of “diversity,” multiculturalism and anti-discriminationism by the elite class. In the meantime, Irish culture is fast becoming a relic, either neutered à la “Riverdance” and relegated to heritage, or else condemned as retrograde. “Plucky little Ireland” is no longer on the periphery of Europe or the world. It has joined the global mainstream, economically, culturally and spiritually, and it has done so with gusto. Like the rest of the Old Continent, it seems hell-bent on birth-controlling and multiculturalizing itself to death. The process has reached the point where even this diagnosis is rejected by those who might be expected to combat its consequences. Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin, the apostle of a “humble, listening church,” revels in the “radical newness of the gospel” that leads us “along paths that we may not have expected to tread” and “away from traditional ways”:? It may lead to appreciate methods of evangelisation which we had earlier found not always to our liking. It will lead to overcome prejudices. The radical newness of the Gospel must be brought into dialogue with the culture in which we live. At times that radical newness will lead us to appreciate the signs of the times, as they can be discerned through the major currents of thought of contemporary humanity and its searching. On balance, an American who likes to feel at home when away from home should not have any qualms about coming to Ireland. Srdja Trifkovic is the foreign-affairs editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture and director of The Rockford Institute's Center for International Affairs. chroniclesmagazine.org