The Parish Hall Empire: Unpicking the origin myth of middle class Ireland, so we can build a future. 

The Parish Hall Empire: Unpicking the origin myth of middle class Ireland, so we can build a future. 

April Maria Sheehan Corkery

Part 1: The mythologised past

So the story goes that we emerged proud brave modern Europeans out of nothing but comely maidens dancing at the crossroads, god fearing eat the dinner in the middle of the day conservatives, sheer grit, determination & hard work. We didn’t take handouts or a hand up & if you’re to listen to the man from the Daily Mail even the hens in the yard were brave revolutionaries.

This is all, of course, pure horseshit.

Not that we didn’t have our comely maidens dancing at the crossroads. We still have that when there’s a shortage of taxis of a Saturday night. I once had a bit of a dance at a roundabout outside Listowel myself before 8 of us poured into 4 seats of a taxi to go back to my pal’s house back when I was a comely maiden myself about 15 or so years ago.

The god fearing take the dinner in the middle of the day conservatives are still there but now after the machinery of capital has ground them into the ground by 35 & they can’t keep going beyond 40 even with their vice of choice be it pints, coke or both, they are letting their brains be as broken as their bodies by the propaganda machinery of capital on Facebook, YouTube & Telegram. It is of course all the fault of women, gays, trans people & immigrants—not the man who retired at 40 to a period estate to racehorses off the extraction of his labour after discarding him for getting slow from the accumulated injuries resulting from his service (much like the fate of the racehorses) while the man in question retires to the dole & nixers in a run down suburban estate with horses on the green. In some cases the horses on the green might have even had the same former employer, discarded to an allegorical fate for getting too slow & too injured too young.

The grit, determination & hard work of course existed. It still exists but is attributed to entirely the wrong class of people. The descendants of the people who put in that hard work, grit & determination are in most cases if not still in the working class, they have backslid into the underclass or had to emigrate. When applied to our upper class & the heart warming rags to riches stories you see on the company websites of various Irish companies, they have less in common with reality & more mythology attached than the Annals of Ulster.

The handouts & hands up from the state are what built the Irish middle class.

The actual history:

Most people lacked & still lack the spine for revolutionary action. The revolutionaries we had left after the war of independence—after the forces of De Valera conservatism took over, anointed by the church & maligned them—many emigrated & became involved in the cause of the worker in places like America & England.

The part of our mythos that gets omitted is the fact that Ireland in the revolutionary period was far more progressive than what came after it post Independence. Socialist thought was rampant even in rural areas. I am from rural Limerick. Most have heard about the Limerick Soviet. Have you ever heard of the Knocklong Soviet? The Bruree Soviet? Castleconnell? That’s just this county. My own home village of Hospital was home to the first Co-Op creamery in the world. You’ve heard about Mao & the protracted people’s war from the mountains. Have you ever heard of the Rockite Rebellions? Agrarian guerilla resistance in West Limerick & North Cork from 1821 to 1824. Our history diverges quite a bit from the narrative.

But much as socialism & proto-socialism found fertile ground here, so did the forces of reaction. In the midst of all our struggle, our greatest national curse was birthed. The curse of inaction, of minding your own fireside, of fatalism best illustrated by the informal motto of the country: “Ah, it’ll be grand like.”

The majority of people, however, were not revolutionaries. If you are alive in Ireland today you’ve more of a chance that your great grandfather hid under the bed than you have of him having stood up & been counted. There’s a fair chance the misguided reconnecting yank you spent ¾ of an hour taking the piss out of online, that his great grandfather stood up & was counted, & as a result the whole family had to run.

The truth is the people with guts were culled off in all the slaughter of our history or forced to emigrate. It’s just as well that this is all a matter of culture & material conditions, not of blood. The problem however now, is that with decades of post independence mythos, the culture that birthed such bravery has been neutered. Not with saber but with pen. Not by force but by coercion, weariness & the fears as well as the aspirations of our own middle class.

Beyond the revolutionary period, while I do not agree with much of what my own county’s most famous son, Dev, did in his time—having taken us from our revolutionary state into a shower of slibhins drowning in misery—he at least at the time was trying to make us self sufficient & ensured housing was built, there were some jobs in state industry & land divided, even if it was only his own faithful that got it. The Irish middle class were built on good semi state & unionised co-op jobs, council houses even while working these jobs, & land commission farms. This wasn’t some genius on his part. This was what needed to be provided to quell the revolutionary thirst for more. It was allotted, regardless of official account, on the basis of who you knew & with whom you aligned. This is what birthed the votes for favours system where you can’t go for support you are entitled to & succeed without a word in from a politician on your behalf. If you aren’t “the right colour” politically, you get the boat (now plane) & if you are, you get the house, or the job, or the grant. The “parish pump politics” the young educated class decry is how a century of power has been built. It’s how they became the young educated class in the first place, because, as their auldlad might say “My father voted for his father, & by god you’ll vote for his son.” It is a microcosm of how global empires build “soft power”. It’s the empire of the parish halls.

From this foundation, the stones laid in the 20’s, the next tranche of cute hoorism came in the Lemass era. Ireland applied for loans for infrastructure in the late 1950s to the IMF that had just been founded after the war. They were giving out these loans to both countries reconstructing after the war & to developing countries such as ourselves. In undertaking these loans it was demanded as a condition that we open our economy, end all protectionism & the pursuit of economic self sufficiency. In return for this, we got the loans, & crucially, we got the multinationals. The arrival of multinationals in Ireland in the 60s to present were driven by a combination of cheap labour with few rights. Many of the factories here in the mid west were staffed with teenaged girls who—having been availing of free secondary education, buying the new teen fashion magazines & having sleepovers in other countries in the post war welfarism era—were machinists in Ireland. Many of my own relatives & neighbours were amongst them. Cheap labour paying 60% tax because their families had few other options, while their brothers sent money home from building sites in England, breaking their backs before they’d even finished growing. This is where the grit, determination & hard graft came from. These are, largely however, not the ones whose sons & daughters are now in the middle & upper class. They are the ones that the handouts skipped because their dads weren’t out canvassing for the local councillor. Some found a bit of prosperity for a time during the boom before losing their shirt & all they had worked for 10 years later during the crash.

In the same era, the ones now in the middle & upper class were made. They got what the others did not. Some of the grafters made it, but this is only to uphold the mythos of how it was achieved, for the whole of the upper class to steal their valour & to demonstrate to our now squeezed, over worked, boom descended middle class who managed to hold on to their job or their house that continued graft is how you’ll get there. “Do not listen to them dirty lefties.”

The upper class got lucrative deals out of “knowing someone.” They got good jobs for their kids in the civil service. They got houses even when they weren’t entitled to them, even when people who needed them were passed over. They got planning on cheap sites that no one else would have gotten. They got brown envelopes. Our history more closely resembles that of a global south kleptocracy than “a modern European nation” & has the same line of inheritance: a people much oppressed throws off the shackles of empire. The revolution cannot be allowed to continue so the worst are cut deals to maintain a status quo that suits domestic & international capital. The worst use a national mythos to steal the valour of the revolutionaries & you know the rest. You’ve lived the rest, even if you can’t admit the truth of it.

In pursuit of the multinational money, in pursuit of the maximum of what can be drawn down from the EU, we have sold not only the family silver, not only the blood, sweat & tears of generations of Irish people, but the soul of our culture. The fight, the honour, the sense of justice.

Much like the song by Mikey McConnell, “The Man Who Drank the Farm.” We are in much the same position as the man in the song late in the song, after he has the whole of the first farm drank & is in serious debt.

“So it looks as if I’m facing Ruination Once Again.

Ruination Once Again

Ruination Once Again

Without another load of bullocks, it’s Ruination Once Again.

Now things are getting desperate cause there’s nothing left to sell

But to my joy I hear that Uncle Pat is quite unwell.

I think I’ll call to see him with strong drink to ease his pain

And if Lady Luck smiles down on me, I’m in business once again

So first I’ll drink his bottom field and then I’ll drink his bog

His forty little black faced ewes and his little hairy dog.

The cattle in his byre, his bonhams and his sow

For I will and I must get plastered for the humour is on me now.”

Part 2: The present predicament

This brings us to the current era. Our upper class have well & truly “drank the farm” from under us.

In return for the multinationals, we sold out our rights to protect & develop our indigenous industries. Instead of investing the bit of tax they have paid (sweetheart deals notwithstanding) into developing our own resources & industry when we did take them, we squandered it in hundreds of ways, small & big. From the banks, to contracts we overpaid for in a form of legal embezzlement. You drive through Ireland, in rural areas & in dilapidated urban areas, you’ll see shells of buildings where industries, indigenous ones, once stood.

In return for EU funds & trade, our shower of gombeens have signed everything put in front of their noses largely without negotiation & have tied our hands to do better for ourselves.

That’s nothing to say of our long standing fishing, mineral & energy rights gripes.

We have drank the farm. Do we learn from our mistakes, try to see what we have left & what we can do with it before we lose it, put in some of the hard graft that generations of our working class have, but at all levels? Or do we go looking for an “Uncle Pat” to soft soap again? This seems to be what our government are currently doing over with their begging bowl of shamrocks.

Well I have bad news for you dear reader: we are very short of uncles, & while Uncle Sam may have a terminal diagnosis, he’s already nearly drank his own farm.

The truth of it is, the multinationals are going home. Maybe not tomorrow but at some stage, as we see the US starting to unravel & grab back at what it has left to prevent collapse. There is already an unofficial hiring freeze. Some are considering pulling out but this illustrates the true precariousness of our situation. The media is in overdrive trying to deny this, but it doesn’t change the facts. It is another iteration of our “ah it’ll be grand” curse propagandised. Why? Because there isn’t a plan B. There never has been a plan B.

We are losing the soft jobs & gaining extraction capital for the duration of however long it will take them to take what’s under the land under our feet. I read in the more local news a couple of days ago that they are going full steam ahead on the mine down in Caherline & the one in Old Palas. Why? Because the US is almost out of rare earths. So they’ll undermine the land under our feet, pay a pittance & poison the whole area with zinc, lead & antimony. The area around the mine in Caherline floods. They’ll have to pump the water out somewhere in winter. One mistake & it will spread through our waterways. For what? Jobs paying ½ to ⅓ of what they’d be worth in the US & a disaster that’ll cost us billions to clean up in the future.

That’s along with the Mercosur deal & other European moves threatening what we produce on the land’s surface.

That’s along with the server farms, of which Ireland has one of the highest densities in the world, taking up almost 25% of our energy, set to rise to at least 40% in the next decade, in a country which has one of the highest dependencies on fossil fuels in Europe—about 80% according to UCC—putting us at complete odds with EU emissions targets & facing us with eye watering fines for completely missing our targets while you buy LED bulbs & pay over the odds for 3-5 different bins. Of which Amazon will be the biggest beneficiary.

Amazon, which will be co-locating with the new “eco park” on the former Bord Na Móna bogs, contracting 800MW of renewable energy from Bord Na Móna, enough to power what homes are in Ireland by itself. Additionally Bord Na Móna has already applied for permission for a 600MW gas plant for backup—yes, enough to power a further ¾ of the number of homes in Ireland. There is currently no credible source of the sheer volume of fuel required from biomethane or hydrogen as claimed they will “switch to later.” Where is that going to come from? American fracked gas of course. What do you think they want the terminals for? So we will pay our fines so we can buy American fracked gas to power American server farms in the Bord Na Móna bogs we shut to meet our emissions targets, while Amazon chips away at their 6,500 workforce to replace them with AI which they are building the data centres for.

This is just Amazon we are talking about. It is just part of the wider position we are now in. We have been led for the bones of a century by fools who fancy themselves as conmen, going around trying to pull clever moves for us to be conned ourselves.

The result is, we are in a very dangerous place now. 88% of our corporation tax is paid by multinationals. US owned companies employ 245,000 people here. We are at a critical juncture & the future does not bode well for us.

Part 3: The 3 paths laid out in front of us for the future

Path 1: The path we are on.

The path we are on is a very scary one. You do not need a crystal ball to see where things are going, & the level of panic that the government have was palpable even in the run up to the 2024 election. It was laid out bare in the subsequent programme for government. In 2008 when Dell pulled out of Limerick, I first realised the shit we were in, & I was a then 16 year old at the time. I have been ringing a bell about this early & often, especially for the past several years. Read the programme for government. Read the last budget. Look how terrified they were during the 2024 election campaign. Look at the media spin & how panicked columnists are in trying to convince you all is well, poo poo all boat rocking, convince you our belly crawling is necessary, good & normal. We are in crisis. Those who are in the know, know. They are trying to convince you that all is well so that you do not take actions to protect yourself or our people from what is coming & jeopardise their chance at raiding the coffers before time, so that they can deny that they knew—like their theatrical performance of “Well Meaning Innocent Dunces: The Musical” that they put on around 2008. What’s coming will make 2008 look like a wet weekend at a car boot sale.

About as many are employed in agrifoods & its ancillary industries as are employed in US multinationals, combined about 4 times the number that were employed in construction around 2008. Our agricultural sector is under attack from both the fact that we have utterly failed to fairly institute reforms we had signed up for—for soft EU money or so we were told—with the dual threat of trade deals: Mercosur, CETA & a likely looming new emergency US-EU trade deal. CETA itself has instituted investor courts, which mean that any subsequent government that would try to burn investors to save our people can be sued for acting against corporate interests.

So having painted that picture, what does that mean? Basically the 1950s without the agency or freedom to act on our own behalf. But while we are at it, 100 years after we first divided the estates into farms via the land commission, it was reported by the Irish Independent 5 days ago that up to 70% of farms are being bought up by investors. So much like in the past, where they bankrupted households to sell the roof over their heads to vulture funds, you may welcome the new investment fund owned mega farms, who will invariably buy up farm land that could be suitable for development first & foremost.

What you can expect is the following:

1. The present government will hold on by whatever means necessary until such time as they cannot hold on any longer, or until they have what nest feathering they need to do done.

2. This will result in Ireland being economically & culturally blasted back 70 years with no means of digging our way out of said hole.

3. The likely left leaning government that will replace Fianna Fáil & Fine Gael will have their hands so badly tied by the time they get into government—which will likely be just as it is all unravelling—that they will largely be powerless to do anything. There will be no funding for anything. The tax take will fall off a cliff & the government will have tied up any hope at clawback so badly we will enter total economic collapse.

4. Immigration will no longer be concerning anyone as such huge numbers will have to emigrate, including our present immigrants. What we will find however, is the door shut in our faces in a lot of the places we once sought refuge in similar times.

5. If we have anything at all left at this stage, they will find a way to sell it, do a deal with some foreign power. Having earned the blame for the opposition, they will sail back into government with the backing of said foreign power & you can expect a maximum of 20 years before we have the same again.

Sound alarmist? I wish. This is the mild version. It could get worse if we actually face any aggression, scrap our neutrality & become cannon fodder, etc. That is if we aren’t facing a foreign backed fascist puppet government instead, considering the sheer scale that is being invested here in trying to build up the far right—currently more per capita than almost anywhere else in Europe. You can dismiss it, but much to my own depression, whereas I might not always be spot on in the finer details, I haven’t been wrong about the general direction of political & economic trends in nearly a decade. If you don’t believe me now, save this & read it again in 5 years. That’s not a good thing for you, me or the broader world.

Path 2: We find an “Uncle Pat” to replace Uncle Sam.

This is also a risky direction. It represents not liberty, but finding a new customer to sell ourselves out to. Against the backdrop of the moves to a multipolar rather than a unipolar US led world order, we could easily find ourselves having to hitch our star to some one of the rising powers. This will come with both political & economic strings attached. Long term, it is unlikely to turn out any other way than how our current situation has. If we take this path you can expect the following:

1. Ireland’s foreign policy & domestic economics could come over time to mirror Russian, Chinese or Arabian interests like we have come to mirror American interests. We could also end up moving closer to Britain & losing the long fought for agency we have cultivated since independence. Many wrongly think that we can be shielded from this by moving close to Europe, but the problem with that is 2 fold:

1.1) The posture we have garnered for ourselves only works as being so & so’s “man” in Europe. Playing middle man.

1.2) The EU if it does federalise has absolutely no interest in our interests & from once we sign that we have no voice. There is no allegory in France for Boston & there is no allegory for “The London Irish” in Frankfurt. We have nothing to negotiate with because we have already signed away anything we could have used as a bargaining chip, because we thought we were getting “free money.” If you think we would be better off as a province of the EU. If you think Ireland—long a nation—should be a province once again, have a look at how Germany treats Schleswig-Holstein or France treats Bordeaux & get back to me. We would be 10 leagues behind either, & the Germans do not even respect the agency & civil liberties of their own people.

So our options lie somewhere between Beijing & Brussels on this path.

2. We will still never be comfortable, never have control of our own resources & the deals on the table at this stage aren’t even as good as what was on offer in the early 50s, bad & all as they were, only we have less in assets to bargain with now.

3. If forced to realign with the UK—which there is already moves towards—we can wave reunification goodbye unless it’s reunification under British rule.

The problem with this entry is not that I & others haven’t thought of it. The problem is no one can say for certain what finding a new patron would represent. It’s uncharted territory, & a territory we are entering into in a boat full of holes running short on fuel. The candidates are not reassuring.

Russia is open about what it wants from client states: loyalty, resources, and silence. Their model is Belarus, not partnership. China is more subtle: loans, infrastructure, investment. But we are only now learning what the fine print looks like for countries who took their money. Zambia, Sri Lanka, Pakistan: the terms become clear only when repayment is due. The Gulf states have money but no interest in Ireland beyond real estate and horse racing. Britain would take us back tomorrow, but only as the junior partner in a reunion that would end, eventually, in reunification under the Crown.

The EU presents itself as the safe option: familiar, nearby, already paid into. But the EU is not a patron in the sense of an uncle; it’s a merger. If we hitch ourselves fully to Brussels, we are not finding a new sugar daddy, we are signing away our seat at the table. There is no constituency for Irish interests in a federal Europe. We would become a province, and provinces do not set their own course.

The truth is, we cannot know what any of these relationships would look like in twenty years, because we cannot know what the world will look like in twenty years. What we do know is this: every patron relationship is a chain around us & we have done this already to be left where we are now. The only certainty is uncertainty, & an uncertainty we have no agency in navigating.

Path 3: “Have it yourself or be without it”

This is my favoured path. Where we use what we have while we have it to invest in lucrative cash cow state owned industries to fund an entire national rebuild with strong emphasis on energy independence, where we focus on eco manufacturing based off what we can produce in raw materials ourselves & take advantage of German de-industrialisation. Where we form an alliance of other post colonial states & invest in helping them industrialise with us in basically a cooperative of countries based in sovereignty, what we can produce between us, & what the likes of the EU would term “resource nationalism.” What we haven’t the climate to produce, others have. What they cannot produce due to shortages of water, we can. An internationalist replacement for the EU based on empowering peoples rather than corporations can be made. It can be made without sacrificing sovereignty. It can be made under the principles of socialism rather than the principles of neoliberalism. It can be made to serve the human race in its entirety, not to benefit the continuation of western powers.

This would be the ideal. However we should not despair nor become despondent if others do not answer the call. Ireland can still pave her own path alone, like manys the battered woman leaving a tyrannical partnership had to before her. There is strength in our mother. She has survived worse. Her 4 green fields will provide, even if we are only operating with 3 for awhile.

Differing from the format of the other 2 paths somewhat, I would like to go through the pros & cons to be balanced & to let you, dear reader, make your own decisions on if to follow me in my calls to set out on this path as a nation.

The Pros:

1. We could have fully democratic control over our own destiny. What we have, how much or how little, can be utilised fully for the betterment of the people living here.

2. We will no longer need to worry about aligning with one crowd or another. We can do what is right according to our conscience & according to our own interests.

3. Long term, we could even end up better off than Norway. Their sovereign wealth fund has built them as a nation. They historically had less resources than us until the north sea oil boom, because the majority of their land is terrible, predominantly mountainous & frozen most of the year.

4. On that note, Ireland has the following heavily thieved resources, & far more unexplored: We currently produce 38% of Europe’s zinc. We have good deposits of silver, lead, antimony, barite, lithium. Recent exploration has shown we have a lot more remaining copper & gold than we once thought. We also have a lot of gypsum, mica & dolomite. We have good natural gas deposits. Crucially, it was discovered in 2012 that we have between 300 million & 1 billion barrels of oil sitting off the coast of Cork. At $55 a barrel, which is what oil is in peace time (it’s currently nearly $96 a barrel), that would be worth between 16 & 55 billion in peace time & at today’s money 28.8 billion & 96 billion from that one oil field alone. There are others. In total our oil & gas resources alone could be worth in excess of 730 billion & we are giving them away.

6) While this raises environmental concerns, this is just to illustrate what we are losing out on. We could be nearly as well off leaving it all in the ground. We have enough biogas capacity to power ourselves & most of the UK. That’s to say nothing of our overall renewables capacity. We have the single highest capacity of any nation in Europe for renewable energy. We could begin a race to bottom out the cost of energy nationally, develop our ability to manufacture on the basis of having the cheapest energy in Europe & seriously invest in homegrown engineering.

7) If we start immediately, paying less for your electricity bill than you do for Netflix, or even getting well paid for microgeneration paid for by exporting our energy either via interconnectors to Europe or Britain, or by converting it to hydrogen for export, is absolutely achievable. So is paying very little for housing while having a secure job you’ll never have to worry about going overseas. Actually having what has been promised to us for 4 generations & more than our ancestors could have dreamed of.

8) Having a proper independent position in the world that does not require belly crawling to anyone.

It is important however, for us to go into this with our eyes open. The cons are as follows:

1. We will have to adopt armed neutrality. A post colonial nation handling its own resources needs to be defensible. Neutrality helps, in the same way as staying out of trouble helps you lead a quiet life, but you’re better off with a lock on the door & an alarm than with the door left open, should trouble decide to trouble you. This does not need to be some kind of North Korea situation. Regarding defense, the Swiss model is far more feasible & not that expensive in the grand scheme of things. An equivalent of the Swiss missile system, with accompanying state of the art radar, would cost circa 8-10 billion at the highest, likely a lot less for us as our mountains are hills by comparison to theirs. That would be the biggest expense, & in the grand scheme of things would save us billions vs investing in fighter jets & other more modular expenses.

2. We have a very short period of time to pull this off before things collapse. The longer we wait, the more our people sit around & wait for things to get worse, the harder the job will be & the less we will have to do it with.

3. It will cause uproar, especially if we are forced to act rapidly rather than coming to an amicable friendly divorce with the current global order by increments. We need to be in a position where we have something built before the crucial moment in history finds us. What we build needs to also give us bargaining power & be of critical importance to Europe, which is why I suggest energy. We need to be making alternate alliances now. We need to be cleaning house now. We need to be diverting funds into indigenous worker owned industry now. We need to build a position of power for ourselves.

These are the key areas such a move could fall down: lack of action early, lack of forward planning & lack of ability to defend what’s ours & what we build. However, hard & all as that is, we do not have another choice if you look at our situation with clear eyes. It’s our only chance of being here, free & independent in 100 years time.