ACROSS EUROPE JUST now men who thought their title was “minister of finance” have woken up to the idea that their job is actually government bond salesman. The Irish bank losses have obviously bankrupted Ireland, but the Irish finance minister does not want to talk about that. Instead he mentions to me, several times, that Ireland is “fully funded” until next summer. That is, the Irish government has enough cash in the bank to pay its bills until next July.
It isn’t until I’m on my way out the door that I realize how trivial this point is. The blunt truth is that since September 2008 Ireland has been every day more at the mercy of her creditors. To remain afloat, Ireland’s banks, which are now owned by the Irish government, have taken short-term loans from the European Central Bank of 85 billion euros. Inside of a week Lenihan will be compelled by the European Union to invite the IMF into Ireland, relinquish control of Irish finances, and accept a bailout package. The Irish public doesn’t yet know it, but, even as the minister of finance and I sit together at his conference table, the European Central Bank has lost interest in lending to Irish banks. And soon Brian Lenihan will stand up in the Irish parliament and offer a fourth explanation for why private investors in Ireland’s banks cannot be allowed to take losses. “There is simply no way that this country, whose banks are so dependent on international investors, can unilaterally renege on senior bondholders against the wishes of the ECB,” he will say.
But there was once a time when the wishes of the ECB didn’t matter so much to Ireland. That time was before the Irish government used ECB money to pay off the foreign bondholders in Irish banks.
ONCE A DECADE I experiment with driving on the wrong side of the road, and wind up destroying dozens of side-view mirrors on cars parked on the left. When I went looking for some Irish person to drive me around, the result was a fellow I will call Ian McRory, who is Irish, and a driver, but pretty clearly a lot of other things, too. He has what appears to be a military-grade navigational system, for instance, and surprising knowledge about abstruse and secretive matters. “I do some personal security, and things of that nature,” he says, when I ask him what else he does other than drive financial-disaster tourists back and forth across Ireland, and leaves it at that. Later, when I mention the name of a formerly rich Irish property developer, he says, casually, as if it were all in a day’s work, that he had “let himself into” the fellow’s vacation house and snapped photographs of the interior “for a man I know who is thinking of buying it.”
Ian turns out to have a good feel for what little I, or anyone else, might find interesting in rural Ireland. He will say, for example, “Over there, that’s a pretty typical fairy ring,” and then explain, interestingly, that these circles of stones or mushrooms that occur seemingly naturally in Irish fields are believed by local farmers to house mythical creatures. “Irish people actually believe in fairies?” I will ask, straining but failing to catch a glimpse of the typical fairy ring to which Ian has just pointed. “I mean if you walked right up and asked him to his face, ‘Do you believe in fairies?’ most guys will deny it,” he will reply. “But if you ask him to dig out the fairy ring on his property, he won’t do it. To my way of thinking that’s believing.” And it is. It’s a tactical belief, a belief that exists because the upside to disbelief is too small, like the former Irish belief that Irish land prices could rise forever.
The highway out of Dublin runs past abandoned building sites and neighborhoods without people in them. “We can stop at ghost estates on the way,” says Ian, as we clear the suburbs of Dublin. “But if we stop at every one of them, we’ll never get out of here.” We pass wet green fields carved by potato farmers into small plots and, every now and then, a small village, but even the inhabited places feel desolate. The Irish countryside remains a place people flee. Among its drawbacks, from the outsider’s point of view, is the weather. “It’s always either raining or about to rain,” says Ian. “I drove a black guy from Africa around the country once. It’s raining the whole time. He says to me, ‘I don’t know why people live here. It’s like living under an elephant.’”
The wet hedgerows cultivated along the highway to hide the wet road from the wet houses now hide the wet houses from the wet road. PICTURE OF THE VILLAGE OF THE FUTURE, reads a dripping billboard with a picture of a village that will never be built. Randomly selecting a village that appears to be more or less finished, we pull off the road. It’s an exurb, without a suburb. GLEANN RIADA, reads the self-important sign in front. It’s a few dozen houses in a field, attached to nothing but each other, ending with unoccupied slabs of concrete buried in weeds. You can see the moment the money stopped flowing from the Irish banks, the developer folded his tent, and the Polish workers went home. “The guys who laid this didn’t even believe it was supposed to be finished,” says Ian. The concrete slab, like the completed houses, is riven by the cracks that you see in a house after a major earthquake but which in this case are caused by carelessness. Inside, the floors are littered with trash and debris, the fixtures have been ripped out of the kitchen, and mold spreads spiderlike across the walls. The last time I saw an interior like this was in New Orleans after Katrina.
Ireland’s Department of the Environment published its first audit of the country’s new housing stock in 2009, after inspecting 2,846 housing developments, many of them ghost estates. The government granted planning permission for 180,000 units, of which more than 100,000 are unoccupied. Some of those that are occupied remain unfinished. Virtually all construction has now ceased. There aren’t enough people in Ireland to fill the new houses; there were never enough people in Ireland to fill the new houses. Ask Irish property developers who they imagined was going to live in the Irish countryside and they all laugh the same uneasy laugh and offer up the same list of prospects: Poles; foreigners looking for second homes; entire departments of Irish government workers, who would be shipped to the sticks in a massive, planned relocation plan that somehow never materialized; the diaspora of seventy million human beings with some genetic link to Ireland. The problem that no one paid all that much attention to during the boom was that people from outside Ireland, even those with a genetic link to the place, have no interest in owning houses in Ireland. “This isn’t an international property market,” says an agent at Savills’s Dublin branch named Ronan O’Driscoll. “There aren’t any foreign buyers. There were never foreign buyers.” Dublin was never London. The Irish countryside will never be the Cotswolds.
WHICH WAY ENTIRE nations jumped when the money was made freely available to them obviously told you a lot about them: their desires, their constraints, their secret sense of themselves. How they reacted when the money was taken away was equally revealing. In Greece the money was borrowed by the state: the debts are the debts of the Greek people, but the people want no part of them. The Greeks already have taken to the streets, violently, and have been quick to find people outside of Greece to blame for their problems: monks, Turks, foreign bankers. Greek anarchists now mail bombs to German politicians and hurl Molotov cocktails at their own police. In Ireland the money was borrowed by a few banks, and yet the people seem not only willing to repay it but to do so without so much as a small moan. Back in the autumn of 2008, after the government threatened to means-test the medical care, the old people had marched in the streets of Dublin. A few days after I’d arrived, the students followed suit, but their protest was less public anger than theater, and perhaps an excuse to skip school. (DOWN WITH THIS SORT OF THING, read one of the signs.) I’d tapped two students as they stumbled away from the event, to ask them why they had all painted yellow streaks onto their faces. They looked at each other for a beat. “Dunno!” one finally said, and burst out laughing.