by Eight and a half billion euro is about to be handed out in Dublin, and I have been rereading a poem about what money does to a nation’s idea of itself
Sunday, Stocktaking, the Stockroom
We are shut, the owner is counting the till upstairs, and I am eating a cheese roll on an upturned crate among the poetry overstock. There are worse places. I have Yeats’s collected poems open on a box of Masefield, at a page that falls open by itself.
The Irish Budget is on Tuesday. My mother has been ringing with updates as if it were a horse race. I have been reading round it, and one figure has stuck.
The Package
An Irish news site published a round-up last month of everything known so far. It says the total package this year will be eight and a half billion euro: seven billion in extra public spending and a billion and a half in new tax measures. Overall government spending is to be capped at a hundred and twenty-five and a half billion. That is a rise of nearly six percent.
It will be, the piece notes, the Finance Minister’s first budget in that job. It mentions a reported request from another minister for a cut in the duty on alcohol to help pubs and restaurants. And it says the two leaders of the coalition had to play down talk of a rift between them over whether to delay increases in the carbon tax.
I am no economist. I work in a bookshop. But I know enough to see that this is a country with money. For most of its history that was not a sentence anyone could write about Ireland.
The Poem
Which is why I had Yeats open.
In 1913 he wrote a poem called “September 1913.” It is a furious poem. Dublin was in the middle of a great labour dispute, and separately the city’s merchants had refused to pay for a gallery to house a gift of modern paintings. Yeats looked at the prosperous Catholic middle class of his day and despised what he saw.
He accuses them of caring for nothing but to “fumble in a greasy till” and add the halfpence to the pence. Praying and saving. That, he says, is what they were born for.
And then the refrain, four times: romantic Ireland is dead and gone. It is with the old rebel O’Leary in the grave.
He meant that the Ireland of heroes, the men who had died for an idea, had been replaced by shopkeepers counting change.
Was He Fair?
No. Not remotely. And that is part of why I love the poem.
Yeats was a snob. He was a Protestant of the declining gentry class who loved peasants and aristocrats and had no time for anyone in between. The people he was sneering at were the first generation of Irish Catholics to have a bit of money. They had been kept poor for centuries. Now they had a shop and a piano and he was calling them grubby.
It is easy to despise the till when you have never needed one.
And three years later the same class he had written off produced the Easter Rising. Clerks and schoolteachers went out and died. Yeats had to write another poem taking it back, the one that says all is changed, and a terrible beauty is born. He was honest enough to do that. He even names, in it, a man he had personally disliked.
And Yet
But there is something in the first poem that is not just snobbery. It is a real question. What is a country for?
Yeats thought a nation was an idea, a shared imagination, something worth dying for. He was afraid that once it had a treasury it would become a business. The dream would turn into an accounts department.
A hundred and thirteen years later, Ireland has a state, a seat at the top tables of Europe, and eight and a half billion to share out on a Tuesday. By any measure the shopkeepers won. And good for them. People are fed and housed and educated who would not have been.
Still, I think he would look at a budget day, at the whole country waiting to hear whether the pension goes up by seven euro fifty or ten, and feel he had been proved right. The till, he would say. All of you, round the till.
In Defence of the Till
I want to argue with him, on behalf of my mother, who grew up in a house in Sligo with no bathroom.
The till is not the opposite of the dream. It is what the dream was for. Those men did not die so that Ireland could be poor and poetic. They died so that it could run its own affairs, and running your own affairs means deciding who gets what. That is a budget.
There is nothing ignoble in a pension. A country that argues for a week about how much to give its old people is not a country that has lost its soul. It may be one that has found a use for it.
The romantic view of Ireland was always mostly held by people who did not have to live there. My mother has no patience with it. She says the best thing that ever happened to the country was that it got boring.
What Poets Are For
But I would not want a country with no Yeats in it either. Someone has to stand outside the counting house and ask what all the money is for. Not because he is right. Because the question keeps the accountants honest.
A budget tells you what a government values, in the only language that cannot lie. If the poem and the spreadsheet agree, well and good. If they do not, it is worth knowing.
I notice that a carbon tax is in dispute. That is a small thing in the scale of the package. But it is a question about what the country owes the future against what it would like today. That is a Yeats question, put in the language of the till.
Monday Morning
It is tomorrow. My mother will have the radio on from noon. I shall be pricing a box of Arnold Bennett.
On the bus I read the London Prat, which treats money with the disrespect it deserves. Its English satirical news on poets and money is very good on the fact that we have none, and its UK satirical news about Irish budgets made me laugh on the top deck. My Boston lecturer says Bohiney Magazine covers the American budget, which he describes as the till with nobody minding it.
Romantic Ireland may be dead and gone. My mother’s hip replacement was done in six weeks, on the state. I know which she would choose.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
