(Image: logo of the Irish Catholic Bishops Conference)

McWilliams has become a popular public figure, known now as one of the few economists who predicted the collapse of the housing market and the subsequent credit crunch. Through books like The Pope’s Children and The Generation Game, and special television series such as ‘Addicted to Money,’ McWilliams has been something of a wet blanket on the party like there’s no tomorrow approach to the Irish economy. During a stint as a host on the RTE comedy series ‘The Panel,’ one of the comedians once referred to him as ‘the ginger horseman of the apocalypse.’

Some of the promotional material puts it like this:

While the others cheered the boom, only one economist accurately predicted the collapse and mess we find ourselves in. He told you the truth then; he’s telling you the truth now.

‘The Outsiders’ opens officially on Wednesday June 16, but I attended one of the preview shows this weekend. While McWilliams’ show might be considered nothing more than a glorified economics lecture, he is able to make it work through his characteristic high energy and good humour.

There’s not too much information that’s new to those who have been following McWilliams’ line of thought for some time. His overarching thesis is that the Irish economy is controlled by a cartel of self-serving ‘insiders’, who not only were responsible for allowing the banking crisis to happen – but who have now rigged the rules of the game so that they will emerge winners from our present economic woes. In the show, he presents a bewildering picture of the insider connections between Ireland’s economic elite, illustrated by a spider-web like graph demonstrating the level of entanglement.

In short, ‘the outsiders’ – that’s the rest of us – are going to be footing the bill for the insiders or else turning to the traditional Irish safety valve of emigration.

Among McWilliams’ remedies to this situation are allowing AIB to fail, abandoning NAMA, and if necessary, seizing a possible breakdown in the Eurozone as an opportunity for Ireland to take control of its own currency and to devalue it, thus stimulating economic growth.

While getting out of the Euro mightn’t be as eminent or as possible as McWilliams hopes, what he says about NAMA frankly scares me. Putting it in perspective, he points out that no country – let alone a small country like Ireland – has ever attempted a bail out of this scale. In a normal country, he says, banks and developers are allowed to fail. That’s part of the rules of the game in capitalism – accepting risk and its consequences.

While McWilliams shows that the relationships between Ireland’s politicians, bankers and developers are incestuous and breed cronyism, he also points to a cultural factor beyond greed or the bonds of an old boys club.

He says that Irish politicians are motivated by a desire not to lose face in front of the rest of the world. NAMA, he contends, is in part a bluff to show to our neighbours that everything is okay and we can handle this crisis. NAMA, then, becomes part of Ireland’s desire to be seen as ‘good Europeans.’

McWilliams likens this to the ‘good room’ that was ubiquitous in poor Irish homes of the past. The ‘good room’ was set aside for when posh visitors came to the home – priests, doctors, anyone that was of a higher social class.

Family members, especially children, hardly ever set foot in the good room. As McWilliams said, Irish people pretended they lived in the good room, and their visitors pretended they thought their hosts lived in the good room.

Now, McWilliams says, our posh neighbours are the rest of Europe and we want to impress them. He says we’d be better served by abandoning this pretence and pursuing different policies.

McWilliams covers a lot more ground than this in the show, which runs until July 3, 2010.

Now that this year’s marathon is over, there is a movement afoot to switch the race from Monday to Sunday. This would save significantly on the costs of policing the event, and limit traffic disruption in the city on the increasingly busy Bank Holiday Monday.

Athletics Northern Ireland and Sport Northern Ireland, co-sponsors of the marathon, are willing to support the marathon on whatever day of the week it falls. But Belfast City Council has not committed to a Sunday date, in part due to concerns that this would impact negatively on Christians’ participation in the event.

I took part in the Belfast City Marathon, running a leg of the relay for Abbey Athletics Club. The Sunday before, I had run the London Marathon. The fact that I took part in the London Marathon on a Sunday already ‘outs’ me as a non-Sabbatarian Christian.

Dr Stafford Carson, moderator of the Presbyterian Church, has written to the Lord Mayor Naomi Long outlining his concerns. Carson praises the positive aspects of the marathon but points out that ‘40 churches lie close to or on the actual 26-mile route’ and that the marathon will disrupt travel to and from those places of worship.

That’s a practical concern, one that could be remedied by changing the course (which has happened before in the history of the Belfast City Marathon). But Carson’s second reason is principled, and this is,

… many Christians from all across Northern Ireland and beyond, who have participated in the charity aspect of the marathon don’t wish to take part in sporting events on a Sunday. This will therefore diminish one of the very positive benefits that the Belfast City Marathon has brought to our community life and will exclude those who are committed to their local church on a Sunday.

Sabbatarianism is a principle deeply embedded in the traditions associated with Reformed Protestantism in Northern Ireland. Strict Sabbatarians, drawing on the commandment to ‘remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy,’ see attending or participating in sporting events on Sunday as a violation of the commandment.

I think that the Biblical principle of having at least one day of rest from all your labours is a sound and sensible one – a gift from God, really.

But for me, sport isn’t work or labour – it’s an intensely pleasurable activity. Rigorous exercise is worlds away from the work I do as a lecturer (and the work most of us do in the West), which involves sitting behind a desk typing. Indeed, for some of us, rigorous exercise could be considered a ‘Sabbath respite’ from the labours of our sedentary, desk-bound lifestyles!

For me, most of the time it’s possible to attend a Sunday service and take part in my sport. If a Christian attends a church that has only one Sunday service, the choice may be more difficult.

But I think the issue of sport on Sunday obscures bigger issues about the way we have organised our society, in which we have no full rest from economic activity. We have no break from the demands of capitalism, with shops open seven days a week.

The Sunday afternoon traffic of the people of Northern Ireland as they clog the doors of shopping centres to consume more products seems to me far greater than the traffic of people going through the doors of our churches on Sunday mornings.

Is this healthy for the people working on the weekends?

Is this healthy for the people who go to the shops out of boredom not necessity?

Is this healthy for the world’s environment, which is groaning as it strains to keep pace with the West’s endless demands for goods and services?

As a society, I think we could be asking ourselves bigger questions about our values rather than whether it is okay to hold the Belfast City Marathon on a Sunday – just one Sunday in the whole year.

If the Belfast City Marathon happens on a Sunday in the future, I hope that Christians feel they can participate with the full support of their congregations, and with the thought that they are doing something charitable – even pleasing to a God that created us to enjoy sport.

(Photo sourced from Athletics Northern Ireland website)

The Irish Times’ Jamie Smyth summed up SJI’s recommendations this way,

THE PUBLIC needs to pay more tax and reject the culture of “ravenous greed” and individualism which has been promoted for more than a decade by successive governments.

Smyth noted that SJI claims the Irish Government made the crisis worse,

by persevering with failed policies and making the plan to bail out the banks its top economic priority.

This was a point that was also made by Fintan O’Toole on Tuesday in an Irish Times column titled, ‘Bailout has turned us from citizens into serfs.’ O’Toole wrote,

A QUESTION haunts me because I can think of no good answer: why should anyone who has a choice continue to live in Ireland? This is not an abstract thought experiment. I have two sons in their early 20s. I am trying to find one compelling reason for them to stay here.

Like SJI, O’Toole laments the consequences of the bank bailouts,

Every year until at least 2021, we will be putting €500 million more into Anglo and Nationwide than into the Department of the Environment’s capital budget. (At least John Gormley will be able to say that the Government is spending unprecedented sums on sewage systems.)

The social and economic costs of this are devastating, especially when you think of what else we could do with the money. For the annual €2 billion we’re putting into Anglo and Nationwide, we could almost double what the State spends on mental health services and disability services.

We could almost quadruple spending on children and families. For just two years of the SFT, we could build a national high-speed broadband network, putting people to work in the process and greatly improving our economic competitiveness.

Is there anything in the Agenda for a New Ireland that could provide O’Toole with just one compelling reason?

SJI urges a focus on four core values that should underpin a guiding vision for Ireland in the years ahead:

• human dignity
• sustainability
• equality/human rights
• the common good

It is easy to pay lip service to these four core values – after all, they are words that slip effortlessly from the mouths of our politicians and did so even during the boom times. I’m most intrigued by the idea of a ‘common good,’ and wonder whether that is ever substantially considered by Ireland’s current batch of policy makers.

There was a time in Ireland where Christian discourses might have been expected to figure prominently in the debate on a common good. In raising these issues in its report, SJI is continuing that tradition. The NGO, formerly known as the Council of Religious in Ireland (CORI), has in the past been associated with Catholic social teaching.

Indeed, SJI acknowledges this Christian influence in the Agenda (p 231),

Social Justice Ireland’s concerns in this area are deeply rooted in Christian values. Christianity subscribes to the values of both human dignity and the centrality of the community.

… Since everyone has a right to a proportion of the goods of the country, society is faced with two responsibilities regarding economic resources: firstly each person should have sufficient to access the good life; and secondly, since the earth’s resources are finite, and since “more” is not necessarily “better”, it is time that society faced the question of putting a limit on the wealth that any person or corporation can accumulate. Espousing the value of environmental sustainability requires a commitment to establish systems that ensure the protection of our planet.

Some radical suggestions here, and in the rest of the document – especially the idea of placing a cap on individual wealth.

While SJI uses Christianity as a basis for appealing to a common good, O’Toole urges Irish people to ask whether they are in fact betraying democratic values by allowing the Government to handle the crisis in the way that it has.

Christianity. Democracy. Can the Irish find within either of them the resources to build a better society and body politic?

Demonstrations and mass protests, many organised by young people using social networking websites, have basically brought down a government and contributed to the establishment of a National Assembly, consisting of:

“Some 1,200 citizens randomly selected from the national register and 300 invited guests, including cabinet ministers and MPs, trade unions, representatives from the media and others, were brought together in a modern-style social partnership.

The task of the National Assembly, comprising 0.5 per cent of the population, was to plan a future vision for the country. People were asked what sort of society Iceland should now build in the aftermath of bankruptcy.”

Byrne is of course comparing Icelandic citizen activism to the lack of action in Ireland, where there have been no significant mass movements in the wake of the financial crisis. Irish people must be aware of what has gone on behind closed doors in government and banking circles. Last week’s Prime Time special on RTE revealed this sordid story in detail. The government’s solution to the financial crisis, NAMA, if it is even marginally effective, is more like a sticking plaster designed to hold the economic system together long enough to ride out the recession rather than a step towards meaningful change. No one seems to be asking people what sort of society Ireland should now build in the aftermath of bankruptcy. But neither are Irish citizens effectively communicating to their political leaders that they want a say in their future.

Also in today’s Irish Times, Fintan O’Toole writes that Irish people do have ‘choices in their public values,’ arguing that they should be grounded in sustainability, solidarity, security and sufficiency (enough is enough – and greed is not good). He recognises that these values could be described as socialist, or could be identified with many religious traditions.

In societies where religious institutions have not been closely aligned with the state, churches or other religious organisations have often been able to lead social change based on these values. This seems unrealistic in today’s Ireland, where the moral authority of the Catholic Church has been damaged almost beyond repair. Some religious groups, like the Council of Religious in Ireland (CORI), have attempted to critique Irish government policy from a Catholic social justice perspective. But CORI is often overlooked; or else their representatives are humoured by Fianna Fail politicians who then blithely ignore their concerns.

Last week, I wrote about an anonymous victim of clerical child abuse who wondered why the Irish people were not confronting an institution that had done so much damage. This week it is Byrne and O’Toole who are wondering why Irish people do not seem ready to use their democratic citizenship to challenge and change an economic system so that it is less risky and more just.