Justine McCarthy: Let’s do St Patrick proud by acting grown up

Even New York, home of the first St Patrick’s parade 249 years ago, is shortening it this year by lopping seven blocks off the traditional route. Moscow and Shanghai have gone the whole hog and cancelled theirs, for fear of inclement weather and insurrection respectively. Vancouver called its parade off last year because it clashed with the winter paralympics, but it is taking place this year.

In the Bundestag, Ireland is regarded as a corporate Dodge City jeopardising the entire European project. In Westminster, we are viewed as Europe’s professional beggars. “From the wearing of the green to the begging for the green. I’ll drink to that,” jeered a columnist in the London Independent last November. In the Elysée Palace, Nicolas Sarkozy curses us as ingrates undercutting France’s corporation tax rate, despite his charm blitz on Dublin in 2008 to rescue the Lisbon treaty.

Enda Kenny warned us on the eve of his election as taoiseach that this country needs to rebuild its reputation abroad. “There are suspicions about Ireland in Europe,” he said. There certainly are, and he will encounter them when the €200,000-per-annum taoiseach tries persuading his Slovenian opposite number, on a salary of €38,900, that Ireland cannot afford to pay its debts. Eamon Gilmore, his tanaiste, agrees. “There is work to be done in repairing this country’s relations with its European partners,” he said, before assuming the role of minister for foreign affairs.

All the he-man bravado during the election campaign about burning the bondholders and the propagation of anti-German sentiment, some of which verged on racism, will not have endeared us to Berlin or Frankfurt. Our identity problems, however, run deeper. Because of the unprincipled way this country has been run for the past decade, Ireland has come to be regarded as an avaricious, two-faced, tinpot kleptocracy. When Irish citizens could not believe what their own leaders told them, why would anyone else? Most of us grew to abhor the sort of country Ireland became. Self-loathing is not a good look. As help-yourself gurus advise, in order to be loved, you must first love yourself.

As eight new ministers pack their bags for a scaled-back love-bombing of foreign shores in honour of the country’s patron saint, our reinvention commences here. Everything from Bunreacht na hEireann to the structures of public administration is to be transformed. There have been calls for a new national anthem and for the official name of the country to be changed to the Republic of Ireland.

All these initiatives are worth examining but they will prove useless unless we make one fundamental resolution: we stop telling lies to ourselves and to everyone else.

In September 2007, Dermot Ahern, who was the minister for foreign affairs at the time, instructed his secretary general to reprimand Christian Pauls, the German ambassador. His excellency’s offence was that he had told the truth. At a dinner in Clontarf Castle attended by 80 potential investors from the German Federation of Buying and Marketing Groups, Pauls described Ireland as “a coarse place” where junior government ministers were paid more than the German chancellor and 20% of the population worked in the public service, where hospitals operated “chaotic” waiting lists, and consultant doctors derided their mooted salary of €200,000 a year as “Mickey Mouse money”.

Pauls was living in the midst of this strutting, orange-skinned, high-fiving, self-deluded bubble of conceit. He could see it. Yet Ahern told him his comments were “inaccurate and misinformed”. One year later, Ireland’s bonfire of the vanities went up in smoke.

Ireland has behaved as a detached European for the past 14 years. Sure, we threw a great party in Dublin during the EU presidency for the new member states, and we luxuriate in occasional fits of europhilia when we compliment ourselves on being model continentals. But our history of emigration and an intimacy with the White House during the peace process have often brought us closer to America than to Europe.

In 2000, Mary Harney, the former leader of the now obsolete Progressive Democrats, declared that we were “closer to Boston than Berlin”, betraying an ideology that cheer-led the lightly regulated free-market gospel.

During an Australian Senate estimates hearing in Canberra last month, Alan Joyce, the Irish-born boss of Qantas, was called an “old Irish bomb-maker” by Bill Heffernan, a liberal senator. Joyce — who, I hasten to state, was never a bomb-maker — laughed off the jaded stereotype. It was so out of touch with contemporary Ireland as to seem quaintly harmless.

Similarly, when Jay Leno did his “drunken moron” skit about Brian Cowen on NBC’s Tonight Show last year, it exhibited an out-of-date stereotype of the whiskey-soused Irish.

Our European neighbours know us better than that. Many thousands of them came to live here during the boom. Hundreds of thousands of others visited. We enjoy the fraternity that comes with proximity and shared experiences. The challenge for us now is to prove that we, too, can be good and honourable neighbours.

Maybe by 2016 we will have mended enough fences to showcase our reformed selves. For the centenary celebration of the Easter Rising, instead of sending government ministers around the world, we should invite the world here. Let’s start planning the party now to show the world we’re fine and dandy here in Glocamorra.

justine.mccarthy@sunday-times.ie