40 The Begrudger

For a long time, through good times and bad, perhaps the most maligned species in Irish society was the Begrudger. The case for the prosecution was comprehensively laid out some years ago by Professor J. J. Lee, in his excellent volume, Ireland 1912–1985: Politics and Society. Lee credited the Irish with coining the word ‘begrudger’, but he also argued, in the course of a brilliant mini-essay on the subject, that the documentary evidence of begrudging Irish behaviour was pretty thin on the ground. While noting that it was a tradition of Irish society that ‘immense amounts of time were devoted to spiting the other fellow’, he also observed that ‘the begrudger mentality did derive fairly rationally from a mercantilist concept of the size of the status cake’, and that since the size of that cake was more or less fixed, ‘one man’s gain did tend to be another man’s loss’.

It was noticeable that, during the Tiger years, members of the Irish entrepreneurial community employed the concept of begrudgery almost in the manner of a club to beat down even the most tentative hint of criticism concerning the boom and its benefits. Even the merest hint of questioning of their motives, methods or manoeuvrings immediately invited the taunt of ‘begrudger’, which proved a handy way of discouraging all scrutiny of their activities. To listen to a particular brand of entrepreneur, one would think that the only thing standing between the Irish people and boundless wealth and happiness was this unfortunate tendency to ‘begrudge’ those who got up at the first burr of the alarm clock and went out to lay two blocks where only one lay before. Those who did not wholeheartedly endorse the entrepreneur’s breathtaking path to glory, his savoir faire, intelligence and wit, his hale and uninhibited enjoyment of the fruits of his endeavours, were portrayed as malevolent and small-minded, carping sneeringly out of the sides of their mouths about the achievements of their betters. For years, while the Tiger thrived, it was impossible to say a ‘bad word’ about the handling of the economy without being savaged as a ‘begrudger’.

Something interesting happened to journalism also. It’s an odd feature of Irish newspapers that, whereas what you might call the engine and chassis of the vehicle is provided by solid economic commentary of an orthodox, market-centred nature, the bodywork is of an entirely different cast. Most of these so-called ‘stars’ are people who in the old days would have described themselves as socialists and who remain, in spite of improving personal circumstances, of a left-leaning disposition.

Back in the 1980s, it was the height of fashion. All you needed to do was adopt a pessimistic attitude, predict the worst possible outcome for any given aspect of public policy and, above all, accuse the government as often as possible of being wrong-headed and incompetent. Back then, the country was in such a state of chaos that it was impossible to be excessively pessimistic.

But the journalistic doomsters were extremely chagrined by the arrival of the Celtic Tiger. Not only was it neither expected nor predicted, but its arrival, and more especially its timing in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, seemed to represent for the doomsters an accusation, suggesting they had been wrong about everything. For years they had been insisting upon the intrinsic unsustainablity and amorality of the capitalist system and predicting the final meltdown of the Irish economy. Now, far from melting, the Irish economy was confounding everything they said and believed, right in front of their eyes. They had no choice but to button it.

Things would have been lean had it not been for the tribunals, but Flood and Moriarty provided an opportunity to transmute the doomsters’ ideological pique into a kind of postmodern fiscal puritanism, allowing them to maintain a continuous high moral tone during a period when their portfolios of opinions were otherwise at risk of redundancy.

Thus, the nature of Irish journalism altered fundamentally in the Tiger years, manifesting a dearth of criticism of economic policy, or of issues of societal justice and fairness in a contemporaneous context. Gone were the old journalistic standbys, like attacks on cutbacks in public spending, appeals on behalf of ‘the less fortunate in society’ and the angry polemic against incompetence in high places. A new tune was created: All Politicians are Crooks and Shysters. Interestingly, this new score related purely to times past, avoiding other than passing and often tortuous reference to the contemporary management of the national affairs, which appeared so unassailable that the erstwhile doomsters had to bite their pencils and keep any doubts to themselves.

Thus, although he was later to re-emerge with the chill winds of recession, the fabled begrudger abandoned Irish society when it needed him most.

As a result of the decades of anti-begrudger propaganda, we tend to identify begrudgery purely with negativity, envy, jealousy and spite. In fact, there may, in the modern world, be a profoundly redemptive quality to this maligned disposition. Back in the 1990s, as the Celtic Tiger was finding its stride, a British clinical psychologist called Oliver James published a book called Britain on the Couch, in which he gave rise to the ineluctable inference that what the Irish call begrudgery might be one of the most effective defence mechanisms employed by the delicate human psyche against the seemingly unavoidable tendency of reality to treat different people in an arbitrarily uneven-handed fashion.

Dr James argued that the principal difference between the 1990s and the 1950s was the fact that most or all of us were able to ‘know’ far, far more people than if we had lived a generation before. Whereas our grandparents ‘knew’ just their immediate family, neighbours, a small circle of friends and acquaintances, most of us today, courtesy of mass media society, have come to ‘know’ hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people. This, he argued, has multiplied the effects of our natural tendency to compare ourselves with others. Being surrounded on a daily basis by the manifest ‘success’ of the rich and famous, we are confronted at all times by the evidence of our own relative failure. This constant, invariably negative comparison, James argued, creates chemical imbalances which attack our self-esteem, confidence and sense of self-possession, creating envy, depression and spiritual malfunction, spawning drug-addictions, obsessive compulsive disorders and insatiable appetites for newer and greater forms of gratification.

Begrudgery, as explained by Professor Lee, is a defence mechanism born of the need to maintain a sense of status and dignity in a society with scarce resources, and may be the only known antidote to this condition. This is why it is a mistake to confuse begrudgery with simple envy or jealousy: a begrudger does not envy the target of his rancid passion; he tears him down, dismisses him and consigns him to oblivion. In the begrudger’s denunciation lurks also an annunciation of pride and self-satisfaction which nullifies any danger of succumbing to true envy.

Begrudgery is therefore a cultural form of what Oliver James called ‘discounting’, which is to say a device to minimize the demoralizing effects of the relative success or attractiveness of others. If upward social comparisons are not to result in a depressing sense of inadequacy, we need to remain mindful of ways in which the object of the negative comparison has been more privileged – or, alternatively, ways in which the envied individual may be disadvantaged – compared to ourselves. The art of the begrudger in remembering the celebrated and successful when they hadn’t a pot to piss in becomes, therefore, a device for the preservation of sound mental health and the avoidance of unnecessary feelings of inferiority.

Had the Begrudger been more vocal during the boom time, he may have provided the necessary reality check for those who had power and fortune, and for those among us who furiously, and ultimately unsuccessfully, sought to emulate such status.