Ireland Inc.: The corporatization of affective life in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland

Affective/cultural recalibrations in the neoliberalized state

Managerialist rhetorics and actions pervade Irish life and corporate profit is surging while real wages stagnate. ‘Austerity’ and ‘resilience’ are watchwords of post-recession public culture and citizens are endlessly exhorted to cultivate ‘entrepreneurialism’ and ‘innovation’ in an era in which corporate ‘disruption’ agendas hold sway. The condition of austerity, promoted not only in Ireland, of course, but elsewhere, has been usefully defined by Mark Blyth (2013: 15), who argues that it comes into being ‘when those at the bottom are expected to pay disproportionately for a problem created by those at the top, and when those at the top actively eschew any responsibility for that problem by blaming the state for their mistakes’.

Julie Wilson (2018: 117) writes that ‘When market competition is generalized across the social field, all dimensions of life become defined by self-enterprise and the appreciation of our human capital’. This characterization is highly applicable to a post-global financial crash Ireland which has intensified productivity imperatives and fortified top-down corporate decision-making while upping the ante on the affective regulation of workers as in the form of compulsory professions of ‘excitement’ on the part of employees. In February 2019 it was reported that, based on OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) data Irish workers were now ranked as the most productive in the world (Burke-Kennedy, 2019). Meanwhile according to the Economic and Social Research Institute ‘Irish workers’ stress levels soared fastest out of 10 EU countries in the wake of the economic crash’ more than doubling in a seven-year interval (Walsh, 2018). Both Melissa Gregg and Nick Srnicek offer accounts of platform capitalism (by Gregg’s definition ‘an economy and a society increasingly built by software engineers’) that usefully contextualize the intense productivity regimes and dramatic escalation of stress that characterize post-financial crash Ireland (Gregg, 2018: 19). For Srnicek, ‘The digital economy is becoming a hegemonic model: cities are to become smart, businesses must be disruptive, workers are to become flexible, and government must be lean and intelligent’ (Srnicek, 2017). This new ethos solicits:

a kind of ideal personality: someone who is indefatigable, restless, and flexible, always ready to accommodate the shocks of the global economy and the more mundane disruptions of working life, from unpredictable scheduling in service work to reduced parental leave and the outsourcing of more and more tasks to fewer and fewer employees. (Leary, 2018: 4)

Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad (2018: 478) have persuasively argued for the emergence of ‘an increasingly psychological turn within neoliberalism, intensified by austerity, in which new ways of being, relating, and apprehending the self are being produced’. Even though an accumulating body of evidence attests to the ineffectuality of such programmes, recent years have seen a notable increase in the co-optation of mental health initiatives and practices focusing on ‘wellness’ and ‘mindfulness’ by Irish and Ireland-based corporations which increasingly deploy them in the service of productivity (Abelson, 2019). Such initiatives are part of a shift documented by Carl Cedarstrom and Andre Spicer (2015: 4–6), in which wellness becomes a ‘moral imperative’, part of a ‘biomorality that necessitates individuals [to] strive relentlessly for health and happiness’. Wellness imperatives are bound up in numerous ways with what Ethan Tussey (2018) has identified as a ‘procrastination economy’ in which smaller and smaller slivers of ‘downtime’ are avidly vied for by mobile communication technologies and the boundary between productivity and leisure grows ever more diffuse.

Zala Volcic and Mark Andrejevic (2016: 6) have usefully demonstrated a set of conditions under which citizens ‘are socialized in new forms of national belonging that rely upon the dynamic of consumption: national belonging is not just the locus of a particular form of imaginary identification but of reiterated practices of consumption’. In line with their notion of ‘commercial nationalism’, we seek to analyse a representational climate that cues citizens to misrecognize the national in the commercial. In order to examine contemporary shifts within an increasingly neoliberalized Irish society, we parse a variety of media texts and sites of material and political culture, including advertising and television as well as the proposed and existing data centres of highly lauded ‘tech giants’. On this basis we show how in ‘Ireland Inc.’ the ideological contours of a neoliberalized political class have permeated legal and technological discourses as much as popular culture. We argue that in Ireland the values of capitalist market managerialism are crowding out other values. One sign of this is the proliferation of dense rhetorical systems of privilege and the use of ‘complex language that increases the status of the users and denigrates those who don’t “get it”’ (Spicer, 2018: 41).

This article employs the protocols of Cultural Studies and sociology to analyse the corporatization of Irish affective life at a time when citizens are regularly cued to believe that they are owed neither fairness, decency nor proficiency from either their elected representatives or from companies to which they provide custom. Writings on affect allow the ‘rethinking and privileging [of] the felt aspects of everyday life, social change and durable structures of power in their (in some ways) non-representational aspects’ (Rentschler, 2017: 12). Our analysis seeks to show how moments of affective release encapsulated in events such as the 2015 marriage referendum, are a counterbalance to a daily life indelibly shaped by a deleterious inflation of social inequality and a pervasive sense of sovereign diminishment. Indeed, in our view it is difficult to overstate the disorienting effects of an era in which, as William Davies has characterized it, elite power operates in a ‘post-juridical’ fashion ‘outside of any norms of discourse or conduct’ (Davies, 2017: 229).

Post-crash norms: banking and property in an era of predatory capitalism

Indicative of the particular intensity of these conditions of elite hegemony is the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA). NAMA is, in effect, a ‘bad bank’ set up after the global financial crash to sell the properties of bankrupt individuals and entities as a means of stabilizing public finances but which, it is now widely understood, has operated chiefly for the benefit of US hedge and equity funds and high-level Irish insiders (see Connolly, 2017). The effrontery of the Irish banking sector, bailed out by Irish taxpayers, has been to escalate a series of hostile manoeuvres toward their customers who are now interrogated about their intentions if they visit a branch, prohibited from conducting a variety of transactions except online and subject to ever-increasing fees. When these conditions are noted in the press, it is unfortunately the case that critique is often undercut either by a suggestion that the Irish banks have always been this way (see Ferriter, 2018: ‘Irish banks: Making customers angry since at least 1760’) or through tabloid treatment that injects an unproductive comic tone (see Pope, 2017: ‘Need proof the banks have it in for us? Here are 10 examples’). Nevertheless, the intensive automation and sweeping staff cuts that have characterized the sector since 2008 are noteworthy. As Peter Hamilton (2018) observes:

Over 26,000 jobs across Irish banks have been lost in a decade of unprecedented restructuring as bailed-out lenders’ businesses contracted, overseas-owned lenders such as Bank of Scotland, Danske Bank and Accbank retreated from the market and Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide imploded.

In 2008, Ireland’s largest bank, Bank of Ireland, was rated an astonishing 496th – four places from the bottom – in an index of 500 global banks assessing quality and sustainability, receiving marks of zero for culture, customer focus and staff investment (Brennan, 2018).

Provocatively highlighting the diminishing capital of Irishness, Fintan O’Toole (2017) recently described an Ireland that has ‘lost the allure of the exotic but failed to replace it with the attraction of efficiency’. Ireland, in this regard, exemplifies a broader global phenomenon in which market-dominant companies increasingly deliver poor-quality goods and services while concealing their oligopolistic and protected positioning. Key to this shift has been a diminishing commitment to customer service and concomitant replacement of staff with automated technologies. Indeed, post-Celtic Tiger Ireland is marked by a dramatic proliferation of forms of consumer labour, or what Craig Lambert has deemed ‘shadow work’, which he defines as ‘all the unpaid tasks we do on behalf of businesses and organizations’ (Lambert, 2015: 1), as we explore further below.

The post-2008 Irish economy has proved increasingly susceptible to new tactics of financial engineering associated with the influence/involvement of private equity. The role of private equity is particularly apparent in the rise of international ‘vulture funds’ that have sought advantage and opportunity amid a widespread mortgage crisis. Indeed, the metaphorical uses of birds of prey has become a common trope in Irish public discourse as various neoliberal profit extraction techniques have impacted on Irish life. So, in addition to ‘vulture funds’, the term ‘cuckoo funds’ designates a now common practice whereby entire property developments are bought out by large firms, ensuring that potential owner-occupiers are in effect locked out. Such cuckoo funds now reportedly make more money in Dublin than Los Angeles, with an executive at US property giant Kennedy Wilson, notably upbeat in her assessment of potential for further growth as a ‘rental philosophy grows in Dublin’. Characteristically, government Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe has recently defended such funds, arguing they drive property growth in the city (Mulligan, 2019a). Such a ‘rental philosophy’ is further imposed on Irish citizens by the ‘magpie’ strategies of Irish local authorities and taxpayer-funded housing bodies who compound the lack of accommodation for first-time buyers by purchasing new-build homes directly for their social housing remit, rather than developing properties as had been previous common practice (Weston, 2019).

While there has been considerable consternation over the cut-throat tactics of these, for the most part, outside financial players, rather more dispiriting in terms of public mood has been the revelation that the main Irish banks, many of which were the beneficiaries of the 2008 public bail-out, had for several years systematically over-charged customers on tracker mortgages. Such mortgages keep the rate of interest aligned with the European Central Bank (ECB) borrowing rate. When that borrowing rate dropped to zero per cent in the wake of the financial crash, many of the banks operating within Ireland attempted to persuade their revenue-pressed customers to temporarily shift to fixed rate loans (customarily set for a three-year period) on the understanding that this would guarantee against fluctuations on the interest rate. The illegal actions arose when banks failed to return the interest rates to the tracker level after this set period, resulting in overcharging customers from €100 to €60,000. The number of households affected has been estimated as potentially topping 40,000 (Weston, 2019), and a significant number of those impacted had had their homes repossessed as a result of this action. The entire debacle forced Paschal Donohoe to call in the major banks (AIB, Bank of Ireland, KBC, Permanent TSB and Ulster Bank) in October 2017 to ‘admonish’ them over their actions, as well as their subsequent heel-dragging when it came to compensating affected customers (Cox, 2017). Perhaps unsurprisingly, an Irish media establishment that finds it difficult to maintain a critical stance against financial elites managed to spin this negative story, with the Irish Times telling of a couple who had been unaware of their bank’s unscrupulous actions, and their surprise upon receiving a ‘windfall’ cheque for €36,000 (Pope, 2018). Possibly sensing this misstep in terms of public sentiment, the following day the same paper published an article entitled ‘One good tracker tale doesn’t wipe out torment of thousands’ that contrasted with the rather light-hearted tone of the earlier piece (‘Cantillon’, 2018).

Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland insulates banks, builders and bond holders from the consequences of their financial actions while disregarding citizen-consumers who are adversely (sometimes ruinously) impacted by them. In a climate of light to no regulation, caveat emptor prevails but also proves insufficient for those instances in which the taxpayers’ interests are misrepresented in government. Factionalization among citizens is promoted (notably in the form of resentment toward the civil service) and flashpoints of social unity (around issues such as equal marriage) celebrated as a form of symbolic redress for growing inequality. In the period after 2008, the tax parasitism of global companies that set up operations (either actually or nominally) in Ireland has proved unassailable, even while austerity violence toward Irish citizens has surged. Under global capitalism, Irishness shifts to a ‘handmaid’ national category that is well-placed to provide affective cover for the brutalities of an intensified order of economic inequality. Exemplary in this regard is the rise of Irish reality television shows (ranging from Dragon’s Den [see Kiersey’s (2014) trenchant analysis] to Irish in Wonderland) that celebrate the authority and entitlements of the wealthy and model positions of emulation and facilitation on the part of Irish people toward the global elite. Programming of this kind helps to render injustice and exploitation mundane. It bears noting that the most popular television programmes in Ireland have a habit of showcasing consumer aspirationalism (as in Christmas perennial The Late Late Toy Show, which commands an astonishing market share and is considered obligatory annual viewing, as well as the renovation programme ratings leader Room to Improve). Together with Eleanor O’Leary, we have argued elsewhere that the Irish post-recession broadcast environment is notable for a flurry of reality and lifestyle programmes (such as Better Off Abroad, Making It Down Under and Tastes Like Home with Catherine Fulvio) that put a positive gloss on emigration and in so doing urge viewers to reconcile themselves to Ireland’s place in the global capitalist order (see Negra et al., 2019). ²

Any account of the post-Celtic Tiger corporatization of Ireland must take note of the explosive growth of the International Financial Services Centre (IFSC) alongside the underfunding of poor and precarious public transport and overtaxed medical service provision. As Ireland leaves the most acute years of recession behind, employment in technology fields has surged, up a dramatic 57% between 2011 and 2016, the largest rise in any sector (Taylor, 2017). However, as political economists Aidan Regan and Samuel Brazys (2018) demonstrate, such developments have led to ‘an increasingly segmented labor force, with the top quintile earning high and increasing wages in the FDI sectors, and a mass of low wage to medium wage workers who have seen limited improvement in their economic situation’ (2018: 224). In recent years the government has studiously maintained a posture of passive observation while the housing bubble re-inflates, fuelled in no small part by the needs of internationally mobile, high-earning tech workers. Its energies have been concentrated instead on initiatives like Creative Ireland, which attest to the term’s emergence as a new knowledge economy buzzword and seem largely designed to neoliberalize creativity. As the state increasingly makes moves to take ideological and financial possession of the creativity of citizens, it simultaneously abandons its commitment to health and well-being in a society that is ever more precisely stratified by social class. Initiatives like Creative Ireland function in part to police ‘outlier identities’ that may be potentially threatening to the ideal of ‘a new kind of self-optimizing “entrepreneurial citizen-subject” accommodated to life in the world of deregulated market freedoms’ (Cherniavsky, 2017: 2). The notion that Irish society maintains a divide between striving professionals and abject others was showcased in 2017 when the young, consummately neoliberal Fine Gael politician Leo Varadkar, launched his campaign to be Taoiseach by stating that he wanted to lead a party for ‘people who get up early in the morning’ (Bardon, 2017). ³

The Irish banking system’s disconnection from the needs, interests and general positioning of non-corporate clients was put across in a stunningly tone-deaf series of ads run by AIB beginning in 2017 featuring a mature couple reflecting with satisfaction on having paid off their mortgage. ⁴ Warmly reminiscing about their hard work over decades raising a family in their comfortable house, attractive sixty-somethings Kate and Mick O’Sullivan are central figures in a long-running series of TV and pre-feature cinema spots and print ads under the AIB tagline ‘We Back Belief’ (see Figure 1). Widely disparaged and mocked as a slap in the face to the large numbers of Irish people who don’t qualify for a mortgage as the gap between property prices and salaries widens, the campaign bespeaks the contempt customarily exhibited by the banking sector toward ordinary customers. Moreover, its tagline, in a classic neoliberal formulation, disingenuously suggests that self-will is the only necessary credential for success. The presentation of the O’Sullivans strikingly accords with a complex of broader discourses that ‘seek to elevate the individualized, mobile and self-possessed “resilient family” as the neoliberal solution to inequality’ (Jensen, 2016: 77). Moreover, it operates as a stark illustration of what David McWilliams has identified as property-based ‘generational inequality’ (McWilliams, 2018).

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Figure 1.

AIB’s ‘We Back Belief’ mortgage campaign suggests self-will is the primary requirement to securing one’s own home at a time when rapid escalation is pricing huge swathes of the Irish population out of the housing market

The discourse on post-recession Irish ‘resilience’ is flagrantly contradicted by tenaciously high rates of emigration, a sharp spike in homelessness and a broad failure to acknowledge/address a culture of despair which has seen a notable rise in suicide rates. The ways in which the disruptive effects of technological dispersion and corporate efforts to render it compulsory intensify inequality have seldom been examined but are the subjects of apocryphal concern ‘on the ground.’ Increasingly compelled to perform the work of corporations to whom they direct their business, Irish customers are subject to ‘self-service protocols’ that represent significant financial savings for corporate entities. Emblematic of this shift is the rise of online banking, which has doubled in Ireland in the last decade (Taylor, 2018). As Diane Negra has argued elsewhere, encounters with corporations play out in a new antagonistic customer service culture in which frustrated, beset customers are compelled to undertake work previously performed by employees: ‘this economy is marked by a transfer of work from organizations to their supposed customers, technology platforms with high failure rates, deep devotion to byzantine bureaucratic procedures, and the conspicuous and constant valuing of high status customers over low status ones’ (Negra, 2016).

In the post-Celtic Tiger economy, it is increasingly common practice to contrive employment arrangements that suppress wages and benefits and outsource hiring to a third party (Facebook, for instance, does this with its Dublin content analysts). Employers have become increasingly adept at externalizing costs once intrinsic to their operations onto workers and the notable rise of co-working spaces, such as those under the WeWork brand, are in part a function of these shifts. Companies like WeWork (newly installed in Ireland in a showplace building in Harcourt Street) ⁵ also take up the psychological slack for the abandonment of workers by triumphantly re-classifying precaritization as self-optimization using slogans like, ‘Do What You Love’. The sloganizing around such new ventures well reflects a new discourse on self-responsibilized happiness. ⁶ As Julie Wilson (2018: 168) notes: ‘Through honing one’s mind for happiness, individuals come to actively embrace the hardships of precarity as an opportunity for self-appreciation and emotional enterprise.’ The broader employment landscape of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, then, features sharply reduced wages for entry-level workers, diminished working conditions, and a reduction in pension-eligible employees alongside pervasive neoliberal hype and a focus on occupational healthism presented as a manifestation of employer care rather than a by-product of the foregoing developments.

Data centres and technological infrastructure: corporate facilitation and the Silicon Valley ethos in Ireland

In contemporary Ireland, the presence of US multinationals, and particularly high-profile tech companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Intel and Apple, is repeatedly presented by the government as well as the popular press as evidence of Ireland’s modernity and privileged position within the realm of global capitalism. Indeed the ‘Silicon Valley ethos’ identified with these companies, which posits that ‘technological innovation, combined with deregulation and capitalism, are both essential and sufficient to ensure the public good’ (Levina and Hasinoff, 2017: 490), is fully congruent with the Irish government’s rhetoric, as it attempts to secure the continued presence and investment of such companies within Ireland, even if this entails bespoke taxation and planning arrangements.

Ireland’s position as a corporate tax haven has increasingly provoked ill-will internationally, famously crystallized in economist Paul Krugman’s jibe about ‘Leprechaun economics’ in reference to Ireland’s startling 2015 economic growth rate of 26%. Such scrutiny has been particularly intensive within the European Union (EU), where the nation’s perceived poaching of US multinationals has resulted in the European Competition Commission’s August 2016 ruling compelling electronics giant Apple to pay €13 billion in back taxes to the state. Ireland’s seemingly counter-intuitive bid to avoid receiving the taxes has resulted in popular backlash from some quarters (see O’Leary and Negra, 2016), exposing the nation’s policy of corporate facilitation which contributes to downward pressure on corporate taxes worldwide. A December 2017 tax overhaul in the US, for instance, was specifically aimed to encourage countries to repatriate cash stockpiles located in low-tax jurisdictions such as Ireland, with Apple committing to a one-time tax payment of $38 billion – equivalent to 15.5% of the $252.3 billion the company held in accounts outside of the US (Irish Times, 2018; Segarra, 2018). Nevertheless, despite such international measures, the activities of the tech giant continue to constitute an unprecedented share of Irish GDP. Indeed, according to IMF estimates, one quarter of Ireland’s growth figures for 2017 can be directly attributable to one specific product – the Apple iPhone (Whelan, 2018).

While the case of Apple’s tax arrangement with Ireland is well-documented, the lengths to which the Irish government will go to facilitate the infrastructural developments associated with these companies warrants further scrutiny. As Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski (2015: 5) highlight, ‘media infrastructures [and] . . . their material dependence on lands, raw materials, and energy imbricates them with issues of finance, urban planning and natural resource development’. These issues came to the fore throughout Apple’s failed attempt to build data centres in Athenry, Co. Galway, and shed crucial light on the government’s position regarding corporate interests and environmental commitments as well as its willingness to rewrite legislation to appease multinational corporations.

Apple’s €850 million data centre development plan, first proposed in 2015, encountered legal delays when some local residents obstructed planning permission and took the case to the Supreme Court, eventually leading Apple to scrap the plans in May 2018 (Gibbs, 2018). Government frustration was evident throughout the process and when, in November 2017, the High Court decided in favour of the data centre’s development, Leo Varadkar personally flew to San Francisco for a meeting with Apple CEO Tim Cook, but failed to secure a firm agreement to go ahead with construction. ⁷ In the aftermath of the Athenry planning obstructions, government officials re-designated such developments as ‘strategic national infrastructure’ (Downing, 2017), enabling the bypassing of a number of planning stages. In doing so, the government is putting massive data servers that serve a global consumer base on par with motorways, railways and water supplies essential to citizens, further underlining the prioritization of corporate citizenship that is increasingly a hallmark of contemporary Ireland.

One important aspect of Apple’s proposed data centre, as well as those of Amazon, Facebook and the other Silicon Valley companies that have developed such infrastructure in Ireland, is the impact in terms of energy usage. The initial reason for the objections to the Athenry site, namely the massive amount of energy provision such servers necessitate, is putting Ireland on course to fail to meet its agreed renewable energy goals for 2020, with an estimated cost to the state of €150 million (Lee, 2019). An all-Ireland generational capacity statement projects that these centres will consume 31% of Ireland’s energy by 2027 which, in tandem with the increased demands of an improving economy, will put existing energy supplies under extreme pressure (Mulligan, 2019b). A further objection that could be raised is the limited payback in terms of job creation such developments comprise. While there will be employment during construction, and supporters of the development suggested it would function as a ‘calling card’ for future investment, once in operation the level of employment generated in an average data centre is quite modest at an estimated 30 people (O’Brien, 2015). These issues render government plans to make Ireland a world leader for data centre development, partly through the amendment to national strategic infrastructure definitions mentioned above, questionable at best given the potential pitfalls in terms of energy security, breaches of environmental agreements and limited payoff in terms of sustainable employment.

However, the most prominent example of state mismanagement with regard to infrastructure planning is no doubt the National Broadband Plan (NBP). Laudably envisioned as a remedy to rural depopulation and a means of ensuring 21-century fibre optic connectivity throughout Ireland, the NBP saw problems early in its planning stages when two of the three firms bidding for the work dropped out and the state decided to press ahead. Despite the project going €1.5 billion over initial estimates, it wasn’t until it was revealed in 2019 that the private contractor consortium Granahan McCourt’s initial investment would be one-fifteenth that of the taxpayer, and that at the end of the contract the infrastructure would belong to the consortium and not the state, that there was significant public outcry. The government notably went against the advice of the Secretary General of the Department of Public Expenditure, who warned of the ‘unprecedented risks associated with this project’ (O’Toole, 2019).

Fintan O’Toole, in a scathing account of the entire procurement process, highlights the role that KPMG, the global consultancy and auditing firm, played in the debacle. KPMG were the auditors of the Irish banks that had to be bailed out and whose failure to identify any problems with these accounts even as late as 2009, lends a particular irony to the fact that this is the global consultancy firm, barely a decade later, that devised the NBP model. A 2015 marketing campaign for KPMG that boasts of it being ‘at the heart of business in Ireland’, accompanied by an image that reduces the entire island to a set of highly recognizable global brands (see Figure 2) further compounds this irony, given the firm’s role in the €30 billion taxpayer bail-out of failed banks AIB and Irish Nationwide. For O’Toole, the ‘ruling culture that has forgotten everything and learned nothing’ is the real object of his incredulity, a culture that provides a concrete example of Francis O’Gorman’s (2017: 5) insight that our contemporary era generates ‘waves of amnesia [that are a product of] societal and economic determinations, of commercial choices and secular obligations, of the fixed regimes of acceptable thinking about time in advanced capitalism’. Notable in Ireland’s case is the role that the digital utopianism associated with the Silicon Valley ethos plays in such amnesiac projects, with global connectivity presented as a panacea, while, as Saskia Sassen (2001: 276) observes, ‘the global economy transcend[s] the authority of the nation state, even as it roots itself into national territories and institutions’.

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Figure 2.

The corporatization of Irish life finds an unintentionally ironic visual expression in an advert for accountancy firm KPMG – the global consultancy firm that notoriously failed to identify any impropriety in the accounts of Ireland’s failing banks prior to the crash – that effectively reduces the nation to a number of recognizable ‘global corporations’ and signifiers of international connectivity

Renovating Irish leadership: Leo Varadkar’s socially progressive neoliberalism

As indicated, a key figure in the increased neoliberalization and corporatism evident in Irish public life is no doubt Taoiseach Leo Varadkar. One of a current crop of youthful, male, media-savvy national leaders such as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and French President Emmanuel Macron, Varadkar, in a similar manner to these other progressive centrists, espouses socially liberal policies in some quarters while doubling down on fundamental neoliberal doxa of privatization and the privileging of elite interests over those of the working poor. For Varadkar, these twin tendencies were very much in evidence at earlier stages in his political career and have continued apace during his premiership. Varadkar seems to sense that renovating the role of Taoiseach through a marriage of social progressivism and economic conservatism is a winning formula in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. While this sort of positioning is common to an emergent cohort of national leaders, it is also a uniting feature of the big tech corporations that regularly emphasize their social progressiveness through overt alignment with annual events such as Gay Pride (see Nagle, 2018). (Although, such seeming altruism on the part of these corporations is undermined through their increased reliance on ‘shadow working’ low-paid contract employees who are denied the security and benefits of high-skilled staff.) However, our argument with regard to Varadkar is not that he constitutes a new development in statesmanship, rather, we seek to highlight how his policies and representational strategies are fully congruent with a shift in Irish public life, evident in such disparate sources as banking advertisements and reality television shows.

The 2015 Marriage Equality Referendum provided the politician, then Minister for Health, with an opportunity to showcase his progressive credentials, as he was a prominent presence during the public celebrations once the ‘Yes’ vote for marriage equality prevailed. The referendum itself was a rare instance of post-2008 affective exuberance within the nation as an almost unanimous decision to allow gay couples to marry meant that Ireland was the first country to extend this right to its citizens through national vote. As both an openly gay man, and the mixed-race son of an Indian immigrant, Varadkar arguably embodies a new sense of national identity that manifested during the referendum, one that extends beyond Catholic, white identity formations of previous generations. Indeed, the politician is just one of a number of high-profile Irish public figures of mixed-race origin who, as Negra et al. (2019: 858) have argued, ‘symbolize a particular Irish adaptability and [showcase] new identity hierarchies based on the hybrid, fully commercialised self’. An irony of the marriage referendum was the high-profile social media influence of economic emigrants who documented journeys home to vote (Ireland does not facilitate overseas voting) that were often shared with the ‘#home to vote’ hashtag, with the positive, cosmopolitan nation-branding this event generated largely the product of the labours of those whose self-exile notably diminished the impact of the economic crash on the state post-2008 (see O’Leary and Negra, 2016).

In contrast to his progressive position on identity politics, is Varadkar’s reactionary economic positioning. Notably, while Minister for Social Protection in April 2017, the politician presided over the controversial ‘Welfare Cheats Cheat Us All’ campaign (Figure 3), which urged members of the public to inform on those they suspected of committing welfare fraud. A key claim made as part of the initiative was that in 2016 the Ministry saved €500 million through fraud detection measures, a figure hotly disputed in a journal.ie ‘fact-check’ article, which concluded the real amount saved to be closer to €82 million (Brennan, 2017). While the emotive nature of the campaign language was later recognized to have been a misstep by his ministry colleagues, Varadkar, as we have noted above, continues to deploy meritocratic discourse that rhetorically constructs an Ireland divided into the work-shy and the aspirational, a mainstay of neoliberal politics that, as Jo Littler (2017: 3) argues ‘promises opportunity while producing social division’.

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Figure 3.

Leo Varadkar, then Minister for Social Justice, launching the controversial Welfare Cheats campaign

Varadkar’s divisive rhetoric has not been without its critics. Notably, a month after the ‘welfare cheats’ campaign, a political advert widely deployed throughout Dublin parodically defaced the official poster (see Figures 3 and 4), changing the message to ‘vulture funds cheat us all’. The advert, funded by an independent group of parliamentarians known collectively as the Independents Against Austerity (and, in particular, TD Mick Wallace), provocatively calls out the hypocrisy of a government targeting those on the lowest rungs of the social ladder while presiding over the large-scale extraction of wealth from its own citizens, as NAMA sold on indebted properties to financially robust international asset managers (‘vulture funds’) specializing in such ‘distressed debt’ (Mooney, 2017).

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Figure 4.

‘Vulture Funds Cheat Us All’ parodies the Welfare Cheats campaign, calling out the hypocrisy of targeting the poor while international investment funds strip Irish citizens of their assets

We close this section by emphasizing another facet of Leo Vardkar’s neoliberal self-positioning – his status as an advocate for neoliberal lifestyling – and a recent moment of contestation to that positioning. As we have suggested, the Taoiseach’s presentation of himself as an exemplary and fit citizen manifests as one of his defining attributes. In line with this he agreed to appear in February 2019 on RTE’s body modification reality show Operation Transformation to have his metabolic age assessed. ⁸ Known for his sang-froid, Varadkar was evidently dismayed, and perhaps a little outraged, when it was revealed that although he is 40 his metabolic age is 53. Grumpily professing himself to be ‘kind of wondering about the science behind it, to be honest’, the Taoiseach’s incredulity and pique were markedly out of sync with his standard self-presentation (Ryan, 2019). The moment proved a revealing refutation of the credo of neoliberal healthism and a demonstration of the fact that health is not purely a product of fitness or diet; it was, in effect a performance of biomorality gone wrong.

Conclusion

The attempt to collectivize responsibility for the financial recklessness of elites was established early in the Irish recession in Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan’s infamous remark ‘we all partied’ as a characterization of Celtic Tiger exuberance. Writing about the UK context but in terms that are equally applicable to Ireland, Vickie Cooper and David Whyte note that:

This façade of ‘togetherness’ has played a key part in the ideological making of austerity. Not only did it help organize consent and support, but it helped deflect the blame for the deficit away from the businesses and private sector, framing it as a problem of the public’s making. (Cooper and Whyte, 2017: 7)

Lenihan’s disingenuous statement prefigured a broader matrix of actions designed to redirect the traditional protective stance by government toward citizens, prioritizing instead a protective relation toward corporations.

A review of key elements of Irish public culture in recent years illustrates how some national social institutions have been renovated and updated while economic institutions drift further away from notions of the common good. Using the framework of ‘commercial nationalism’, this article has sought to sketch a state of affairs in which corporate interests customarily prevail over social and individual ones in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. This is not to say that there are no countervailing forces within Irish society and culture that call out the neoliberal tendencies recasting life within the nation. Although, as we have indicated, career politicians have sought to capitalize on the success of the marriage equality campaign and the repeal of the eighth amendment, one can’t overlook the positive social change these votes brought about, and the solidarity that manifested across diverse walks of life within and beyond the nation during the campaigns. One might also look, for instance, to a healthy podcast culture in which the likes of Blindboy Boatclub, sometime member of comedy duo The Rubberbandits, decries the developments we outline in this article, or the output of emerging musicians such as Dublin band Fontaines D.C., whose acclaimed 2019 album Dogrel, as Irish Times journalist Una Mullally (2019) lyrically puts it, ‘speaks to those who reside within the cracks, where the things they value about a place can’t be bought or sold’. The purpose of this article is not to deny that there is a space of resistance in existence in contemporary Ireland, but to emphasize how, as we have shown, the popular culture of the period indexes a shift toward corporate impregnability and a public culture in which individuals absorb greater risk and take up positions of heightened precarity.

This shift can be mapped in everything from a cluster of reality television series that glorify emigration as a permanent feature of Irish global citizenship, to bank ads that tout the good fortune of a small minority of older citizens in a position to have paid off mortgages, and in the political persona of a young, dynamic Taoiseach who cultivates good relations with corporate interests while largely ignoring the social problems associated with austerity. Most diffusely and most decisively, the shift is expressed in a:

self-conscious turn toward affective labor as a way of reinvesting the desire of the Irish population in an emotionally and financially oppressive mode of capitalist valorization, all the while deflecting attention away from questions concerning the responsibility of the institutions of the Irish state to manage the country’s wealth in a just and democratic manner. (Kiersey, 2014: 359)

In sum, post-Celtic Tiger Ireland exhibits many of the traits Peter Bloom and Carl Rhodes (2018) associate with ‘the CEO Society’, namely one in which ‘corporate ideals of rivalry, self-interest and even exploitation are spreading so as to transform all areas of human life in its [the CEO Society’s] own image’ (2018: 48). It is a site marked by the proliferation of what Saskia Sassen (2017) recognizes as ‘predatory formations’. Such formations, she observes, have led ‘to escalated systemic capacities for massive capture at the top, environmental destruction on a scale we have not seen before, and a significant rise in the expulsion of people from reasonable life options even in rich countries’ (Sassen, 2017: 2). In recent years, Ireland has emerged as a place where ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ Jordan Belfort draws large paying audiences at the Convention Centre in Dublin and the Taoiseach appears on a well-watched television programme where he defines his job as ‘chairman and CEO of the organization’, while under-employment, wage theft and pervasive homelessness are normalized (Crawley, 2018). In this new phase of Irish (self-)narrativization, any element of history or cultural identity is seemingly available for brand building and promotion as exemplified by a recent campaign by an Irish advertising agency for an insurance conglomerate that recreates a 1966 speech announcing free secondary education in Ireland and, perhaps most astonishingly, the name choice of Workhouse Visual Communication on Dame Street in Dublin (Ferriter, 2019). As Ireland settles into what has been characterized as a ‘jobs-rich but wage-poor recovery’ (Burke-Kennedy, 2018), the intensity and variety of tactics in play to secure popular acceptance of corporate hegemony can be expected to both solidify and expand.