Ireland isn't really a utopia – it's just its neighbour is a gurning claptrapocracy

‘I think being a woman is like being Irish,” wrote Dublin-born novelist Iris Murdoch, “everyone says you’re important and nice, but you take second place all the time.” I sometimes think this sentiment reflects my own wariness as an Irish person of taking too many compliments from overseas, and explains why I find congratulations for the country’s current government a bit unsatisfying.

The Economist recently called Ireland “an unlikely diplomatic superpower”, while a leader on these pages praised the “enviable beauty” of the Irish political climate. After years of alternating between calling Ireland’s Brexit tactics cynical and naive, even the Telegraph this month praised Ireland for “taking over the Eurozone” and “extending their grip” on the continent’s institutions. Having negotiated its way through the Brexit morass, swerved the worst of Covid-19, secured a seat on the UN security council, and won a historic EU judgment that means they have the right to insist the world’s richest country does not pay us any tax – hurrah! – Ireland’s place in the global hierarchy appears on the rise, and the UK has continued marvelling at the shrewd cunning of their plucky little neighbour.

Why, then, does this praise seem faint, or unearned? It’s not that we hate adulation. Seeking flattery from abroad is one of Ireland’s most crippling and shameful addictions, right up there with Garth Brooks or pairing coleslaw with lasagne. This is a fact confirmed any time a foreign celebrity appears on Irish telly. “So tell me,” RTE talk show host Ryan Tubridy will dutifully ask Greta Thunberg or Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, right after they’ve finished talking about their work clearing minefields for Unicef: “What is your favourite thing about Athlone?”

It’s just that Ireland hasn’t turned into some 24th-century futurist utopia so much as installed sensible public policy that should seem unremarkable in a modern democracy – and in fact, given most western responses to the coronavirus, actually is unremarkable. This government has received praise at home for its response to the crisis, but we should remember that its unheralded Fianna Fáil/Fine Gael coalition-of-the-boring was instituted to obstruct Sinn Féin, who just this year saw an unprecedented leftward surge in support from people tired of both main parties.

While Ireland has received plaudits from the World Health Organization for its dealing with the current crisis, the same mistakes with care homes were made in Ireland as elsewhere, and small clusters of infection have re-emerged in recent days. The idea of Ireland as a model of competence in the field of social and public health is also one most Irish people might find surprising, since it has its own issues that rarely attract attention from afar: a mounting housing crisis that currently means 10,000 people are homeless in one of the hemisphere’s richest states; a rolling series of healthcare scandals surrounding everything from poor bed provision to faulty cervical cancer tests; and the remarkable saga of the new National Children’s hospital in Dublin, originally budgeted at €400m but is now forecast to be costing around €2.4bn, making it one of the planet’s most expensive buildings.

Ireland’s decision to enter lockdown earlier than Britain was a good one, but only in comparison with the grievous laxity of our easterly neighbour. The early days of Ireland’s track and trace app are showing positive results, but this is a success unduly magnified by the British government’s initial resistance to such technologies, and subsequent failure to launch one that doesn’t break its own data protection laws. Irish people have largely followed the protocols as advised, but they’ve also enjoyed relatively consistent, sober messaging from government, media and health experts. This is in contrast to than Britain’s bewildering stew of denials, contradictions and outright political chicanery around adherence to their own guidelines – none of which have faced any serious consequences from the UK’s parliament or largely right-leaning press.

It’s on this last point that one might find a meaningful distinction between the two countries. While England’s political culture is notoriously barbed and acerbic, Ireland’s is rather strait-laced and sedate. Irish newspapers may be dismissive and hectoring when it comes to Sinn Féin’s surge in support, but they rarely depict them as communists who live in bins. They afford a soft touch to government ministers who have to be woken from a nap in the Dáil to vote against workers’ rights, but stop short of exalting them as celestial objects bestowing sunshine on their grateful subjects. Despite this, the Irish press has landed more recent hits on their government than their English counterparts. Earlier in July, Barry Cowan’s 17-day tenure as a minister for agriculture was ended after a slew of coverage of a years-old, and spent, conviction for drink driving. Compare this with the lack of any consequences for Dominic Cummings, or the fact that both Priti Patel and Gavin Williamson regained senior ministerial posts shortly after being sacked for actions that almost reach the definition of espionage.

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It’s this sense of political unseriousness that seems the most marked difference between the two places, and it says less about the “enviable beauty” of Ireland’s system than about Britain’s further slide into a fact-averse, consequence-free banana republic of malevolent toffs. This style of politics had ruinous effects on the Brexit referendum and the subsequent EU negotiations, and has now become criminally disastrous in a pandemic that’s costing many more lives in Britain than their nearest neighbour.

For all its other ills, Ireland has not yet disposed of experts, accountability or political memory. These things are taken seriously, and a combination of steady, boring diplomacy and common-sense public health measures are granting Ireland greater praise than they should, now that those approaches can be so readily contrasted to our American and British counterparts. It’s a sort of “clowns to the left of us, jokers to the right” arrangement, which continues to herald great acclaim for an Irish government so dysfunctional that Leo Varadkar spent a day last week briefing against his coalition partner, Taoiseach Micheál Martin, on whether their green list of accepted travel destinations should even be released.

Praise for Ireland as shrewd and canny operators gets the diplomatic calculus back to front. Ireland is not outflanking a competent, longstanding neighbour. She just has the pleasure of being compared with the gurning claptrapocracy next door. So long as Boris Johnson waffles, prevaricates and sees fit to place the NHS on the table for sale, amid the strongest surge in its appreciation since its founding, Ireland’s mundane governing coalitions will continue looking important and nice by comparison.

• Séamas O’Reilly is a writer from Derry