The Arts, Culture and the Wealth of Nations Journal of Irish and Scottish

Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies Volume 2: Issue 2 The Arts, Culture and the Wealth of Nations AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen JOURNAL OF IRISH AND SCOTTISH STUDIES Volume 2, Issue 2 Spring 2009 The Arts, Culture and the Wealth of Nations Published by the AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen in association with The universities of the The Irish-Scottish Academic Initiative ISSN 1753-2396 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies General Editor: Cairns Craig Issue Editors: Michael Brown, Rosalyn Trigger Associate Editors: Stephen Dornan, Paul Shanks Editorial Advisory Board: Fran Brearton, Queen’s University, Belfast Eleanor Bell, University of Strathclyde Ewen Cameron, University of Edinburgh Sean Connolly, Queen’s University, Belfast Patrick Crotty, University of Aberdeen David Dickson, Trinity College, Dublin T. M. Devine, University of Edinburgh David Dumville, University of Aberdeen Aaron Kelly, University of Edinburgh Edna Longley, Queen’s University, Belfast Peter Mackay, Queen’s University, Belfast Shane Alcobia-Murphy, University of Aberdeen Ian Campbell Ross, Trinity College, Dublin Graham Walker, Queen’s University, Belfast International Advisory Board: Don Akenson, Queen’s University, Kingston Tom Brooking, University of Otago Keith Dixon, Université Lumière Lyon 2 Luke Gibbons, Notre Dame Marjorie Howes, Boston College H. Gustav Klaus, University of Rostock Peter Kuch, University of Otago Graeme Morton, University of Guelph Brad Patterson, Victoria University, Wellington Matthew Wickman, Brigham Young David Wilson, University of Toronto The Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies is a peer reviewed journal, published twice yearly in autumn and spring, by the AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen. An electronic reviews section is available on the AHRC Centre’s website at: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/riiss/issjournal.shtmll Editorial correspondence, including manuscripts for submission, should be addressed to The Editors,Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies, Humanity Manse, 19 College Bounds, University of Aberdeen, AB24 3UG or emailed to [email protected] Subscriptions and business correspondence should be address to The Administrator. Subscription information can be found on www.abdn.ac.uk/riiss/publications Cover image: Tercentenary series £50 bank note, marking the 300th anniversary of the founding of the Bank of Scotland (1695). CONTENTS Editorial v Boom and Bloom 1 Sean Dorgan Awaiting the Inevitable 13 Robert Crawford Some Political Economy Lessons 25 from Ireland’s Boom and Bust Frank Barry The Arts And The Wealth Of Nations: 41 The Role Of The State John O’Hagan National Identity and Culture in a Cold Climate: 53 The Case of Scotland David McCrone The Economics of Identity: 67 Heritage as a Cultural Resource in Ireland, 1922 – 89 Pat Cooke O Reason Not The Rhyme! 87 Martin Drury Gamblers and Speculators: 95 the National Theatre of Scotland stakes a claim Adrienne Scullion National Music, Identity and Cultural Capital 109 in the Irish Economy Fintan Vallely Scotland’s Traditional Music and Song 123 as Cultural, Social, and Economic Assets Ian Russell Museums, Meaning and Money in Glasgow 139 Mark O’Neill Proper Accounting 153 Terence Brown Notes on Contributors 161 EDITORIAL In John Ramsay McCulloch’s edition of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, first published in 1828, McCulloch offers the following justification of the science of political economy, and of the principle of the accumulation of wealth which it studies: The possession of a decent competence, or the ability to indulge in other pursuits than those that directly tend to satisfy our animal wants and desires, is necessary to soften the selfish passions, to improve the moral and intellectual character, and to insure any considerable proficiency in liberal studies and pursuits. Without the tranquillity and leisure afforded by the enjoyment of accumulated riches, these speculative and elegant studies which enlarge our views, purify our taste, and lift us higher in the scale of being, could not be successfully prosecuted. The barbarism and refinement of nations depend more on their wealth than on any other circumstance. No people have ever made any distinguished figure in philosophy or the fine arts, without having been, at the same time, celebrated for their riches and industry.1 Culture and refinement, for McCulloch, follow wealth: wealth, therefore, is the necessary foundation which has to be built before a culture can achieve ‘refinement’, and before distinction ‘in philosophy or the fine arts’ can be produced. McCulloch believed that he was here expressing the truth taught to us by Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, and it is this version of Smith that has been promoted by the neo-liberalism that came to dominate Western politics in the last quarter of the twentieth century. In 1975, in Chicago, Margaret Thatcher declared that ‘Adam Smith, in fact, heralded the end of the strait-jacket of feudalism and released all the innate energy of private initiative and enterprise which enables wealth to be created on a scale never before contemplated’.2 1 John Ramsay McCulloch, ‘Introductory Discourse’, Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Edinburgh, 1863; 1828), xv – xvi. 2 Quoted Stephen Copley, ‘Introduction: reading the Wealth of Nations’, in Stephen vi Editorial ‘Wealth creation’ became the primary aim of political parties right and left, and nations were to be judged by their ability to generate wealth. By the 1990s, in the ‘Celtic Tiger’ years, Ireland was to be a model of such wealth creation, achieved by unfettering the Republic from the desire of its founders to protect the Irish people from the modern world, and then by embracing the principles of a liberal, free market economy. By contrast, Scotland was a ‘dependency’ culture, clinging to a socialist vision of planned development and deeply resistant to entrepreneurial capitalism. To Mrs Thatcher, Scotland’s refusal to adopt her free-market principles was deeply ironic, for ‘Scotland in the eighteenth century was the home of the very same Scottish Enlightenment which produced Adam Smith, the greatest exponent of free enterprise economics till Hayek and Friedman’.3 If, after the economic disasters of 2008 – 09, few could still subscribe wholeheartedly to the view that free markets and free enterprise would, as McCulloch predicted and Thatcher insisted, create the wealth to allow human beings the ‘enjoyment of accumulated riches’, nonetheless, as the bailout of the banks proved, no government has an alternative vision of how the international economic system might be organised. But that such ‘free-market’ economies released people for those ‘speculative and elegant studies which enlarge our views, purify our taste, and lift us higher in the scale of being’ is hardly credible: the increasing gap between rich and poor, lengthening real working hours, the trivialisation of a public sphere infused by advertising, the retreat of the State from publicly-funded higher education and the retreat of higher education itself from any but pragmatic values, does not suggest that we have been, as societies, lifted ‘higher in the scale of being’. If artworks are still being traded at enormously inflated prices it is symptomatic not of a widely spread increase in ‘speculative and elegant studies’ but rather of the commercialisation of the art world as a ‘hedge fund’ for those with wealth that needs a secure location in a world of increasingly untrustworthy investment vehicles – not only the insecurity of the banks and the untrustworthiness of the bankers and the brokers, but increasingly of the governments which back them. Rather than ‘soften the selfish passions’ and ‘improve the moral and intellectual character’ of the nation, the neo-liberalism of the 1970s and 80s produced, as a whole series of commercial and political scandals revealed in 2009, a world distinguished by an anti-intellectual, amoral selfishness. We Copley and Kathryn Sutherland (eds), Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (Manchester, 1994), 2. 3 Ibid. The Arts, Culture and the Wealth of Nations vii end the so-called ‘noughties’ with a world brought to ‘nought’ – or at least to national debts with dizzying numbers of ‘noughts’ – by fifty years of the pursuit of national wealth: prognostications of the future that awaits us, not only in Ireland and Scotland but in the West more generally, point to many years of public austerity (whatever the increases in private wealth) and a squeeze on state funding in which culture and the arts will be among the first to suffer, precisely because they are seen as the outcome and products of wealth. The wealth having disappeared, they will be (once again) unnecessary till the foundations of wealth have been rebuilt. This monocausal relationship between wealth and the arts could be challenged from many different historical perspectives: Robert Burns grew up in a period and in a social context where it was almost impossible for small tenant farmers like his father or himself to accumulate wealth, and yet he not only accumulated and passed on one of the richest folk collections in the world but turned many of them into works which still have worldwide recognition; the Irish Literary Revival, which gave us some of the greatest works of Anglophone modernism, took place in an Ireland less than two generations away from the crisis of the Famine, two generations in which almost half the population had been driven to emigration by the country’s impoverishment; and the period of Thatcher’s destruction of the British manufacturing economy in the 1980s, and, especially, of the Scottish manufacturing economy, with unemployment levels not seen since the 1930s, was the period of the greatest efflorescence of Scottish art since at least the 1920s and perhaps as far back as the 1820s.

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