How the Irish always shoves the blame for their woes onto others.

As the Republic flounders towards collapse again,lets ask: why do we always get things wrong? Sure, I know three reliable answers: the Brits, the Brits and the Brits again. Indeed,entire university faculties are given over to discourses on Hibernian victimhood,with self-pity intellectualised though the impenetrable verbal mud of Foucault,Derrida and Fanon.

This whingeing school of thought has an academic brand name, Field Day,and a cast of articulate laureates who specialise in the pliants of our woebegone Irish identity. Yet no one considers the possibilty that there might be something genetically askew with too many Irish people for us to create an ordered,predictable society that does not fall apart every 15 years or so.

So,has our still small population been cursed with some genetic fault from our founding population which came from Spain 4,000 years ago? A baleful genetic legacy need not be very large. Any teacher will testify to the impossibly disruptive influence of a minority of pupils. What if the same were true of an entire society.

The enduring success of Fianna Fail,founded by yet another Spainard,has been the main story of independent Ireland. Yet this is the party that did its violent best to destroy the State at its outset,and did so again in the 1930s by waging a ruinous economic war with the world's mightest empire,and our only trading partner. It did bring the State to its knees in the 1950s,attempting to create a Catholic Gaelic paradise,and courted ruin again in 1970 when it turned a blind eye to the formation of the Provisional IRA.

Lo,come the 1980s,and insane Fianna Fail borrowing took us to the brink of penury. And finally,here we are again in the 2000s now facing Amageddon. Yet at this very nadir,the Fianna Fail vote of 25% in Euro elections suggests that a quarter of the population is clinically insane. We don't need psephologists to explain Irish elections. We need psychiatrists. Take Donegal,where the electorate in the 1990s returned one TD who demanded free,universal British television,and another who demanded Brits out: transfers from one got the other elected. Irrationality is s defining feature of Irish life,yet even to draw attention to this is to attract comparably irrational cries of ''anti-Irish''.

Thus the mental disorder even has its own antibodies which prevent any inquiry into it. ''We are victims: we cannot be authors of our many misfortunes and anyone who says we are is a bigoted anti-national Hibernophobe''

Kevin Myers B.T. Friday August 28 2009