A look at how Ireland changed after the global financial crisis

John Connell’s The Ghost Estate explores the severity of the wounds that afflicted Ireland after the global financial crisis.

A protester makes his point outside Leinster House, Dublin, Ireland 07/12/2010. Finance Minister Lenihan is planning an init...

It is no easy thing, explaining to Australians the misery wrought on Ireland by the ­global financial crisis. Most of us felt no more than a light breeze from the cyclone that made landfall on the republic in 2008. We are like someone born rich, for whom each economic downswing is merely a prelude to another boom, trying to understand the kind of poverty that never lets go.

Because it wasn’t cyclical for the Irish; it was a gavel brought down on the country as a whole. In recent decades a people stunted by centuries of insularity, repression and sectarianism grasped the possibility of joining the wider world. For the first time they stood up, a proudly independent and prosperous nation, and gave the finger to those who historically ­had exploited them or simply done them down.

Yet they were soon disabused of their ­optimism and confidence. This hurt would be proportionate to the hope the Irish initially ­permitted themselves.

The severity of the wounds reopened by these events may be gauged by the reluctance of Irish writers to confront them. There is hardly a burgeoning sub-genre of de-clawed Celtic tiger novels. Indeed, John Connell, whose debut tackles the consequences of his home country’s meltdown, was hard-pressed in recent ­Australian interviews to name more than a ­couple of titles that had done the same. The Ghost Estate shoulders that burden, though it is one so heavy the book occasionally buckles ­beneath the weight. The fact of the effort is creditable, however, and the novel’s cumulative achievement should not be ­gainsaid.

Despite its flaws, Connell’s work is fearless in anatomising a vast social unravelling; canny, too, in doing so without being overwhelmed by the scale of the recession. What the author manages here is to condense a national disaster down to a local tragedy. Not only that: he links one man’s blighted life to an imagined ­historical figure. The fate of Lord Henry ­Defoyle, high Tory politician and unapologetic member of the 19th-century Protestant ­ascendancy, twins the trauma of the republic’s founding with its contemporary rout.

It is late in 2007 and Gerard McQuaid is on the up. He’s a young sparky with an admirable work ethic and ambitions that, though modest, are of a kind unimaginable to his parents’ ­generation. He and his workmates, local boys and Polish incomers, are kept busy toiling for those newly risen property developers who seem set on turning the country into a patchwork of golf courses and bijoux housing estates.

McQuaid has only just taken on the running of the business when a real estate tycoon named John Kane offers him a plum job: managing the installation of ­electricity in a new housing ­development. There are dozens of new homes to wire up, along with an old manor house on whose land the estate lies.

The best things in The Ghost Estate are to be found in the descriptions of the daily working life of McQuaid and his team. I know of no one since John McGahern, the greatest prose writer in Ireland after ­Beckett, who has so quietly hymned the labour of the Irish working class. And while ever it sticks to the rhythm of their daily round — the long hours spent drilling and unspooling cable, the lunch rooms dense with cigarette smoke and magnificent yammer, the pubs of a night filled with blokes whose family names can be ­inferred from the colour of their hair — you could almost read Connell’s work as a ­celebration rather than an elegy.

But the narrative is littered with warnings. McQuaid is not an ­educated man — his girlfriend, Sinead, is studying in Dublin and the growing gap between them is another aspect of the looming disaster — but he is an intelligent bloke. He notices the ‘‘farmland that had been so hard won from the soil by generations of local men was now being cleared and covered over by their sons’’. He notes the greed of his countrymen in the light of their unprecedented wealth, and sees how their prosperity alienates them from the many Poles who work beside them, men who echo earlier Irish experience in that they ‘‘were in search of a better life in ­another land and yet dreamed only of returning home’’. In other respects, McQuaid is alarmingly ­obtuse. He works all the hours God sends to make a success of his new role as boss, and also to afford a home of his own in which he and ­Sinead may start a family. But a constitutional reticence forbids him from discussing his plans more clearly with the woman who would be his wife. As New York investment bank Bear ­Stearns falls on the TV above the bar in his small town in County Longford, our young hero fails to read the flashing banderol portending the end of Ireland’s economic delirium.

What he does do is obsess over a portrait ­discovered among the accumulated detritus of decades in the manor. It is of Henry Defoyle, a man known to Pat O’Reilly, a plumber and older and wiser colleague of McQuaid on the construction site, who sparingly dispenses to the younger man a little of what he knows. The chapters in which Lefoyle’s time in the manor is revisited are not so successfully realised as the modern strand of the story but have the virtue of showing us the roots of the frenzy that has gripped McQuaid and those around him. We come to understand things will not end well in either century.

The fault of the book is tied up with its ­success. The Ghost Estate is so keen to hammer home its thesis that it locks its characters in didactic straitjackets; finely rendered as ­Gerald is, as his colleagues and lovers and ­enemies are, we feel them prodded towards their end by authorial orderlies. Conversely, the `novel’s great success is tied up with that flaw. The passion, the anger, the ferocious sense of justice that impels the narrative emanates from the page, lighting up the narrative like floodlights beneath a cathedral.

It is the work of a deeply talented and ­engaged author, and the story it tells will lodge itself in the imagination of those who take it on.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian’s chief literary critic.

John Connell will be a guest of the Sydney Writers Festival, May 18 to 24.

The Ghost Estate

By John Connell

Picador, 360pp, $29.99