Patrick Brodie is Assistant Professor in the School of Information and Communication Studies at University College Dublin and editor of Media Rurality, also published by Duke University Press. His new book, Wild Tides: Media Infrastructure and Financial Crisis in Ireland, traces Ireland’s shift from reckless pre-2008 real estate development to a post-crisis investment in media infrastructure that has backfired. Through ethnographic work and policy analysis, Brodie reveals the unexpected ways that financialization alters the daily life of a nation.
The title of your book, “wild tides,” refers to the phrase “a rising tide lifts all boats,” an economic dictum which you describe hearing from every corner throughout your interviews and informal conversations with Irish, and the tidal metaphor recurs throughout the book. How do “wild tides” differ from a “rising tide”?
The title is an attempt to bridge the metaphorical/discursive politics that “dematerialize” the financialized world economy, with its material politics and relationship to climate change in Ireland. And the ascription of “wildness” as I articulate in the introduction is a durable, colonial logic by which territories are conditioned for extraction and the like, which in the case of Ireland has been part of a “place-branding” exercise to capitalize on Ireland’s colonial history alongside its contemporary neoliberal economy. In emphasizing that the financial tides that structure the global economy are “turbulent,” I want to go beyond conceptions of a world market characterized by “rising” growth and subsequent and catastrophic crashes. This turbulence is a structure of the market, led by the productive forces of the “metropolitan” core in the global north (particularly the US), which is cultivated by and for an increasing concentration of wealth for the very few at the expense of economic and political violence against the many. We are seeing an extreme example of that structure take shape with the US-Israeli war on Iran, whereby the beneficiaries are an oligarchical few owners of capital—petroleum producers, tech companies and defence contractors, and financial traders. Meanwhile, economic, environmental, and overt military violence on a catastrophic scale is enacted against countries and peoples in the so-called peripheries, as well as marginalized and working class communities in the imperial core.
This might seem like an aside, but I think it’s an important point when understanding how the violence of finance capitalism shapes the territorial structure of the global economy. As world-systems analysis helps us identify, the “neoliberal” consensus maintained the imperial arrangement whereby the limited benefits of industrialization via participating in outsourced production and services just re-shaped the economic dependency of peripheral and semi-peripheral states. Ireland is a semi-peripheral economy, and has benefited enormously from this imperial arrangement, facilitating the tax evasion of multinational firms primarily based in the US. However, it has also rendered Ireland enormously vulnerable to swings in global financial markets, which were felt most acutely during the aftermath of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, but also have been institutionalized through post-financial crisis and so-called “recovery-era” economic policies. This dependency, in particular, was effectively mandated by the market-led bailout conditions of the “troika”—the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund – after the Irish crash.
In short, the turbulence of global markets in Ireland, due to an apparently contradictory but permanent austerity alongside enormous prosperity, is today experienced as a kind of everyday affect associated with state economic policies. The book attempts to bridge these scales. “Wild tides” as a title thus tries to capture that mess of contradictions, which I hope the book itself then helps to demystify and explain in the context of post-financial crisis Ireland.
In your introduction, you explain that the book’s study of media infrastructure “unravels the specific industrial threads that characterize contemporary Irish neoliberalism.” What are those threads, and what makes them such a useful site for understanding neoliberalism in Ireland?
In the book, alongside some of my other recent work with Patrick Bresnihan, I develop what I refer to as “neoliberalism with Irish characteristics,” which gestures towards the fact that Ireland’s state economic development model has become a relatively centralized form of economic planning by and for multinational industrial investment. This has a long history, but the state has “doubled-down” and even intensified this model since the financial crisis, including in the form of successive Government plans by Fine Gael and now Fianna Fáil to accommodate continued dependency on US economic flows to ensure future prosperity. This renders Ireland extremely vulnerable to the turbulence of a US-led economic system.
After trying to position Ireland and its media economies within the world-scale systems I discuss above, I identify three sites where attempts to build an economic “recovery” through the financialized mechanisms that had led to the crash in the first place intersected with media industries and their infrastructures: the built environment of Dublin’s “creative city” planning; the production and labour geographies of media industries outside of Dublin; and in Ireland’s infrastructural facilitation of the global tech economy through data centers.
I studied each of these sites through a mixture of discourse analysis, interviews, participant observation, and site-specific fieldwork—oftentimes, just going places, photographing, and spending time with interlocutors and in pubs—to get a sense of how the above contradictions played out in situ. Some of the most instructive insights from the book came from these journeys, for example, out to what one data center engineer referred to as “data center country” in the southwestern suburbs of Dublin, where Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, and several large colocation providers have major data center facilities. Watching these geographies change over time through the simultaneous intervention of multinational tech investment and Irish state intervention demonstrated the degree of spatial, environmental, and infrastructural transformation required to accommodate the global growth of these industries. At the same time, speaking with media and tourism workers, for example in rural Galway or Kerry in the west and south of the country, helped to show how uneven the “benefits” brought by this model of state facilitation for multinational investment are. This precarity is structured into everyday life in contemporary Ireland, in spite of the scale of wealth and infrastructural investment for global tech and associated media industries.
Beyond the fieldwork from the book, I now only need to speak with my undergraduate students at UCD, who leave the country in droves after graduation—an eye-wateringly high cost of living paired with a difficult job market in these industries makes it hard for twenty-something university graduates to stay in the country. I speak about this in the conclusion of the book, where I think I’m able to update some of the book’s insights—which mostly takes place in the “recovery-era” up until 2020—into the present. The “austerity” politics of the 2010s and its economic consequences haven’t gone away for ordinary people in Ireland. The recent energy crisis due to the war on Iran has made this even more readily apparent.
Throughout the book, you touch on the longstanding tensions of land politics in Ireland. How does the island’s colonial history shape Irish relationships to land today?
The above answers all gesture towards some of the prevailing structures of Ireland’s colonial history. I should emphasize, as I do in the book, that I’m using “Ireland” as a shorthand here for the 26-county southern state, the Republic of Ireland. “Northern Ireland,” the occupied six counties still under British control, are partitioned from the southern state. I’d be remiss not to emphasize that this is still the most enduring and noteworthy legacy of colonialism in Ireland, and it continues to structure and constrain political, economic, and environmental futures on the island. A great example of this is the ongoing struggle around Lough Neagh in the north, the largest freshwater lake in Ireland or Britain, which is still owned by the Earl of Shaftesbury. Every year, there are toxic algal blooms due to pollution from a nearby factory farming plant. Economic decision-making and land ownership structures heavily constrain local environmental democracy, which implicates an enormous proportion of the island, north and south—the lake provides over 40% of Northern Ireland’s drinking water.
In the book, the history of colonialism is primarily discussed in terms of the ongoing core/periphery dynamics that occur on and beyond the island in terms of economic structuring. Ireland, as I mention above, is classified as a “semi-periphery” through a world-systems analysis, meaning (in a simplified sense) it both reaps limited benefits from and is often subjected to the violent flows of the global economy. The features of Ireland’s ongoing dependency are the result of political and economic decision-making since the establishment of the independent, 26-county southern state in the 1920s. In particular, the Irish state’s efforts to “liberalize” its economy—meaning, deepen its relationship with the US and Europe, in the aftermath of attempting to break from economic dependency on Britain—took place through industrial policy inviting international investment. It is impossible to understand the political and economic decision-making of the Irish state without positioning it within this longer history. In particular, data centers have become the most obvious example of this economic dependency on the US, as these mostly big tech infrastructures now use 22% of Ireland’s electricity. This is an exceptionally high number, with no similar global comparison at this scale, and the Irish state’s climate policies around electricity and water are entirely hamstrung by this resource-drain. Ireland’s economic history, developed through a postcolonial development model, is entirely shaping the future of its energy and associated environmental and infrastructural systems.
At the same time, within the geography of Ireland itself, there are internal differentiations and experiences of this development model, which map onto enduring colonial politics. Ireland has a strong rural-urban divide—in particular between Dublin and the rest of the country—which can be traced back to the role of Dublin as the center of colonial governance during British rule. Dublin is still pejoratively referred to as “the Pale” by non-Dubliners (etymologically coming from the same root as “the palisades”), and politics is organized around prominent urban-rural lines. As I write, a farmer convoy are occupying and have brought Dublin to a standstill over fuel prices—activating a politics of rurality that I’ve also explored elsewhere with Darin Barney and a slate of contributors. State policies designed for “regional development” in Ireland specifically are always limited by the spatial concentration of wealth and governance in Dublin, as well as a sense that industrial development via multinationals tends to bring with it environmental harms and minimal democratic input. “Rising tides” also have clear high-water marks based on distance from Dublin, and/or relationship to specifically branded tourism or other focused regional development campaigns.
Just finally, in relation to that last point, there is also still this external conception—which the state have somehow internalized and embedded in their own self-promotion, especially economically—of Ireland’s “wildness,” which draws on obvious colonial conceptions of existence beyond the metropole. This was very prominent in films and other cultural representations throughout the twentieth century, which in many ways sanitized and gentrified what were often highly bigoted conceptions of Ireland and the Irish. The Quiet Man, the 1952 American film by John Ford, is frequently brought up as an example of this, full of drunken, fighting, and “Colleen” Irish stereotypes, especially in the context of capitalizing on Irish-American yearning for the rural authenticity of the “motherland.” Throughout the book, I try to draw in these cultural legacies as well, especially in how the state uses them to brand its economy—a kind of neoliberal “wild west”—as a site for unfettered investment.
Are there stories or interviews you’re still grappling with after the book’s completion, or that you wish could have made it into the book?
Tons—though I do try to gesture towards some of these “weirder” encounters in the introduction, so many fieldnotes just couldn’t make the cut. One that I keep coming back to, especially in the context of the thankfully limited spread of the far right here in Ireland, is a discussion I had with a prospective data center developer in Wicklow back in the late-2010s. To hammer home the points he was making about being cut out of Ireland’s data center development plans, he put me on the phone with what he referred to as a former politician, who warned me that there was a shadowy, globalist cabal of unelected decision-makers running the state etc.—proto-“Great Replacement,” far right conspiracy stuff. A few years later, this part of Wicklow was subject to one of the most violent anti-migrant campaigns we’ve seen in the context of recent far right mobilization. I can’t help but wonder if I’d somehow gotten an early insight into how these politics of misplaced and often petty bourgeois grievance were forming in the context of austerity and “recovery-era” Ireland.
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