Richard Pine, formerly of this parish (RTÉ arts administrator and senior editor) has lived for 15 years on the Greek island of Corfu. In his regular Letters from Greece pieces, published in The Irish Times, the writer has caste an astute and sometimes wry eye on his adopted land, albeit from the vantage point of a leafy, green Ionian place often deemed the prettiest of all the Greek islands.
However, Pine’s book is only occasionally about prettiness, dealing in the main as it does with the decidedly un-pretty crisis which Greece has endured in recent years. Its citizens have clearly been put through a kind of media wringer, hailed by some as feisty heroes fighting the good (anti-Merkel) fight, disdained as wily irresponsible folk by others. Pine sets about separating the hard grains of truth from the lazy myth and the result is a strikingly illuminating, perceptive account. “Greece is essentially a country of creative, industrious, honest people,” he writes.
He points out that “decades of abuse through cronyism, nepotism, bureaucratic inefficiency and obfuscation, bribery, corruption and tax evasion have created the present crisis, but the average man in the street (or man in the olive grove) has little or nothing to do with it. “
In the chapter, A Failed State?, he declares that the monopoly situation of most professions in Greece is contrary to EU rules, with membership effectively restricted to Greeks. Thus, the practices of architects, opticians, civil engineers, real estate agents, hairdressers, bakers constitute a kind of closed shop.
Pharmacists and taxi-drivers jealously guard their licences while no new licences were issued for truckers from 1986 until 2010. In those years, some 34,000 trucker licences were in circulation, some changing hands for approximately 300,000 euro. Literature, art, film and music are surveyed impressively and passionately and the author must be commended for his blend of careful journalism with a judicious sampling of the rich imaginative talents still flowering in contemporary Greece.
"Greece is Ireland and Ireland is Greece, " Pine argues. "In fact the two countries could not be more similar. each on the rim of a fragile Europe and an even more fragile eurozone, each proud of its independence from the age-old dominant neighbour, proud of its historic contribution to European culture."
Paddy Kehoe
