In a recent interview about his memoir of life with the late Marian Finucane, John Clarke was describing to Pat Kenny the Ireland in which he came of age. “It was an extraordinary place,” Clarke drawled, in that magnificent, lachrymose baritone. “There were no jobs, there was no careers, that I’m aware of. You could get a job in a very, ah, in insurance or Guinness’s. But if you lived down the country... there was no off-farm work. Once you got out of swaddling clothes, you were on that boat to England or Canada or America.”
For vast numbers of people in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, the choice was deprivation or separation, and often both. Readers of a certain age will have no difficulty imagining the world Clarke describes. In the subterranean folk memory of the country, there is a clear picture of all that human misery wrought by grinding poverty. Younger readers can find plenty of accounts of what the playwright Tom Murphy – whose entire family emigrated from Tuam, leaving only him and his mother behind – called the “bitterness, futility, stagnation”.
Why was Ireland so poor for so long? Political scientist Tom Garvin asked this question in a book called Preventing the Future, published nearly 20 years ago, which sought to explore and explain the failure of the new Irish State on so many fronts for the first half-century of its life. While the 1920s and 1930s were difficult for obvious reasons, the postwar period was harder to account for.
Garvin’s answer lay in the stultifying conservatism that took hold in Ireland after independence and seemed to petrify after the war. While Europe was seeking to rebuild itself with Yankee dollars and to consciously create societies that promoted prosperity, mobility and a strong social safety net, Ireland instead looked inward and, Garvin writes, “made a series of ‘non-decisions’ that were, in the short and medium term, disastrous to the country’s development prospects”.
Most damagingly, this prevented the spread of mass education, and of higher and technical education, that drove such spectacular economic growth in western Europe and enabled the construction of their social democratic states.
As with many of the failures of the politics of the time, it was the satirist Myles na gCopaleen who best captured the resistance to education. Writing in The Irish Times in the 1940s, he had the “Plain People of Ireland” observe: “Dear knows some people are very smart, these county council scholarships to the universities in Dublin do more harm than good, young gossoons walking around in their Sunday suits on them on weekdays when they’re at home at Easter, ashamed to be seen out with their fathers and oh no thanks, I’m not going to give any hand with the sowing, I have to attend to my studies, I’ve an exam in two months. And that reminds me I want five pounds for books. Sure it’s all madness. There’s no other word for it. Madness.”
Later that decade, the paper remarked in an editorial that the education system simply didn’t teach children how to earn a living.
All we seem to want to talk about is how to spend the money. Maybe we should think about how we get it from time to time
The point here is not the enduring wisdom of Irish Times columnists and leader writers (though take that lesson if you wish), it is that the economic state of a country is the result of policy decisions taken by its leaders. And that without the taxation revenues provided by a healthy economy, no government will be able to scaffold a healthy and decent society.
It often seems that the health of the Irish economy, and the river of money that flows from it, is taken completely for granted by everyone. That it just happens automatically. But it doesn’t.
It is a result of the slow accretion of far-sighted policy decisions taken over time – the extension of free secondary education; joining the EEC; fixing the public finances in the late 1980s; cutting corporation tax and hustling for foreign direct investment; massively expanding higher education in the 1990s and 2000s; welcoming the tech and pharma industries and basically giving them anything they wanted; joining the euro; declining to default on debt and fixing the public finances again in the wake of the financial crash; and so on.
Of course, it goes without saying that lots of bad decisions were made too. The economy, as nobody needs reminding, fell off a cliff in 2008. But that makes it all the more important that the health of the economy and the promotion of growth-centred policies should be at the very heart of any government’s decision-making. Nothing is more important, because without it, you can’t do anything. It should be the number one priority of every party that aspires to lead the next government. They can fight about how to spend the money later.
Yet there is bafflingly little political debate or public discussion about the economic, enterprise and fiscal policies that the country should follow over the next decade or two. The current Government has been in the fortunate position of having the money to throw at all sorts of political problems: how many times have you heard Ministers say, “It’s not a question of money”? Well, it’s very likely that for future ministers in future governments, it very much will be a question of money.
Ireland is a small country that must navigate the international economic and political currents over which we have zero control. All we seem to want to talk about is how to spend the money. Maybe we should think about how we get it from time to time.
Put that another way: even of this moment of remarkable prosperity, the case for a cautious economic policy, a stable fiscal policy and a lively, productive, responsive enterprise policy has never been stronger.
It’s easy to forget that Ireland wasn’t always rolling in cash
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11.11.2023
In a recent interview about his memoir of life with the late Marian Finucane, John Clarke was describing to Pat Kenny the Ireland in which he came of age. “It was an extraordinary place,” Clarke drawled, in that magnificent, lachrymose baritone. “There were no jobs, there was no careers, that I’m aware of. You could get a job in a very, ah, in insurance or Guinness’s. But if you lived down the country... there was no off-farm work. Once you got out of swaddling clothes, you were on that boat to England or Canada or America.”
For vast numbers of people in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, the choice was deprivation or separation, and often both. Readers of a certain age will have no difficulty imagining the world Clarke describes. In the subterranean folk memory of the country, there is a clear picture of all that human misery wrought by grinding poverty. Younger readers can find plenty of accounts of what the playwright Tom Murphy – whose entire family emigrated from Tuam, leaving only him and his mother behind – called the “bitterness, futility, stagnation”.
Why was Ireland so poor for so long? Political scientist Tom Garvin asked this question in a book called Preventing the Future, published nearly 20 years ago, which sought to explore and explain the failure of the new Irish State on so many fronts for the first half-century of its life. While the 1920s and 1930s were difficult for obvious reasons, the postwar period........
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