Ship of Fools Read Free Page A

idea was not just that it was wrong or that it was believed by politicians and policy makers around the world. It was that the Irish themselves came to believe in it. They managed, collectively, to misunderstand why they had become prosperous and in doing so to waste and eventually to destroy that prosperity. The rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger was indeed a kind of moral tale, but the lesson was not that free-market globalisation is a panacea for the world’s ills. It is, on the contrary, that politics, society, morality and collective institutions matter.
    There is no doubt that Ireland’s economic performance in the late 1990s was genuinely remarkable. The rate of unemployment in the fifteen European Union countries as whole remained more or less static throughout the 1990s. In Ireland, it was cut in half, from a desperately high 15.6 per cent to 7.4 per cent (and shortly afterward to less than 5 per cent). The level of consistent poverty fell from 15 per cent of the population to 5 per cent. In 1986, Irish GDP per head of population was a miserable two-thirds of the EU average, and even in 1991 it was just over three-quarters. In 1999, it was 111 per cent of the average, and significantly higher than that of the UK.
    The Irish share of foreign investment by US-based corporations rose from 2 per cent to 7 per cent. By 2000, Ireland had $38,000 of foreign investment for every man, woman and child - more than six times the EU average. World-leading corporations like Pfizer (which makes all of its Viagra in County Cork) or Intel (whose European base is in County Kildare) created good, well-paid and increasingly highly skilled jobs.

    This was a new way for a country to get rich: Ireland became far more dependent on foreign investment for its manufacturing base than almost any other society. By 1999, half the manufacturing jobs were in foreign-based companies compared to 20 per cent for the EU as a whole. But it seemed to work. At the end of the 1990s, Ireland had become the largest exporter of computer software in the world. The overall value of exports more than doubled between 1995 and 2000. In the ten years to 2004, the growth of Irish national income averaged over 7 per cent, more than double that of the USA and almost triple the average growth rate in the eurozone.
    Mass emigration, with all of its debilitating economic, social and psychological effects, ended and was gradually replaced by large-scale immigration - a phenomenon that had been utterly unimaginable to generations of Irish people. Coming to Ireland to look for work would have been, at the start of the 1990s, like going to the Sahara for the skiing. By the time of the 2006 census, one in ten of those living in Ireland were born elsewhere.
    Partly as a result of these two factors, the population rose at a phenomenal rate. While the rest of the EU added one person to every 1,000 between 1998 and 2008, Ireland added ten. For a country in which depopulation had been the ultimate mark of despair, the simple fact that there were a lot more people around was a historic achievement.
    All of this was great, and it was also a lot of fun. Coinciding with the gradual establishment of peace in Northern Ireland after the Good Friday agreements of 1998, it made Irish people feel a lot better about themselves. Ireland shook off much of its authoritarian religiosity and became a more open and tolerant society. The pall of failure that had hung over
the Irish state for most of its independent existence seemed to have been blown away for ever. Ireland was young, buoyant and energetic, and to those who complained that older spiritual values were being lost, the ready answer was that having a job and a house and a choice about staying in your own country can be pretty spiritually uplifting too. Even the undertone of hysteria in the increasingly frantic consumer spending could be forgiven - Irish people had been relatively deprived for a long time and were now working at