Political Footballs of Our Time #1: Education

I’ve just caught a few minutes of the Vincent Browne show, which is a good deal more time than I ever want to give to a man who sounds like my great aunt after one sherry too many. This evening, Vincent and his merry men were considering the Green party’s latest bid to look like they have a backbone.

It’s funny, watching the Greens and Fianna Fail park their wagons around the campfire while the wild Fine Gaelers, Labour and the rest roar. Let’s be clear, at this point, every Irish person with any possessions at all is guarding them more closely than Gollum and his precious. Looking at our elected leaders, one is tempted to employ the line ‘from my cold, dead fingers’ when it comes to power. Or, more likely: ‘Once I’ve got my green card sorted’.

So, for anyone reading this outside of Ireland, the Green party has won some important concessions from Fianna Fail, their coalition partner, which will allow them to remain in government with a clear conscience. In the language of headlines, this means two things: a carbon tax and no reintroduction of college fees. If anything ever illustrated the extent to which political apathy and class is endemic in Ireland, it was this. In Ireland, Fine Gael & Fianna Fail are basically the same party with different accents. Labour is the guy, who when confronted with the sight of a burning house, demands to check each fireman’s bona fides before they touch a hose. Sinn Fein tell everyone what they want to hear, safe in the knowledge that they never have to actually act on their promises (yet…). Libertas, bless them, are what would emerge if PG Wodehouse was writing about Roderick Spode and his Black Shorts right now.

The Greens were the party you settled for, since you couldn’t vote Lib Dem. They never really stood for anything, other than being green, which is fine, if you’re on a county council, but quite another thing when you’re running a country. Nevertheless, plenty of people thought they might be worth a punt, or at least weren’t Sinn Fein, so off they went. With nary a backward glance at the lessons of history (au revoir, Progressive Democrats), they courageously took two ministerial posts in Brian Cowen’s government. Then, rather unfairly, time chose not to stand still.

So.

In the local elections, predictably, Fine Gael and Labour cleaned up. Just as predictably, Fianna Fail and the Greens were routed. Fianna Fail is very big, and can absorb this sort of thing. The Greens are not, and looked pretty rattled for a while. Of course, as both parties reminded us – this was not a referendum on the government. Heavens, no.

Either way, it was pretty clear that come a general election, Fianna Fail was going to take a heavy hit, perhaps enough to cause one of its rare breaks from power, while the Greens would be the latest recipient of the coalition partner booby prize.

At the same time, we were all trying to figure out what to do about this fine recession we’re having, And by we, I mean Brian Lenihan, and by figure out, I mean he asked the bankers what they would like for Christmas:

“I’ll have a get out of jail free card, please Minister! And if you could see your way to throwing in an ‘oul bonus – the eldest is getting married in the Ritz Carlton and those school fees won’t pay themselves, sure you know how it is.”

Good old Brian decided to put us (and the next seventeen generations) in debt for the rest of our natural lives, based on what intellectual lightweights like Joseph Stiglitz called a “massive transfer of money from the public to bankers”. He used some other words, like “squandering”, “nonsense” and “criminal”, but he can’t have meant them pejoratively, I’m sure.

Meanwhile, over in Iceland (I do have a point, eventually), things are pretty grim. Huge budget deficits, bank insolvency, a mutinous populace, and lots of other bad things combine to make the island look very desperate indeed. But, if you compare them to us, the differences are not so great. Indeed, there are many who believe that Iceland’s early bath will prove to be helpful in the long run.

In Ireland, we chose to hide under the blanket. As we did so, things continued to get worse, and they real bottom, when we finally hit it, will be much lower. The Greens obviously asked good old Brian for advice, because delaying the inevitable, as they have just done will only make their pain all the worse. Barring divine providence, which to be fair, usually did right by Bertie, the Greens will be decimated. It’ll be an election that even Enda could win.

- I’d meant to write something funny and non-political, but it’s hard to avoid fish so obviously in a barrel.

- As a by-the-by: the reintroduction of fees is not a bad idea. What is much, much worse is the lack of finance and attention at primary and second-level education. Pay for kids to go to college, if they can’t afford it. Not to boost enrolments at private secondary schools. Expand and fund the public school sector; teach children well from an early age; invest in special needs education. Then you’ll have a ‘smart economy’, not a collection of smart arses with visa-stamped passports.

- Gosh. I seem to have a bit of an opinion on this. Terribly sorry. I don’t know what came over me. I think it’s a touch of sobriety. Won’t happen again.

Fear And Loathing In Lisbon

It's been a while since I've written anything of length on this blog. I've been thinking about the Lisbon referendum again lately, because for me it coalesces a number of thoughts I have had about politics and how information is communicated.

For anyone not reading this in Ireland, we had a referendum earlier this year to decide whether we as a state wished to sign up to the particulars of the Lisbon Treaty. Without getting into the for and against arguments, the treaty aims to further cement the EU as a federal body, makes the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights legally binding within member states and generally speaking brings each country closer to singing from the same hymn sheet. As you can imagine, there are those who think this is a good thing, citing the value of cooperation and that in a world with immense superpowers like the US, China and Russia, the whole of Europe is greater than its component parts. On the other hand, there are those who see more than a shadow of the totalitarian state, or less hysterically, a gradual transferral of individual power (& hence, liberty) to a central organisation. Effectively, it's the big tent approach versus the small government (or libertarian) thesis.

The reason we are having these referendums at all (not every country in the EU does) stems from Crotty versus An Taoiseach in 1987. This resulted in a supreme court ruling that forces the government to ask permission for any significant change to Ireland/EEC (EU as was) treaties, since such alterations would be in effect amendments to the Constitution, that wily document crafted by Dev while the rest of the world was looking west at the National Socialists in 1937. With me so far? If you've ever been to a parent-teacher meeting, a union meeting, or any get together that invites a mass discussion, you may already expect what happens in such cases. Any issue, no matter how general, becomes deconstructed in an ever-expanding sea of minutiae, like cells in a petri dish. So for the 'No' camp, the Lisbon referendum can be about any number of tangential objections that exist on placards, cheerfully removed from context. Signing up means reduced power, increased military presence, abortion, divorce, immigrants, the death knell for Irish farming. Here's Libertas's current poster:

Look at the language of the poster. "Irish Democracy 1916-2009? Vote No!"; the sun, disappearing into dark clouds that rise up from the bottom of the picture; in the foreground an authentic-looking Irish child with startling green eyes and (of course) red hair. This is designed to do two things at once: stir a patriotic sense of pride for the mother country, and to be a call to action, invoking, with 1916, the be-pedestaled martyrs for freedom, and connecting a vote against this treaty as a continuation of those earlier actions.

How about the 'yes' vote? In Ireland, it is supported by all the major political parties. This doesn't necessarily mean automatic success. It was the same in the previous referendum and it didn't end well there either. The yes camp has two problems that don't trouble the no campaigners. First, most people don't really understand what the treaty is or what it implies. Whether because the treaty itself is a typically arcane legal document, or that our media has failed to communicate the gist of it effectively, most people have wildly differing ideas of what it means. So you have a situation where the truth belongs to he who shouts loudest. Last time it was Libertas and Sinn Fein. This time, more sinister groups such as Coir have added their voice.

Second, the yes campaigners suffer from being the captains of the Titanic. Ireland, though we style ourselves irreverent and rejoice in the narrative of the Rising and nationalism (700 years and all that) is, more so than Britain, a nation of shopkeepers.

We more or less invented the idea of ourselves as Celtic firebrands. Our national sports and dance are largely a construct of the Gaelic League, a movement that took inspiration from the Belle Époque in France, in an attempt to radicalise a population that was not nearly as desperate to leave the United Kingdom as later thinkers would have it. Our political parties all sit on more or less the same fence, right in the middle, leaning right or left as the wind blows. So we can have a centre right party that has been in power uninterrupted (barring a three-year gap) since 1989. This party can go into coalitions with other political persuasions with barely a shift in the direction of the ship - in fact, most coalition partners emerge very much the worse for the experience, while Fianna Fail sails on into another glorious sunset. We like stability. For years one of the most ethnically homogenous countries in Europe, we prefer today to be as yesterday and tomorrow to be more of the same.

The problem for the government is that the weather forecasts are gloomier day by day. Allegations of cronyism and corruption were dismissed in years past, since everything was going well, but not anymore. Suddenly the years of being in power are not indications of trustworthiness and reliability, but Exhibit A in the trial of the driver who was asleep at the wheel. The current strategy for rescuing Ireland from the recession, being a variant on 'rob the poor to feed the rich' as far as many people are concerned, contributes to a confidence meltdown when it comes to trusting their advice on the election. Even the opposition parties who are for the election have similar problems.

So how do they convince us? They can't scare us, although there is the odd half-hearted effort:

As it is, support for the yes camp appears to be (tentatively) the majority view. In the light of their failure in the local elections, which is likely to have been the largest shift in Irish voter loyalties for some time to come, Libertas and Sinn Fein may have to resign themselves to being the lone voice at the dinner party, or the crank at the bar. They can win, sometimes, on specific issues and they can count on a certain bed of support (as can any party), but mass support thus far eludes them, because for better or worse, we are not a country of ideologies, but a collection of stories, some true, some almost true, but always - always - regular and timetabled.

It'll be interesting to see how it goes this Friday. By all means comment and tell me how wrong I am about any of this. In the meantime, I'll leave you with this video, which you may find instructive, given the eleventh commandment: Thou Shall Not Question Stephen Fry.

Financial Wizards and Fantasy Governments

Malcolm Gladwell’s just published a new article in The New Yorker on the theme of David and Goliath, which I think is worth a read. Especially so for Ireland, due to what it has to say about how you succeed when the odds are stacked against you, which no-one can deny is the case for us at the moment.

Gladwell uses two key models to illustrate his points: basketball, specifically the unlikely success of a teenage girls team in California, and the equally unexpected victories of T. E. Lawrence and his Bedouins in 1917. In both cases his examples should have lost – the basketball team were less skilled than almost all their opponents and the Bedouins were much fewer in number and untrained in comparison to the Turks. But they didn’t lose, because they did something that should be obvious, yet isn’t: they chose not to play by the accepted rules of the day. Now, that sounds both obvious and a preamble to another terrible U2 profile, but it doesn’t seem to have been so.

I’m going to use another model, writing and writers, to help me explain what I think is interesting about it. When we think of underdogs, we fundamentally misunderstand what the term means, romanticising the wrong things and downplaying more relevant information. J. K. Rowling is one of the most noted ‘overnight successes’ of the last 10 years, but every profile and interview misconstrues what she represents. The standard narrative runs thus: single mum in Edinburgh has eureka moment when she invents an orphaned wizard called Harry on a train journey, then writes the manuscript over cold tea in local coffee shop. A few foolish publishers had their Decca (the label that famously turned down The Beatles) moment, until the agent Christopher Little plucked it our of the slush pile, sold it to Bloomsbury and the rest is muti-million pound royalties and castles in Scotland.

This is fine as far as it goes, and has galvanized many hopeful writers of future bestsellers, but it’s not, strictly speaking, the whole truth. The reality for novelists, whether for adults or children, crime, fantasy, SF, literary, romance or thriller, is that there is no money in it. A typical advance for a first-time novelist is €3000. An advance is all you will have until you ‘earn out’ meaning the royalties that you have notionally accumulated rise above the advance amount. Essentially, an advance is like being handed half of your monthly salary before you do your work with the other half dependent on whether or not your job is still there four weeks later. You may be able to sell foreign rights to your work, or movie rights, but there’s no guarantee that they will be even close to that advance. And that’s it. There’s no more.

Let’s say you took a year to write your novel – it took Rowling five years to produce the first Harry Potter, during which time she plotted the series in general terms and nailed all the odd details that captured the imagination. The average novel is 75,000 words long, so you wrote just under 1500 words a week. Perfectly do-able. That’s still €57.69 per week. You couldn’t get a mortgage in a war zone for that these days. If you earn out, you may start seeing a good return. Rowling did, after all – why not you too? But if you don’t, you may not even get another chance at the windmill. The publishing world is littered with the cautionary tales of mid-list novelists whose efforts went without promotion and sank without trace. A great number of big deals were announced during the boom years, but few ever made good on their financial promise. This is largely because most of those six-figure advances were given to books that, well-written or not, were sold on the basis that they were thematically as close as possible to Rowling or other bestselling authors.

If you go to any bookshop and look at the children’s section, you will see walls of books all aiming for the Potter market. Every second children’s book grabs for that elusive magic in the hope that the author will break out and become another Rowling. But when Harry Potter came out the landscape was very different. Apart from the acknowledged classics from Dahl, Tolkien, Blume, Lewis and Blyton, most fiction aimed at Rowling’s 10-14 (the initial presumptive range) was what we might call ‘issue-based’. If you are under 40, you will remember very clearly what this means: stories about real issues (teen pregnancy, abuse, homosexuality, divorce, coping with disability, etc), all rendered so real that you could feel the driving rain and itchy polyester school uniforms through the pages.

It was a worthy idea, borne of a desire to render the reality of a world in a way that would be acceptable to children and teenagers – or the idea of them that held sway in the minds of parents and social workers of the time – and blast the stereotypes of Blyton and the like out of the water. The only problem was that children didn’t actually want to read them. If only the authors had aimed older: the confessional stories of magazines like Now and Women’s Way show there is a frighteningly huge market for misery-lit. So Harry Potter arrived in a world where his only competition was twelve-year-olds coping with their parents divorce and where no-one had any financial expectations of success. Hindsight is handy for these sorts of things, but it was a no-brainer.

But this is not the same world that the descendants of Potter arrived in. Children’s books were hot properties, expected to do big business and now there was enormous competition for the same prize. Yet both the publishers and the authors expected that the rewards would grow exponentially. They didn’t.

In Ireland – and the world – we thought we could lend and borrow ever-increasing amounts of money. We assumed that because a house on street A sold for €1 million that (a) €1 million was the base value, which could only rise and (b), if we knocked down another house on that street and built a terrace of four townhouses in its place we could make €4 million. It didn’t work that way.

This is the essential point. We allow outliers like Rowling to distort (massively) our perception of the day-to-day reality of an entire industry. The average children’s writer earns the same as they did when Harry Potter first came on the scene, which is to say: not much, But because the story of her success is so compelling, the outsize nature of it is distorted and we see it as more logical and achievable than it really is. In drawing that analogy with Ireland, we can see two things. First, that for Rowling, substitute the big winners of the boom – developers like McNamara and Dunne. They made it big, so we thought we could, Every chancer building a townhouse in their back yard or grabbing a buy-to-let in Bulgaria was traveling the same journey to fame and fortune as the Ballsbridge barons, as far as they were concerned. They were only a couple of well-timed deals away from their own glowing profiles in the Irish press. So the likelihood of success was amped up in people’s minds at the expense of understanding the irrationality of the whole enterprise.

All the emphasis was placed on the success of these guys, but little on long-term considerations. It was endemic. This is why we have a beautiful road from here to Galway, but no train line from Cork to Mayo. Or why we had a ‘socialist’ taoiseach but couldn’t manage to address the educational needs of the poorest amongst us. Like the starry-eyed writer of the 500^th Harry Potter knockoff, we reached out for our philosopher’s stone (a detached Georgian with a sea view, thanks for asking) while all around us the floor collapsed.

If you want to succeed at anything, two things will be helpful: talent and luck. If you have those, life can be much easier. But there is one thing that no amount of wish-fulfilling will avoid. There is no success without hard work. It doesn’t happen. The problem with our government’s response (and indeed the banks) to the crash since the beginning is that they got lucky on the basis of hard work done by others, over many years and in many countries. They didn’t make it happen and had no idea what to do when it stopped, so we have been like the long-suffering wife of a gambling addict who swears blind that everything is fine and bills are paid, etc, until it’s far too late and now even the family silver has to be sold to pay the debts. I’m not convinced that any of the opposition currently sharpening their stand-up skills on the benches have any real strategies for the future, but at least they haven’t spent the last six months pretending that they can turn the tide with a fork.

the dangers of journalism, or why I love research

When Obama ascended to the US presidency in January 2009 (yes he was elected in November 2008, but GWB didn't go back to Texas until the inauguration), there were lots of 'death of satire' articles floating about the news. Jon Stewart of The Daily Show publicly mourned his impression of the Washington Cowboy and wondered where they would now find humour. As it happens, they found it in their competitors.

In the US, big media is very big. Print media is on the same downward slide as it is everywhere else - less people read newspapers anyway, most organisations botched their entry online, dissatisfaction with their response to the last decade, particularly homeland security and the Iraq war - but television news is another story. The best way to understand them is to imagine a cross between the Sun and a glossy lifestyle magazine. TV networks like CNBC, Fox, Bloomberg & CNN sell (as they feel they must) the most distilled version of the news and have all the access that they require to the corridors of power. But when they get in there, they ask not why decisions were made and what has resulted, but rather, what wallpaper they choose and how awesome it is to be a billionaire.

In the boom market, there were (of course) many who criticised that approach. But let's not kid ourselves - it was the minority. this last decade was the one that gave us Big Brother, Celebrity Insert Reality Show Name Here, Cribs, The Fabulous Life of... and so on. We could shuffle right up to the velvet rope, because the veneer of success was so easy to achieve. When you can look like a winner, you can start to feel like one too. The real cost of things gets lost and your perception of both your wealth and the distance you are from losing it starts to become very skewed. As you start to believe in what you see in the mirror, you ask less questions about how it's being held up and by who.

This is why we're in the mess we're in right now. Not because capitalism failed, or because globalisation is universally bad, nor can we blame GWB or his cronies. We fell asleep at the wheel. If you questioned the rollercoaster, you were a naive lefty. If you questioned the left, you were a rabid neocon. These were convenient labels, especially in Ireland, where every party was equally left, right and centrist. At a recent talk by Malcolm Gladwell, someone from the floor raised the question : 'how did this happen?' to which the afro'd one replied that it was a consequence of intellectual laziness.

How?

Paul Krugman, Nobel prize winner for economics, had been warning about the dangers of a crash for some time. He wasn't alone. Vince Cable in the UK, our own David McWilliams (full disclosure: I'm occasionally employed by that fellow), are notables among countless others. But who in Ireland did we listen to when warnings of a property bubble were aired? Esteemed economists who worked for the estate agencies and banks that most stood to gain from an improving market. This felt awfully close to scientists, employed by cigarette companies, telling the world that there was no link between their products and any ill-effects. Unless you could be too cool.

So all the signs were there. Why then, did we let things come to this pass? In Ireland, we're facing one of the most ridiculous budgets in years, which will profoundly affect everything about our country. We elected these people, these Galway tent cheerleaders, even though all the evidence shouted caution. Despite warnings that even after a decade of an unprecedented boom, little in the way of real infrastructure had been accomplished for this country, which would inevitably mean that we would be ill-prepared for any future problems, we voted in Bertie and his merry men. Who did we punish? The PD's, who allowed themselves to be manoeuvered into the whipping boy of Irish politics. Watching the Green party be even more inept and so comprehensively bullied, any languishing support so decidedly eroded, you develop a sort of respect for PD's (the last people in the Fianna Fail ejector seat).

Of course, you have no respect for these guys - but you don't have to. They don't need your respect. They'll get elected anyway. Watch how the media heat got turned off Bertie and where the money was from the moment he jumped ship and left Cowen to figure it all out. We are an electorate that has been bought and paid for in speed ramps and mortgage relief. Make sure your name is on short term local projects, or on a party level, small initiatives that make people think that they're saving money. Don't worry that it won't last long, or that you haven't dealt with the costs of the health service, or the iniquities of education. No-one will remember until after the election. If you don't quite make the grade, fret not. You can throw a bone at one of the other smaller parties, or better still, a few independents. All they want is a few extra traffic lights and they'll keep quiet for a few years.

It may well be that Fine Gael manage it this time round. But it won't be because they have a series of coherent policies, or are effecting a sea-change in Irish politics per se. It will entirely be about getting the only other party with anything approaching large enough numbers and support outside Dublin. But be in no doubt that whoever it is, as it stands now, you're just choosing between card sharps.

So what does that digression into a rant have to do with the beginning of the post? You may have seen this already - I've been meaning to write about this for a few weeks, but have a look at this:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
CNBC Financial Advice
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

Stewart and The Daily Show found another target after all. CNBC was a big cheerleader for the boom. Everything was great, even when it wasn't, just as in Ireland, when we were buying duplexes in invented towns with no infrastructure for more than a house in a nice part of any good city in the US. Every property section was our Jim Cramer. For a while there, it seemed as though his entire extended family were in some way involved in Mexican waving the entire Irish economy.

What NBC did have was access. More so than any person on the street, and more than most print or online outlets, even many television networks, they could get close to the halls of power. It's something of a shame that when they got there all they did was open the doors and ask if sir needed anything else for the evening. The Daily Show never had that sort of access. Sir Allen Stanford would never have turned up for a Stewart grilling. Bush never did, either. What they did have was the motivation to research. It was digging for the facts, as they did above, that has made this comedy show one of the most respected news programmes in the western world, and one that nobody in the US media can ignore. The thing is, the facts aren't hard to find. It just requires that you care more about them than who is going to be America's next top model.

When you have a media outlet that cares more about how those at the top feel than what they do, have done or will do, you have film and music magazines that are extended advertisements for whichever company is selling something that month, interviewers who ask soon-to-be-exposed-as-Ponzi-schemers 'how it feels to be a billionaire', or even, national television stations that report a news story then apologise for doing so, because a politician's feelings may be hurt. When a 27-year old woman's decline from cancer is relayed through every possible medium, but we are afraid to poke fun at our leaders, or watch our watchmen, we're doing something wrong, surely?

Apologies for the long rant. Someone give me a column so I can work these personal problems out in a more public forum.

Economic-based rant, part 1

This is my first post. I'm a 'more part-time than I'd like' writer right now, but one of the regular gigs that I have is as a columnist for that august publication, Totally Dublin. That'd be Dublin, Ireland, geography fans.

It's fun, but occasionally I find myself wanting to write more than my word count, so one of the things that I'll be doing here is posting my columns from time to time, with some added bits if I think I haven't rambled enough. Hopefully it'll stay fairly interesting and avoid self-indulgence, but we'll see...

October's column is inspired largely by another recent job, working as a researcher for David McWilliams, an Irish economist who has just published a book called The Generation Game, which is catching a teeny bit of heat right now, mainly for suggesting that Ireland's boom might just possibly have a best before date.

Anyway, here's the column:

'The queues of frantic soon to be ex-customers are trailing out of branches of Northern Rock as I write this, with the British parliament desperately trying to calm everything down amid fears of an imminent recession. By the time you read this, the situation may be much worse, or if we are to remain with our governments interpretation of the affair, just grand, no bother at all, barely a storm in a teacup. Bertie says that all those people who are suggesting that the economy might be in less than the full flush of health ‘are not economists’ and that he wouldn’t trust them ‘with a dime going down the shop’. Rightly so. Do these comedians not realise that our currency is the Euro? Clearly, against the fearful intellectual might of Our Glorious Leader, charlatans like David McWilliams, Alan Greenspan and The Economist are naughty schoolboys secretly reading the Beano inside their economic textbooks, quaking in their shorts. Surely everyone is going to come to their senses now and go back to buying duplexes in Meath?

What’s that? Sub-Prime mortgages? Consolidated loans? Popular in America, you say? Sounds good. Nothing could possibly go wrong there. Oh. It did? Really? Collapse in financial markets, eh? Ah. Well. That could never happen here. We’d never dream of selling sub-prime mortgages to people who have no business with Monopoly money, let alone the real stuff. No, we’d never have people like Start, Springboard, Stepstone, Nua Homeloans or GE Money peddling that sort of financial product. I’m certain that these companies also would be in no way connected to some of the large US financial outfits that are on the sharp end of the subprime disaster on that continent right now, or some of the ones that have been getting a bad press in the UK at the moment. Names like Citicorp or GE Capital would never pop up, surely.

Whew. I’m glad that we don’t need to worry. Even if we did, Our Glorious Government have taken fabulous care of Ireland’s infrastructure in these prosperous years. We really have made hay while the sun shone. What with all the new hospitals and schools in the rapidly expanding commuter belts, the massive improvements to the public transport system and the roads all over the country. Not to mention broadband. I think we should all ignore that World Economic Forum report on how Ireland has a poorly developed and inefficient infrastructure, or all those tedious reports about healthcare and education shortcomings. They’re all just jealous.

Oh well. I’m sure nothing else could go wrong. We have all those lovely US multinationals like Intel, Apple and Google. Excuse me, I didn’t catch that. China?

Yes, I would be in no way worried about the fact that our biggest indigenous industry – the building and property market – is predicated on selling things to each other at ludicrous prices. Nor do I have any worries that all these other countries like China, India or even places like Poland or Romania would ever do something as ridiculous as undercut our invitingly low corporate tax. What’s in it for them? Anyway, it’s not as though they have substantially more people willing and able to do the same jobs for the multinationals that Irish people do now.

Yes, we’re very lucky to in such a rock-solid economy, run by such a clever government. We’ve got no worries at all. '

So, it's a little flippant, but that's the problem with columns generally. They're not really designed for detailed discussion of complex ideas, which is fine unless you're as pretentious as me. Then again, if you wanted a profound discussion of economic ideas, you probably wouldn't be reading Roisin Ingle, Julie Burchill, or god forbid, me.

Still, it's interesting to think about the issues that I'm trying to raise here. Ireland is in a different situation than it ever has been before. We do seem to have lots of money, and everyone is doing really well. However, it doesn't necessarily follow that everything's going to stay that way, let alone keep getting better.

There are several potential problems with the economy, it seems to me:

1. Our reliance on foreign multinationals. Before anybody confuses this for Indymedia, I'm not about to start ranting about globalisation. Or at least, not right now. What I am saying is that a large part of the reason that Ireland's boom has happened is attributable to our success in attracting large foreign corporations to our shores - Dell, Apple, Intel, Pfizer, Google, etc, etc. We succeeded in bringing these outfits here because we had a great sales pitch: an educated, English-speaking workforce, (relatively) cheap costs and most of all a very agreeable corporate tax rate.

In 1999, Ireland's corporate tax rate was 8%. To put that in context, the rate in the UK was 30% at that time. We could set our bar that low because we had nothing to lose - this was 8% more tax than we would have had otherwise, so it was in effect, free money. There was no way that the UK could compete with the underdog across the water, and by October 2004, Ireland was the most profitable country in the world for US investment. US companies, being clear-minded about the whole 'making money hand over fist' thing, came over and created lots of jobs, pouring lots of money into the economy.

So this is all great. We're all working in HR and driving our BMW's, thinking about Saturday's barbecues. Everything's just fantastic.

Along comes every other country that was in our position 15-20 years ago. Last year, a Swiss canton, Zug, set it's corporate tax rate to 6.6% (Ireland's at the time was 12.5%). Every country that watched our ascent from Europe's pauper to prince is going to copy this model, just as we are beginning to be unable to compete. Bulgaria's corporate tax rate is
10%. Expect this to continue, and as it does, watch one very compelling anchor to our economy get pulled.

...................................................................................................

After writing all that, I think that it might be an idea to split this post, given that it's now over a thousand words.

So, whomever has read down this far: cheers, I hope it's been interesting. Do come back.

- thanks to FinFacts for all the hard data that I don't actually carry around in my head...