Good is bad? .
The Celtic tiger's underbelly
by Mary Fitzgerald
Talk about Ireland's stunning economic success in recent years tends to neglect the darker side of the boom
During the latter half of the last decade, Ireland boasted the fastest-growing economy in the developed world. Grafton Street, Dublin's main shopping thoroughfare, now charges the sixth highest rental yields of any street on the globe—€4,496 per square metre—and one third of all houses in Ireland were built in the last ten years. But this façade of economic health hides a lingering malaise. Ireland may have become wealthier, but the gap has between the new "super rich" John Murray Brown describes in his January cover story for Prospect and those who live at the other end of the scale has widened dramatically. According to the charity Connect-World, one in ten children in Ireland lives in “consistent poverty,” and Ireland's poverty rate in the developed world is second only to the US. The Irish government’s own statistics reveal that 17 per cent of the population lives “at risk of poverty.” And the financial security of the “newly affluent” middle classes is dangerously dependent on the value of property—national house prices have risen 270 per cent in the last decade. “Ireland has experienced a sudden, heady feeling of being rich, but most people are not actually rich,” says social commentator Fintan O’Toole. “It’s a dangerous illusion of personal wealth.” Over 1.5m people—roughly a third of the population—earn less than €38,000 (£28,000) a year. This may sound good, but does not go far when average household costs are 46 per cent higher than in Britain, and the average price tag of a house in Dublin is €403,233 (£304,239). Much has been made of the “employment miracle” of the 1990s, but unemployment has not disappeared. It has hovered at just under 5 per cent for the past five years, very similar to Britain's. The country’s fortunes have undoubtedly dramatically improved—the rate of joblessness in Ireland neared 20 per cent in the late 1980s—but its economic growth has also far outpaced infrastructural development. The health service is, as O’Toole puts it, “abysmal… if this was China or Romania, people would be doing documentaries about the appalling state it’s in.” And many argue that the government’s failure to invest properly in public services has excluded many from competing on a level playing field. If you cannot afford to pay for extra tuition for your children (as 75 per cent of Dublin parents did last year) for example, they will be at a disadvantage when they sit their Leaving Certificate exams.
by Mary Fitzgerald
Talk about Ireland's stunning economic success in recent years tends to neglect the darker side of the boom
During the latter half of the last decade, Ireland boasted the fastest-growing economy in the developed world. Grafton Street, Dublin's main shopping thoroughfare, now charges the sixth highest rental yields of any street on the globe—€4,496 per square metre—and one third of all houses in Ireland were built in the last ten years. But this façade of economic health hides a lingering malaise. Ireland may have become wealthier, but the gap has between the new "super rich" John Murray Brown describes in his January cover story for Prospect and those who live at the other end of the scale has widened dramatically. According to the charity Connect-World, one in ten children in Ireland lives in “consistent poverty,” and Ireland's poverty rate in the developed world is second only to the US. The Irish government’s own statistics reveal that 17 per cent of the population lives “at risk of poverty.” And the financial security of the “newly affluent” middle classes is dangerously dependent on the value of property—national house prices have risen 270 per cent in the last decade. “Ireland has experienced a sudden, heady feeling of being rich, but most people are not actually rich,” says social commentator Fintan O’Toole. “It’s a dangerous illusion of personal wealth.” Over 1.5m people—roughly a third of the population—earn less than €38,000 (£28,000) a year. This may sound good, but does not go far when average household costs are 46 per cent higher than in Britain, and the average price tag of a house in Dublin is €403,233 (£304,239). Much has been made of the “employment miracle” of the 1990s, but unemployment has not disappeared. It has hovered at just under 5 per cent for the past five years, very similar to Britain's. The country’s fortunes have undoubtedly dramatically improved—the rate of joblessness in Ireland neared 20 per cent in the late 1980s—but its economic growth has also far outpaced infrastructural development. The health service is, as O’Toole puts it, “abysmal… if this was China or Romania, people would be doing documentaries about the appalling state it’s in.” And many argue that the government’s failure to invest properly in public services has excluded many from competing on a level playing field. If you cannot afford to pay for extra tuition for your children (as 75 per cent of Dublin parents did last year) for example, they will be at a disadvantage when they sit their Leaving Certificate exams.
If your child has special needs and you cannot afford private health insurance, you could be waiting up to two years for treatment. “Here we are, supposedly the third richest country in the world, and yet people in need of help are competing for the crumbs that are being tossed out,” says Peter McVerry, a Jesuit priest who has worked with Dublin's homeless and disadvantaged for over 20 years. A lot more people have jobs now, he concedes, “but those that have been left behind are stuck in the quicksand much more firmly than they were in previous generations.”
Jim Walsh, professor of geography at Maynooth University, says that in some parts of the country the infrastructure is “slowly catching up,” but in others it has a long way to go. And as the economy shows signs of slowing down, less public money will be available for such projects. Current social welfare services—already under strain—are simply not built to withstand the pressure that a proper recession could apply. Just as many people question Ireland’s long-term economic durability, many also point to problems the Celtic tiger has exacerbated—in particular, violent crime. The murder of 27-year-old John Daly in October was the latest in a vicious spate of drug-related gangland killings in Ireland. While some of Daly's former "colleagues" have offered exotic reasons for his killing—including the claim that he was the 14th victim of the "Cappagh curse": a travellers’ jinx placed on their gang after a young mother overdosed on their wares—it seems more likely that Daly was the latest casualty of the vicious turf war in Ireland’s lucrative cocaine trade. Unsurprisingly, Ireland’s new affluence has led to a surge in demand for all manner of "designer" items, including cocaine; it is estimated there are now 75,000 cocaine users in Ireland (out of a population of less than 5m). The booming trade has lined the pockets of criminals like Daly, and intensified inter-gang rivalries: annual gun fatalities in Ireland have doubled in the last three years, and Dublin’s per capita gangland murder rate was triple London’s in 2006. This sits at odds with the success story many Celtic tiger cheerleaders are so keen to promote, and journalists are often accused of hyping the drug crime issue to boost newspaper sales. There may be truth in this, and it’s also true that real efforts are being made to tackle gangland crime. A massive undercover surveillance operation in November led to the arrest and charge of the prolific Alan "Fatpuss" Bradley and several others for armed robbery and a string of other offences. A tough new criminal justice act was brought in last year, and after Daly’s death Taioseach Bertie Ahern talked of using non-jury special criminal courts for gangland murder cases. (Unaware, presumably, that this is already common practice.)Ireland is not the first country to see an increase in crime and drug consumption correlate with an increase in national wealth. And some of the infrastructural problems may have been avoidable—Jim Walsh concedes that no one could have foreseen or planned for the dizzying growth of the 1990s. But it is dangerous to proselytise about the Irish "economic miracle" without acknowledging its adverse consequences—and beginning to address them. The country’s transformation has been dramatic, and so, perhaps unavoidably, the side-effects have been more acute. But this does not mean they should be ignored.
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