The Celtic Tiger is all the buzz these days. Newspapers and politicians gush about it; economists and serious magazines debate its pros and cons. (Just last week Newsweek was reflecting on its dark underbelly.)
None of this is surprising: Ireland’s rise from near-Third World status to one of the richest countries in Europe and one of its fastest growing economies all in the space of 20 years has been a remarkable feat.
A country that once watched in despair as its best and brightest decamped to England, America and Australia is now welcoming the prodigals (and their children and grandchildren) back. East European workers are flooding in, looking for (and finding) work and better lives and wages than they can get at home. East European governments are besotted with Ireland’s achievements, and the country has been inundated with delegations keen to discover how it was done.
New Irish family home |
The short answer is that the Tiger is the product of a combination of investment-friendly policies (including the lowest business taxes in Europe), billions in European Union development funding, and repeated three-year tripartite agreements between governments, employers and trade unions on national development priorities.
On a recent visit to the west of Ireland I found the Tiger’s footprints everywhere. Renowned for its physical beauty, the west of the country has a reputation for having been isolated from the tides of history, its staggeringly beautiful landscape and its, well, quaint, social life preserved from the mists of time.
This is only partly true. Isolation has been important. In a charming, if slightly overegged book called How the Irish Saved Civilisation, Thomas Cahill argued that the monks and scribes of the land preserved the remnants of civilisation from the fall of the Roman Empire till medieval Christendom was ready to receive it back again. In this case, isolation was important. But at other points in its history, the west of Ireland has been a major crossroads of the world. The dense networks of prehistoric fortresses are one indication of this, as are the Norman castles.
In its time, the west was the centre of a thriving trade with Spain, and a centre for lace-making worldwide. The emigrant ships heading to America often left from here (and many tourists are tracing these roots). These days, agriculture and tourism are leading industries, and the west is more than pulling its weight.
The new wealth of Ireland is very visible here. Family houses way too big for one family and looking for all the world like regency manor houses to this untrained eye are springing up everywhere. More recently, the traditional old stone houses (long left to fall into ruin or serve as barns and garages) have become more fashionable, and building contractors are flat out meeting the demand for renovations and restorations. On the outskirts of towns and even quite small villages, new housing estates are being built to meet the needs of the region’s new labour force.
The infrastructure is struggling to cope. Startlingly, for a country as gloriously green as Ireland, water is a problem, and local communities have been organising to push water boards to expand supplies. Equally, the charming country roads (ideal for tootling through the countryside or for a leisurely trip to the airport) need to be supplemented by something more efficient for moving goods and people through the newly emerging regional hub cities. There is much road-building going on.
New forms of communications and tourism mean that the west is now very much part of the wider world. There are ATMs all over and it only occurred to me very late in the piece that I had enjoyed unfettered mobile phone connections even in very distant parts of the island. There are paintball parlours and the young have skateboards, wear hoodies and expose their midriffs — hardy folk those Irish girls! And the big scandal while we were there concerned the breathtaking costs run up by consultants who had spent three years on a computerised wages system for the hospitals that has never worked (as the million euro salary cheque for one lucky worker showed).
But relics of an older world persist. One perfectly nice old woman quite casually referred to ‘pagans over there’, by which she seemed to mean Buddhists in Vietnam. A groups of locals, discussing changes in the education system, bemoaned the decline in the numbers of men and women with vocations that called them to the church and, therefore, to unpaid teaching. The hospitals, on the other hand, while funded by the State, remain in church hands and are free to impose their Protestant or Catholic value-systems on patients and staff (on issues such as abortion and stem-cell research).
On a happier note, local pubs seem to be flourishing, even in the tourist towns, hidden away in the oddest spots. And while there is Guinness and Murphy’s there’ll always be an Ireland.