I noted an excellent speech made by Irish President Michael Higgins late last week. Given at the 20th anniversary of the Irish think tank TASC, which is dedicated to social reform, the President had much to say in economics, including this, which I have transcribed as carefully as I can:
Historically policy making in Ireland can be characterised as largely reactive, technocratic, top down, not strongly influenced by the institutions of social partnership but rather driven by vested interests.
The flaws and limits of the neoliberal paradigm have not only been exposed for all to see but have been acknowledged particularly in the wake of austerity responses to the global economic crisis of 2008/9 and a set of responses that has proved so socially ruthless in many parts of Europe.
That economics and the source of those responses was based on a fallacy of description and an obsession with descriptive economic analysis and quantification of metrics including completely meaningless use of gross domestic product. It was championed at the expense of deeper analysis with theoretical adequacy. It was bad economics, imposed carelessly and with disastrous results.
As the Irish Times has noted in an article which also has a five-minute extract of the speech, the President added:
Many economists remain stuck in an inexorable growth narrative, or at best a ‘green growth' narrative,” he said. “A fixation on a narrowly defined efficiency, productivity, perpetual growth has resulted in a discipline that has become blinkered to the ecological challenge – the ecological catastrophe – we now face.
That narrow focus constitutes an empty economics which has lost touch with everything meaningful, a social science which no longer is connected, or even attempts to be connected, with the social issues and objectives for which it was developed over centuries. It is incapable of offering solutions to glaring inadequacies of provision as to public needs, devoid of vision.
Our obsession with inexorable economic expansion expresses, perhaps, a desire to transcend our material limits and rise above the state of nature. Yet this growth fixation paradoxically increases the potency of those very limits.
A deadly cocktail of exploding inequalities, massive deregulation and a globalisation defined solely by trade densities has precipitated this ecological crisis.
That's why I think we need a President, and one who can tell politicians what the country really thinks and make a consequent call for action.
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Given the number of President Higgins Tea Cosys that seem to appear on the internet it seems that he is both respected and liked in The Republic so it may be a portent of things to come
President O’Higgins describes the Republic as being an appalling country. I can’t see a single uplifting point he mentions about the country he’s head of state of.
Capture by vested interests, catastrophe, disaster, inadequacies etc.
There are many people in Ireland who think he has a point.
I would have thought there were many people in England who think he has the same point about this coutry, as well.
I share his analysis, good man.
And yet Ireland seems to be doing so much better than the UK in some ways.
How far that’s because they’re an actual tax haven & the UK is a tax-haven-enabler, I’m not qualified to say.
But Ireland has made signifiant progress in the last 15 years, away from domination by the Church and towards the kind of socially liberal society most people want – at least according to the Social Attitudes Survey.
While the UK has been hypnotised by a crew of dishonest corrupt merchant bankers and their hangers-on.
The tax haven is currently creating a dangerous and destabilising budget surplus in Ireland – from just four companies.
The liberation is from the Catholic church
For the lower paid life may be even tougher than here, and for the young, accommodation is dire
In light of this, the (ROI) Government has tried to make it easier for first-time buyers, who are often priced out of the market.
The first is the Help-to-Buy scheme, which offers first-time buyers help with the deposit or help for those who are self-building. Under the scheme, purchasers who are tax compliant and who have a 70 per cent loan-to-value ratio can claim relief of up to a maximum of €30,000.
So the ROI government does care. It’s just that they are doing the wrong thing about it: they are subsidising demand.
President Higgins has this the wrong way round in my view as he sees this as a problem of neoliberalism.
Neoliberals do not advocate subsidising demand.
Some of our politicians could take lessons from this.
We seem to have what Michael Hudson calls an “Electoral Democracy” which seems to be a “democracy” with a form of democratic input/elections and processes but with outputs/outcomes which are managed/ controlled by an oligarchy/plutocracy.
Might a non-elected, independent person/institution, such as a king or whatever, who/which withstands oligarchic pressures, result in greater socio-economic equity, which is the functional manifestation of real democracy?
I do not believe in non-elected posts on the whole. Ultimately there has, as Tiny Benn said, to be a way to be rid of someone. But we need better democracy.
It certainly explains the state of his desk when Biden visited – he reads, bless him!!
I have family in Ireland and visited last November. They have a lot of the same problems we do with their public services and infrastructure, and they like us are dominated by the narrow world view of their capital (I was in Co. Tipperary, and Dublin is not fondly looked upon at all). Their labour market is atrocious and hard if you are not middle class and working conditions are harsh in some sectors. I know as I have a niece and nephew working in it.
It’s so refreshing to hear O’Higgins (I follow rugby union and he’s always there when Ireland play internationals and everyone seems to like him) and even more so since he is in government and challenging a lot of what we here know at least to be without foundation.
If only Stymied and Laboured could say such things!!
And what about what he says? My reaction is that the economy of both Ireland and the UK is over concerned with the growth of the value of money and nothing more. It’s as if all the money has been captured to serve capital and wealth when in fact it also needs to service the means of that wealth – people, plant and infrastructure etc. Money it seems can only invested in things that make a money return – a disease of the neo-liberal West.
Hopefully the greed we have seen since 2008 has reified matters and there will be change of some kind.
For all that, if I left the UK, I’d consider Ireland seriously for obvious reasons but the biggest attraction is that well, it’s definitely not England – let’s put it that way – of which I’ve had enough of to be honest. But you’d still need to be financially comfortable to live there mind – especially if you were not in Dublin. But the same goes in most of Europe I imagine.
When I first knew Ireland well EY (as they now are) tried to get me to work there, pointing out my then house in southwest London could have been swapped for something amazing on the Shannon. Not now it could not. And overall I made the right decision.
Oh, it’s tough over there alright at the moment.
My nephew works as fitter at a bottling plant – on nights – and he is getting the best wage ever but the plant is old, in need of reinvestment, constantly breaks down and wastes product but is also dangerous – none of the safety cut outs at the plant work when he has to work on the line. From what I can tell the second generation that runs the plant prefers to spend their money on other things. He was considering a move to Australia but the cost of living there has risen a lot (he can weld etc., and is good with his hands).
My niece has rotated out of so many sectors as wages have fallen and it now on yet another course to try to get steady decently paid work. Both have had to give up rented accommodation and live back at home with my brother as rents have risen and wages have dropped. My family has tradition of not being scared of hard work – but even they have found it hard.
I have to say though that it’s totally different to England in one key aspect for me: yapping. The Irish love to talk, find out where you are from – they sort of love conviviality – on the boat, in the pub, at the shop, at the restaurant having your breakfast. There’s none of that ‘stiffness’ you get around strangers in England. My brother has been over there getting on 30 years, and when his mates come over I’m treated as if they’ve known me all my life.
It’s hard not to fall in love with that ‘liveliness’, a country that is jus big enough to not become impersonal. But an easy life at the moment it is not. In rural areas everyone has to have a car or you just cannot get about. Recent inflation has made things very hard.
A friend of my brother’s brought around a load of free peat he’d cut year’s back. Apparently Irish citizens are being encouraged to turn to gas etc., and leave peat alone. As I was told – no chance of that if the government is going let prices like that rip through a country. It makes you think!
Michael Higgins, surely?
He goes on to say:
“We are challenged to rebalance economy, ecology and ethics. We are challenged to craft a socially accountable version of the economy – challenged to restore a hierarchy of purpose, whereby economic objectives, tools and measures are designed to serve the fundamental objective of human development.
… Notwithstanding the distance we find ourselves from achieving such an outcome, we must dare to dream it, to offer its outcome and continue to play our part as advocates for a paradigm shift, such as that to which I have spoken in my address, a paradigm that places an entrepreneurial state at the centre of social and economic objectives, a paradigm of universal basic services, a paradigm which recognises that inequality is not inevitable, but rather the outcome of exclusionary, inequitable policy.“
Here is the text – https://president.ie/en/media-library/speeches/speech-at-a-reception-for-tasc-think-tank-for-action-on-social-change
And video – https://youtube.com/watch?v=W_a5FFHllaQ
My mistake….
It’s a household habit to call him O’Higgins and it’s wrong
Thanks
Well, to be fair, in Irish he is “Micheál D. Ó hUigínn”.
I’m not sure how important he considers the “D” to be – it is everywhere on the President’s website – but he does not appear to use the “O” in English.
The whole of the speech is well worth a read. He gets it, in a way that few British politicians appear to, and is not afraid to say it.
Thanks
Agreed on the speech
My wife comes from a family of Irish speakers (originally)
She always uses the O’ as a result, I think
To be fair, Charles has long had the interest, the means and actually tried to lead by example (!) on the environmental front 🙂 As ever with listening it will be ignored again unless there are actual political consequences.
In my opinion the green stuff that Charles does is for the sake of keeping up pretences – imagine how much energy the upkeep of all of those castles requires… However, if he goes and says people should invest in sustainable infrastructure then all of the problems the royal family creates regarding ecological damage will be ignored because he is taking a “green” stance.
Wow, that is a speech! If only we could have a head of state or PM who could come up with that, instead of our ludicrous monarchy and PM’s like Johnson, Sunak and whoever his replacement will be. What a contrast between Britain and Ireland.
Whatever Ireland’s problems I can’t help feeling that as a country it is on an upward trajectory in the world, in stark contrast to its one time colonial master Britain.
EU membership and Brexit are part of this of course. But also the fact that Ireland has a more modern grown up politics than the UK. An elected head of state and a proportional voting system instead of a hereditary monarch and the hopeless FPTP.
Ireland: most political institutions corrupt to the very core. Try this from Fintan O’Toole to illustrate: Sat Apr 29 2023
On Monday, as he was leaving to attend an international summit on the development of offshore wind energy in Europe’s northern seas, the Taoiseach used the words “pressing” and “urgency”. The first was in relation to climate change; the second referred to the “urgency of action… reinforced by Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine”.
He also referred to offshore energy development as “our 21st-century moonshot”. Ground control to Major Leo: your circuit’s dead; there’s something wrong. Leo Varadkar’s evocation of a sense of urgency prompted me to wonder when the issue of offshore wind farming first presented itself to the Irish political system. I can tell you now: it was almost a quarter of a century ago. It was in 1999 that an all-island group, commissioned by the governments of the Republic and Northern Ireland, created an atlas of the vast offshore wind energy resource in our waters. That same year, the first application for a commercial licence to survey and build an offshore farm was lodged with the Department of the Marine.
We (who the “we” is is irrelevant) have been talking to SF (on energy related subjects). Interesting and highly disciplined party. They will win the next election, change will come. Varadkar & co will become (as they already are) yesterdays trash. The Irish deserve better than the imbeciles that are currently in power (not just the Politicos – but the morons in ESB).
Irish politics are paralysed by the fear of SF amongst the Balls Bridge establishment
The electorate will solve that, I think
There are some indications that Charles, having waited so long to be King, will want to make a mark on society in his remaining years, with progressive, compassionate ideas that never even entered the head of his mother in her 70 years as a passive, compliant Queen. But he will be aware of ruthless Establishment opposition to anything they could call political. Will he heed or ignore this? I hope the latter.