Economics: Social Inequality and the Celtic Tiger

Orienting Questions

• Has the economic boom in Ireland been accompanied by rising levels of personal debt and social inequality?

• Have rising levels of affluence in Ireland been accompanied by a better quality of life?

• What is quality of life?

• Does rising affluence mean that public services (health, education, social security, housing) have been improved?

• Are there alternatives to the neoliberal model of economic and social progress?

This chapter will overview how the recent rise in economic productivity in Ireland has in part been achieved through neoliberal economic policy including social partnerships, tax breaks for corporations and a policy of wage restraint. As a result, the benefits of this economic boom are unevenly experienced within the Irish population, and while the boom has facilitated a transformation in collective cultural identity that can be characterised as positive, there has been a rise in poverty, job insecurity and social inequality. Despite recent studies which give Ireland a high ranking in terms of quality of life, rising social inequality and an underdeveloped transport, health and welfare infrastructure raise serious questions with regards to the effects of short-term neoliberal economic strategy in Ireland.

IRELAND IN THE CONTEMPORARY CONTEXT

A great deal of contemporary debate has been concerned with the diverse and contradictory effects of globalisation on local economies, cultures and societies. The impact of the various transformations on Irish society associated with globalisation and economic modernisation has been an issue of strong contestation in the public sphere. However, increasingly economists from both within and outside Ireland are commending the alleged positive effects of globalisation in facilitating the Celtic Tiger economic boom. A recent article in The Economist (Peet, 2004: 125) argues that Ireland's recent economic modernisation combined with a vestigial traditionalism have enabled Ireland to avoid the social problems characteristic of other countries, and that this modernisation of the Irish economy and the accompanying erosion of Catholic and patriarchal authority have liberalised and cosmopolitanised Irish culture (in an essentially European manner) while avoiding the social inequalities of the US. Such accounts illustrate a particular point of view shared by many entrepreneurs and politicians, a view that celebrates the recent claim that 'Ireland is one of the most globalised economies in the world' (Kearney, 2003: 47). This reflects a particular view, which, although not shared by all is quite hegemonic in the public sphere, that Ireland has 'arrived' and that it has successfully negotiated a 'third term' or path between a variety of seemingly opposed options: European and American, traditional and modern, communitarian and individualistic, and implies a progressive dialectical dynamic whereby opposing tendencies in Irish society have been reconciled in a satisfying synthesis. There is some cautioning amongst analysts with regard to the lack of long-term economic strategy, but overall the consensus is that Ireland's economic boom is a model to be emulated.

At the level of everyday life, however, the effects of the Celtic Tiger are not so simple, and the consensus is not nearly so clear, for an examination of talk radio, the media and other dimensions of the public sphere reveals a variety of contradicting and competing public discourses with regards to the perceived effects of the Celtic Tiger economic boom. We have recently argued (Keohane and Kuhling, 2004) that the diverse and antagonistic character of these transformations which have accompanied Ireland's experience of accelerated modernisation have produced a variety of cultural and social collisions between different and often incompatible forms of life, collisions between 'traditional' and 'modern', between Catholic and secular, between rural and urban, and between local and global, understood as discursively constructed binary oppositions, which reflect how difficult it is to make sense of these rapid social transformations. The collisions have produced a variety of social problems in Ireland, and are quite literally manifested in the increased rate of traffic accidents in recent years. Our research is not simply confined to literal collisions, for we argue that 'traffic accidents are a spectacular and literal representation of more general collisions occurring in Irish society today, between vestigial traditionalism and accelerated modernization, between the local and the global, between the values and organizing principles of action of community and society' (Keohane and Kuhling, 2004: 49).

Collisions Between Cultural Representations of Ireland

The collision in Irish society between contradictory or incompatible lifeworlds tends to manifest itself in dichotomous and in some ways conflicting representations of 'time' in Irish society, dichotomies which are inherent in the oxymoronic character of the term 'Celtic Tiger'. This term has become the signifier of collective identity and vitality, a collective ego-ideal, yet the differential notions of 'time' underpinning these two signifiers in this term point towards a variety of contradictions. The term 'Celtic' invokes a premodern, romantic, 'spiritual', unified sense of history that is remote, primordial, prenational, and which transcends the divisive historical realities of modern Ireland. In contrast, the term 'Tiger' resonates with a different and in some ways opposite set of images, for it invokes the rhetoric of competitive individualism, energetic progress and globalised capital. This attendant ideology of survival of the fittest denotes the shift in Ireland towards a laissez-faire, neoliberal ideology (O'Hearn, 1998). The dichotomous images and temporalities underpinning the term Celtic Tiger are also reflected in the quite different representations of the 'romantic Ireland' propagated by Bord Fáilte and the thoroughly modern image of Ireland posed by the IDA: Bord Fáilte representations of Ireland tend to show Ireland as characterised by either a premodern 'glacial time' (Lash and Urry, 1994), as a 'lackadaisical...