Ireland’s economic and social ‘crisis’ -

The missing but necessary discourse

Michael D. Higgins

Reading the columns of the newspapers during the summer, including the columns of
the Irish Times, and the letters page which contain such concerns as impelled the
correspondents to take pen to paper, one is left with an overwhelming sense of what is
being evaded rather than what is being discussed.

The word ‘crisis’ and the pronoun ‘we’ are thrown around as pieces of language in the
manner of snuff at a 19th century wake. One article after another, whether one begins
with the shortfall in the Governments estimates of receipts necessary to meet current
expenditure, the non availability of liquidity to keep firms in the real economy in
business, the excessive rate being paid by the Irish Government for international
borrowings as a result of the immense damage of a reputational kind visited in Ireland
as a result of a small clique of speculative gamblers who called themselves bankers,
the assumption is the same we have moved into a crisis and we, the Irish Public, must
regard ourselves as some form of collective ‘we’, one that is responsible for what has
come to pass.

The greatest social disaster of our times of course, the fact that we face 600,000
people unemployed before the year is out, rarely makes it to the front pages and never
stays as a topic for very long. The fact that this summers concentration has largely
been on the attempts at survival of property speculators and their banks while at the
same time issues such as unemployment, poverty, inequality, injustice and all of the
despair that flows from disappointed expectations, of the young and the old, tells us
much. There is neither the space nor the capacity for an adequate debate on our
immediate future, on how we would hope to emerge from the ‘crisis’ to which so
many refer.

The media obsession with a single report the McCarthy Report, just one of a number
of key publications that have appeared, or will appear, before the end of the summer –
the NAMA legislation, The Report on Higher Level Pay, The Report on Commission
on Taxation – reveals an approach that is singular in its inadequacy in a policy sense.

The proposals in the McCarthy Report are just that – simply proposals for reductions
in expenditure without discussion or evaluation as to policy options, social
implications, and above else, unemployment consequences. As a former
Cabinet Minister I can see how similar they are to those opening lists one received
from the Department of Finance at the beginning of the bilateral talks prior to the
Estimates. Indeed, the public seem to have missed the significance of those who
constituted the membership of the McCarthy group, which was of course co-chaired
by a Second Secretary of the Department of Finance.
All of this can be discussed in detail on the resumption of the Dail. Much more
serious however, I suggest, is the nature of the debate so far. There is no evidence of a
public or scholar capacity to mount a sufficient debate on how we have come to our
present position, the validity of the assumptions on which that strategy was based, the
failure of financial governance, and our regulatory institutions.

The public are entitled also to ask any of us elected politicians as to what our precise
project is in terms of recovery. There are many in the Dail who speak of getting back
to a point before the collapse of our property boom. This is to leave the logic of the
property boom in place. Again, there are many who suggest that our social
expenditure should be justified solely in terms of what revenue is extracted from
whatever type of economic activity that enjoys tax driven preference of the day. I
believe that the majority of those elected probably hold such a view. I do not share it.

Missing from the debate so far is any concept of citizenship. Indeed former
Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern reduced the debate on citizenship to a debate on volunteering,
important but not the same thing. This is quite extraordinary in a republic. It is
regarded as radical and unacceptable by the conservatives who cheered on the
property rackets to speak of social security, of a floor below which citizens would not
be allowed to fall. After all the most extensive interview given on our public service
broadcaster by the leading banker / gambler who did the most damage to Irelands
financial reputation, called for cuts in social welfare.

Yet citizenship is what we should now be discussing. Our public, the more socially
concerned elements of it surely do not want a return of more of the same. Just think
of what a debate we would have had if we had begun with the citizenship floor, with a
debate on universal provision, and the progressive extension and realisation of it?

Surely now it is time to ask too if we are not merely in the grip of not just a great self
deception as to language. Perhaps it is that we have such a deep anti-intellectualism in
the general culture as prevents us from examining the assumptions of the economic
models we have used, one that has not only failed at home, but has failed at global
level.

On his recent visit here Nobel economist Amartya Sen spoke of a recovery of a sense
of justice in economics. He announced that his next project of writing would be a
new preface to Adam Smiths Towards a theory of moral sentiments, which preceded
Smiths Wealth of Nations.

The concept of ‘Reason’, Amartya Sen sees as derived from the Greeks, in the work
of Adam Smith, became in the recent century a very narrow distorted version of
rational choice, upon which in time a fictional version of a perfect market was
constructed. That myth has now collapsed. Indeed all that is left of it are the
ramblings of the members of what one might call the Cult of the Invisible Hand.

The connection between philosophy, ethics, economics and social theory that was
possible in Smiths time, even by way of speculation, is allowed little space now.
There is no discourse that has it as its centre. One is forced to conclude that not just
language, but scholarship itself, has failed the public. At a time when new models are
needed, even suggested by events such as the ecological challenge and enduring
global poverty, even the questions do no rise to the challenge.

If Amartya Sens project is to have the effect of his previous seminal works he must
face the circumstance of a scholarship of his times, in his own area of economic
theory, where no consideration of goodness, of the good person, of the good society,
of inter-generational justice is given space.

The other great confidence trick being perpetrated on the Irish public is the suggestion
that we all created this crisis which now envelopes us, that nobody warned of its
social consequences. For the record Paul Daly in his fairly recent book ‘Creating
Ireland’, on page 210 quotes from a Dail speech of my own given on 21 April 1988:

“Let it be said, there is a consensus in this country, a consensus now in favour

of individualism, greed, the financial institutions, cowardly politics, people
with no conception whatsoever of what it means to live in a republic.

We are unique in another respect – a Republic without a concept of

equality …… We are creating two tiers of citizenship in relation to
access to health, education and social provision.”

It is simply not true to say that there was a consensus that supported the unfounded
speculative version of the economy that is in ruins following the collapse of the
property bubble. What is true to say is that it is very difficult to get
acknowledgement for the fact that the opposition to it came from those on the Left in
Irish politics. Evasive terms like ‘the politicians’ or ‘the political class’ are as evasive
as they are safe for those who use them, but in reality constitute a form of intellectual
cowardice.

It is time for a real debate with an appropriate discourse on the forms of the economy
that might serve a genuine citizenship, with inter-generational justice, and an inclusive
society. We are far from it.

(Michael D. Higgins is Labour T.D. for Galway West and Honorary Adjunct Professor
at the Irish Centre for Human Rights at NUIG)

18 August 2009