Regretfully, I must ask again, can we please kill the phrase "Celtic Tiger"? Faithful listeners to Morning Ireland were treated last week to a series of items on "the downside of the Celtic Tiger". Every silver cloud has a dark lining, we were reminded. I had completely forgotten.
We are all too familiar now with the attributes of the Celtic Tiger - downside, underside, backside, soft belly, claws, paws, teeth, tail, eyes, ears, cubs, offspring, growls and purrs, footprints, stalking and shadow.
We idolise the beast so much that we even acutely feel its absence from many places it refuses to visit.
The metaphor of the Celtic Tiger serves not to clarify an idea, if ever it did, but to mish and mash what could be useful discussions.
Recently this newspaper editorialised on the economy, "this is the time for choices about the future . . . the political system will be failing the electorate if they are not debated vigorously at the next general election". Leaving aside the problem that most political and journalistic debate is personality-obsessed and akin to MTV's Celebrity Death Match (where plastic models decapitate, dismember and eviscerate each other), the first step to debating clearly would be to banish all talk of the Celtic Tiger.
The problem is that the Celtic Tiger is put up there to be defended, thanked or blamed. It is as if all economic success and our most pressing economic and social challenges arise from economic growth above 5 per cent (aka the Celtic Tiger). One day we will have to pronounce the Celtic Tiger economy dead. By all accounts, that day will come either if the US economy crashes, bringing us down too, or, less dramatically, when GDP growth is a mere 4-5 per cent rather than 8-10 per cent.
No economic or social challenge has been solved forever by the Celtic Tiger. High growth has presented a window of opportunity. It will not be a laurel to rest on.
By the same token, few, if any, problems for public policy are caused solely by the Celtic Tiger economy, only to disappear, or to be more easily solved, when growth abates.
At a lower GDP growth level, we will still have the important challenge of trying to replenish old, dying jobs with new ones. The non-Celtic Tiger economy will deliver new jobs, just as the pre-Celtic Tiger economy did (only not enough new jobs, and often fewer than job losses).
Delivering new jobs, remaining competitive and constantly tuning policy to the requirements of enterprise will be as important as ever. Low corporation and personal taxes will continue to be central to meeting this objective. Raising taxes will work against it.
Our lifestyle challenges are not caused by Celtic Tiger growth levels, to be easily solved if growth is restrained to non-Celtic Tiger levels. Lifestyle issues are common across all industrial societies. There is very little peculiarly Irish or Celtic Tigerish about them.
As for poverty, there was plenty of it before the Celtic Tiger - significant and worse poverty than now. Even statistics show this.
There is an argument about the measurement of poverty. Like poverty itself, this argument existed before the Celtic Tiger and will continue afterwards. It, too, is not peculiarly Irish, special to the circumstances to which the Celtic Tiger has given rise. The likelihood is that poverty, by whatever measure, will not be eliminated before we have to accept that the Tiger economy is dead. There will remain issues of poverty when we move out of Celtic Tiger phase, and they will not be more easily solved by virtue of having lower growth, less employment demand and less consumption.
As regards transport, I personally guarantee that we shall still have big problems when the Celtic Tiger dies. We would have had plenty of transport problems if growth had never risen above 3 per cent. One benefit of rapid growth and the transport crisis it has provoked is that we see that making do with bockety transport infrastructure is no longer an option.
Strong growth and the creation of wealth also means that making do with bad transport is no longer a necessity.
It is also entirely possible that house prices will continue to rise, even if growth is less than 5 per cent. A recession would reduce prices, but what it delivers to new house buyers, it takes away from house holders, the opposite of today's market.
The challenge of making and implementing appropriate policies for jobs, poverty, transport and housing will remain when growth declines to lower levels. Then we'll see more clearly that the problem was not high growth itself, but the inability to identify and implement responses quickly and effectively.
And that inability, if it persists, will continue to cause problems no matter what growth level is achieved. Oliver O'Connor is editor of the monthly publication, Finance.
E-mail: ooconnor@indigo.ie
