It was known in Britain as Nigel Lawson's boom, and he became celebrated, almost revered, as the architect of the turn-around in his country's economic fortunes. Charlie McCreevy has not played such a seminal a role in our recovery, but his hand has been steady on the tiller during the most spectacular period of growth any country in Western Europe has experienced. Yet, far from being revered or even liked, he is actively disliked among what passes for an intelligentsia here.
We know why. It's not just his manners or his accent, though neither commend themselves to these former class-warriors who once preached the innate virtues of the working-classes and who spoke warmly of the "advances" of socialism in eastern European countries, but who nonetheless demanded bourgeois urbanity in their left-wing salons. It's not even the fact that he has helped make us all so rich that our disposable income will soon overtake Germany's. Nor is it even that poverty is receding everywhere, and though far from gone, is now of manageable proportions. No. Charlie's great and unforgivable sin in the eyes of the liberal-left is that, intellectually, he has proved them wrong: a thousand-fold wrong.
Proved wrong
If you value your brain above all things, it hurts to be proved wrong, especially by someone like Charlie McCreevy, a bit of a country wideboy with a country wide-boy's manners, and a country wideboy's understanding of economic theory. This is the theory which has enabled illiterates from Mayo and Kerry to leave Ireland and make fortunes in countries which applauded enterprise and energy, which did not begrudge success; and the theory goes like this. Let people work. Don't confiscate their income in taxes. Reward endeavour. Don't reward deliberate failure. Don't treat poverty as a moral issue to be defeated by charity but as an economic one to be conquered by work.
This was not an intrinsically Fianna Fail message, for that party was too addicted to vote-winning populism to easily absorb the economic lessons which emigrants had learned abroad over the years, and which were embodied in the policies of Nigel Lawson. Fianna Fail's culture was Janus-like: facing one way, theoretically, it favoured economic development; but facing in the opposite direction, its instinct was to create, by means of heavy taxation, a large State-controlled treasury, the contents of which were to fund populist adventures such as free toothbrushes for children.
You can't do the two. You can't have high economic growth within a culture of high taxation, unless you have colossal natural resources; yet a culture of high taxation was justified for "moral" reasons. When, before this boom, I wrote about the perniciousness of our high taxation system, one colleague told me loftily that she felt privileged to be able to pay so much in tax because of the good it could do. Another told me that all she needed to do to justify high taxation was to visit Kilbarrack.
Under-achievement
This sort of ethical drivel was the fuel which drove not merely the under-achievement of Ireland, but also the underachievement of the very classes the taxes were designed to assist - the poor. High, untaxed dole was competing with highly taxed lower incomes, seducing productive workers to leave the labour force and join the unemployment queue. Yet a populist party such as Fianna Fail would never have dared voice such a suspicion aloud. And when this column did, I was called (yawn) a neo-Thatcherite.
Subsequent workforce surveys have shown that high taxes were indeed driving workers into a State-dependent parasitism, even as people with savings sought to make illegal investments outside the country to avoid tax. The State was strangling itself; and only political deadlock between the major parties enabled the PDs to enter government on a tax-cutting programme.
Yet how those who argued that poverty was a moral matter, to be solved by the state, detested the PDs. Charlie McCreevy, of course, did not. Instinctively, he understood their message. Let people keep their earnings. Look after the hopeless, the old, the ill, but make everyone else work. So the pious State-interventionists turned their loathing on him, as he took a shears and through Budget after Budget hacked at the levels of taxation.
We know what happened. Tax-take rose, and the Government coffers were awash with money, even as the economy boomed. It is the simplest of economic lessons, one which was derided by the obsolete left who preferred inert, incompetent and heavily unionised State-run companies to dynamic and privately-owned ones. In a bizarre rebuttal of their own self-interest, they preferred a State monopoly and high airfares to low air-fares and competition.
Caste of priests
Why? Because more important to them than money was the power of their own beliefs. Like a ruling caste of priests, being right was of greater significance than being rich. And like the priests of old, the left-liberal priests tolerated no opposition. To suggest that private enterprise was better than State-owned, and that lower taxes, especially for the rich, were more productive of tax, was a moral heresy on a par with declaring to the old hierarchy that sex outside wedlock was a good thing.
Now, dumbfounded, the sick old priests of statism must observe the intellectual triumph of the free marketeers and that hicky Minister for Finance with the country accent. Charlie McCreevy was right all along. Is it any wonder that they hate him? What's worse, measurably they grow richer by his measures. The poor dears: being indebted to a man who intellectually has proved you wrong is truly the ultimate humiliation.