GENERATIONS of Irish people have had to accept much lower living standards and a poorer infrastructure than their neighbours in northern Europe have enjoyed.
This depressing reality has become deeply embedded in our national psyche. We are consequently ill equipped today to adjust to the recent sudden dramatic change in our fortunes.
This change could propel us within a single generation from being by far the poorest country in northern Europe in terms of our annual income (although not for a long time to come in respect of our infrastructure) to being one of the best off.
A distinguished economist has recently expressed the view that our capacity for economic growth has been raised to something like 6 per cent a year. Perhaps, however, an actual 6 per cent growth rate would be too much to hope for: even if we have developed a capacity for such a rate of economic growth, there are bound to be periods of less dramatic performance.
We might, therefore, do better to look at the implications of a somewhat lower average growth rate of, say, 5 per cent, sustained over most of the next 15 years.
That this is a real possibility may be seen from the fact that - except for the early 1980s when a sharp deflation of our economy was required so as to bring order into our public finances - our economy grew at an average annual rate of 4.2 per cent during the 30 year period from 1958 to 1988.
Since 1988 our growth rate has averaged almost 5.5 per cent, so a long term growth of 5 per cent henceforth implies an actual slowing down of our economy.
Few people realise that even a reduced 5 per cent growth rate, if sustained over 15 years, would more than double our national output. Even assuming that the impact of economic growth on employment during the past four years has been exceptional, a doubling of national output must certainly increase employment by over one third. That would mean at least 450,000 additional jobs.
Such a rise in employment would reduce substantially the numbers out of work, even allowing for a substantial inflow of emigrants returning to take up jobs, the return of women to the labour market after a period of childcaring and the numbers of schoolleavers and college leavers seeking employment. (Because of the post 1980 fall in the birth rate, this post education flow will diminish steadily after the turn of the century.)
At the same time as employment rises and unemployment falls, our population will be growing albeit, because of our low birth rate, much more slowly than the rise in employment. Within 15 years population might increase by some 250,000 to 300,000, depending on the scale of net immigration during this period.
With employment rising much faster than population the ratio of dependants to workers, which within the past decade has already fallen by one fifth, will drop by something like a further onethird.
This would mean that the increase of about one half in each worker's output and purchasing power in this period would have to be shared, whether within his or her family or through taxation, among far fewer dependants. Consequently, average material living standards would almost double.
AS CURRENT projections of living standards in Britain and continental Europe during the next 15 years suggest improvements of less than onehalf (only one third in the case of Britain, if that country's economic forecasters are right), this would mean that average material living standards here would be likely to outstrip those in Britain early in the next decade.
Within this 15 year time span, our standard of living could pass out those of almost all other European countries.
What of the public finances? In such circumstances many different scenarios would be possible, depending upon the priorities set by whatever governments would be in office during these years.
One such scenario would involve a reduction of the burden of income taxation by one quarter, combined with an annual increase of 3 per cent in the resources available for current public spending on services such as health and social welfare and at the same time a doubling of the volume of public investment, to be financed out of a current budget surplus rather than by further borrowing. (Instead of borrowing we would be repaying debt by that stage.)
Let me emphasise once again: the scenario that would make all this possible is not a particularly optimistic one; it reflects what would be possible if, during the next decade and a half, our economic performance were on average to be somewhat worse than in the past eight years.
The danger we face is one of failing to take seriously this prospect of dynamic economic growth. This encouraging prospect could all too easily be messed up if we failed to prepare adequately for it.
Thus, if our education system were to respond in the wrong way to future needs for example by succumbing to half baked pressure to allowing vocational training to displace genuine education in our schools - or if we failed to reorient our training provisions towards the rapidly changing needs of the economy, we could all too easily choke off this remarkable opportunity.
For our economic success to date stems above all from the quality of our nonspecialised and liberal education system.
Moreover, if we failed to make the huge investments needed to catch up on our infrastructural backlog (e.g. in roads and public transport), or if we made the wrong investments (e.g. building in Dublin a grossly inadequate onstreet LRT system that could clog our streets), we could weaken our chance of a major economic breakthrough.
Again, failure to allocate to our deprived urban areas the current and capital resources needed to remove the principal causes of crime in our cities could eventually precipitate conditions of disorder that would discourage the large scale industrial investment that is a precondition of continued rapid economic growth.
ANOTHER error that could wreck our prospects would be a failure to plan on an adequate scale the availability of serviced land with adequate drainage and other services to meet our housing requirements.
Housing could easily prove a real bottleneck, partly because many of the new jobs will be filled by emigrant workers returning here with their families, almost all of whom will have to be housed as soon as they arrive.
In the Dublin region this will mean that we will have to abandon the ludicrous idea that housing and the servicing of land can be adequately planned by seven independent county councils rather than on the basis of a comprehensive and unified metropolitan organisation of the region's housing, drainage and transportation needs.
Again, failure to put to best use our water resources could block economic progress. As Sadbh O'Neill pointed out on this page last Wednesday, it would be a disaster if the current populist pressure for free water were to dissipate this valuable resource which, like other similar scarce resources such as electricity and gas, will be put to best use only if it is metered and, to the extent that consumption exceeds a normal household's needs, paid for as it is used.
The prime task of the incoming Government will be to turn our whole society around so as to face the unfamiliar problem of coping with a rate of economic growth unknown in Europe during the past 40 years.
Might our political parties, perhaps, raise their sights to make this most crucial issue the principal focus of their campaigns? It's a thought.