Éirvana

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven! William Wordsworth

Now that Ireland’s misery index (the sum of its unemployment and inflation rates) has edged above ten per cent and aggregate employment has virtually stopped growing, was calling a book on the social impact of the Celtic Tiger Best of Times? tempting fate?  With economists worrying about competitiveness and property prices suffering a meltdown likely to last for some years, have the editors – Tony Fahey, Helen Russell, and Chris Whelan – and their team of skilful social scientists been unlucky in their timing?  Maybe so: we should know in a year or two.

Still, there is a big difference between today’s economic worries and the extreme doom and gloom of the 1980s, and the prospects of Ireland returning to a pre-Celtic Tiger status quo are remote. Nor does it seem likely that the social improvements which accompanied economic growth will be significantly eroded. Nowadays a period of less hectic economic growth – if that is the worst that is in store – would hardly be a disaster for most people. Some might even welcome it.

Not so long ago, it was a different story. As recently as 1987, the year of Italy’s famous sorpasso over Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, Irish GDP per head was less than two-thirds that of Italy. Eleven years later Irish GDP per head overtook Italian GDP per head, and in the following year UK GDP per head. Irish GNP per head – a more meaningful measure for Ireland, given the drain of profits and royalties accruing to foreign-owned multinationals – overtook Italian GDP per head in 2001 and UK GDP per head in 2004.  It was an extraordinary achievement. 

Man doth not live by bread only, though, and one of the common criticisms of the Celtic Tiger is that its material gains have come at a cost in terms of social cohesion, alienation, and dislocation. Not so, argue the contributors to Best of Times? in unison. In a series of mainly persuasive essays on a wide range of topics the authors – mostly present or former associates of Dublin’s Economic and Social Research Institute [ESRI] – write up the achievements of the last two decades or so. Those achievements include the switch from net emigration to net immigration, the continued vibrancy of social and communal networks, significant improvements in health, the unprecedented boom in employment, considerable intergenerational upward mobility, and big reductions in the levels and depths of deprivation and social exclusion. While acknowledging problems in areas such as drug addiction and a rising homicide rate, the authors paint a picture of an Ireland that really “has never had it so good”. The problems that remain are “more modest” than suggested by critics and “manageable”. 

What a contrast with an earlier socio-economic survey from the ESRI, Understanding Contemporary Ireland (1990). That volume was co-written – rather than co-edited – by an eminent quartet of ESRI-based sociologists – Richard Breen (now at Yale), Damien Hannan (since retired), David Rottman (a criminologist, now in the US), and Chris Whelan (also co-editor of Best of Times?). It appeared when the Celtic Tiger was still in gestation. Written against the backdrop of an unemployment rate of nearly one-fifth and a public debt that exceeded GDP, it was utterly innocent of the transformation about to take place. Understanding Contemporary Ireland took social class as “the core of [its] explanation of social change” and blamed the State (sic) for failing to promote economic development and greater social inequality. By contrast Best of Times? contains little about social class – only Chris Whelan’s chapter, co-written with Richard Layte, invokes it analytically – and “state” does not even appear in the index. Where Understanding Contemporary Ireland was critical and neo-Marxian, Best of Times? is celebratory and apolitical (or postpolitical?). In this respect, another ESRI-inspired volume, Bust to Boom? The Irish Experience of Growth and Inequality (2002), offers a kind of half-way house: optimistic about the future, but very focused on “the importance of strategic national choices for both economic performance and social inequalities”. The implied shift in the course of Irish sociological research bears testimony to the impact of the Celtic Tiger.

The broad case for social betterment made by Best of Times? is unassailable. It implies, though it does not address, the high costs of poor policy-making before the mid-1980s. After all, had the Irish economy followed more closely the growth trajectory of the rest of Europe since the 1950s, the benefits described by its contributors would have been enjoyed by more people and for much longer. The economic history of poswar Italy offers a useful yardstick in this respect, since both Ireland and Italy were both very backward economies by European standards, with almost identical rates of GDP and consumption per head. For the next three decades or so, real Irish consumption per head fell further and further behind Italian consumption per head.

The 1950s represented a wasted decade in economic terms for Ireland; growth in the 1960s, while impressive by historical Irish standards, was less than Italian; and the deflation necessitated by the fiscal follies of the late 1970s widened the gap even more. It would take the great leap forward that was the Celtic Tiger era to bridge that gap. By the late 1990s consumption levels per head in the two economies were again on a par. However, our path to the Best of Times? came at a price: had the Irish hare replicated the straighter Italian road to affluence, Irish consumers would have been better off by about one-third on average in the interim (Ó Gráda 2007).

Here I focus on some very recent changes in social and personal wellbeing, sudden and largely overlooked in the media, and not given due consideration by Fahey, Russell, and Whelan (henceforth FRW). Some of the changes are too recent to be expected in Best of Times?; perhaps others might have been included, although it is in the nature of such collective endeavours that they can never be quite up-to-date. These changes are arguably as striking as – and more puzzling than – the trends described in the book itself.

First is the sharp and unexpected acceleration in the rate of improvement in the expectation of life at birth, highlighted in recent papers by statistician Shane Whelan (2008) and economist Brendan Walsh (2008), and not captured in Best of Times? Figures 1a and 1b describe the sharp rise in life expectancy at birth that began in 2000 and the accompanying drop in infant mortality from 1999 on. The increase in the expected life span between 2000 and 2006 was almost as big as that in the preceding two decades. This is important because, obviously, the length of time consumers enjoy any given level of consumption contributes to economic wellbeing just as much as increases in average consumption levels do. Enjoying an annual income of €100,000 for fifty years is preferable to enjoying it for thirty. A specialist economics literature describes how to evaluate the increased welfare associated with such shifts; and accounting for it would undoubtedly add significantly to the achievements of recent years (Ó Gráda 2007). It would also temper the rising income inequality ably documented by economists Brian Nolan and Bertrand Maître in Best of Times? (FRW, Chapter 3) and elsewhere, since the rise in life expectancy has been much more equally spread than that in incomes (compare Becker, Philipson, and Soares 2005) and in Ireland seems to have been enjoyed fairly equally across counties. The rise in life expectancy has implications for old age social security, but that is an issue for another day.

Second, for all the recent and current media commentary about Ireland being awash with alcohol, per capita alcohol consumption, although still worryingly high, peaked in 2001-02. Beer consumption (measured in units of pure alcohol) per adult had already peaked almost a decade ago (in 1999). Despite all those Bulmer commercials, cider consumption per head peaked in 2001, while spirits consumption per head peaked in 2002. Only wine consumption, five times as high now as two decades ago, continues to rise (Hope 2007: App. 3; for Britain, compare Creagh 2008). Indeed, given ample evidence that the demand for alcohol is income-elastic over a wide income range – that, holding other things constant, expenditure on drink rises more than proportionately with income – and that real personal consumption per head has doubled in Ireland since the late 1980s, a much bigger rise in alcohol consumption might have been expected over the last two decades or so (compare Conniffe and McCoy 1993, pp. 20-1). In practice, other things have not remained constant; but given the relative decline in the price of alcohol in recent years, the reduction in the number of teetotallers, and the rising proportion of women drinkers, it is the modest reduction in average adult alcohol consumption since the late 1990s that is surprising. Yet Figure 2b indicates that alcohol consumption in Ireland, though past its peak (for now?), remains rather high by current European and OECD standards.

Perhaps that decline helps to explain why, despite the vast increase in car registrations and road traffic, the number of fatalities in road accidents has continued to fall. Road Safety Authority data shows that numbers killed in road accidents have plummeted from 338 per million registered vehicles in 1996 to 247 in 2000 and 159 in 2006, with a further significant decline likely in 2007. Indeed, the number of persons killed on our roads peaked at over 600 as long ago as 1972; it was 365 in 2006! Presumably data describing fatalities per passenger kilometre – a more appropriate measure – would reveal an even greater decline in the fatality rate. Here too the gap between reality and media perception is wide, as seen in the recent comment from “a little woman in a little orange car, a non-speeding, non-drink-driving blonde”, the Irish Independent’s Medb Ruane(2)

Accidents happen –­ it’s awful but inevitable. A puddle on the road, a sleepy feeling, even an unexpected sneeze convulsing a driver, can make the difference between health and injury, life and death. You’re fragile when you’re in a piece of metal called a car, even if you feel secure.
None of the above license people in road policy, safety and traffic management to trot out excuses about bad driving behaviour when numbers are rising, not falling, despite all the fanfare. This is substance, not image, and actions are what count.
 [emphasis added].

Is it not somewhat ironic that two high-profile state bodies, the Implementation Group Established to Progress Recommendations Aimed at Tackling Alcohol Misuse and the Road Safety Authority, were both established in 2006, some years after the social problems they were intended to target had peaked? Such groups can do useful work and address serious issues, but they have a vested bureaucratic interest in highlighting the gravity of the problems they address and in claiming credit for improvements that were in train in any case. A proper perspective on the challenges facing them is surely needed when devising solutions and allocating what public resources are available across all problem areas. Fiscal arithmetic dictates that more spent on, say, the Road Safety Authority means less for other deserving causes such as relieving loneliness and fear in old age, relieving disaster in distant places, tackling learning disabilities, or saving the Irish language from extinction.

Third, Best of Times? shows that, despite the current vogue for stress management counselling and the like, psychological stress levels fell during the Celtic Tiger years. This claim is strongly supported in recent research by UCD economist David Madden (2007), who reports a reduction in mental stress in Ireland between 1994 and 2000.  Madden’s decomposition analysis shows that features associated with the Celtic Tiger – better employment prospects, rising education levels, and higher incomes – accounted for much of the decline.

A more extreme and distressing measure of mental health is the suicide rate.  A study published by the Central Statistics Office in 2005 noted that that “there was a definite trend upwards in the suicide rate in recent times, particularly among males aged 15-24” (Heanue 2000: 37; see too Corcoran, Arensman, and O’Mahony 2006), and OECD data suggest that between 1980 and 2000 youth suicides per head of population grew faster in Ireland than anywhere else in the developed world. At the end of the old millennium the suicide rate in the population as a whole was less than the OECD average, but the youth suicide rate was second only to Iceland’s. The current rate is about nine suicides per 100,000 population; four-fifths of the victims are male, and half the total under twenty-five. There is a real problem here, and the numbers only hint at the scale of the heartbreak and loss involved. 

However, the suicide rate, measured relative to the whole population, has been falling in the new millennium (Figure 2). On the basis of data up to 2002, Best of Times? notes a fall in the male suicide rate since 1998, but the fall has been much sharper since then. There were 457 recorded suicide victims in 2004, 431 in 2005, and 409 in 2006. Here too there is a gap between media rhetoric and statistical reality; one recent daily newspaper report has a junior health minister vowing to cut the suicide rate by a tenth; another links the rise in suicides to the closure of rural public houses.(3)

Fourth, some commentators may find it tempting to regard the declining influence of the Catholic Church in recent decades as a precondition for recent Irish economic success.  This version of the Weber-Tawney thesis, which originally linked the Reformation with the rise of capitalism, would consider the secularisation that has brought increases in single parenthood, in divorce and marital breakdown, and in unplanned births and abortions as part of the process that also created the Celtic Tiger (for a rather extreme version of this argument see Bloom and Canning 2003).

In this case too, very recent changes muddy the water. While both the proportion of births outside marriage and the number of abortions rose in the 1980s and 1990s, there is evidence of shifting patterns in both in the very recent past. Figure 3 describes the trend in the proportion of births outside marriage since 1980. The levelling off is significant, but more important is the downward trend in births to younger women. Teenage births, mostly extra-marital, surged from 1.6 per cent of all births in 1960 to 3.3 per cent in 1980, and peaked at 6.3 per cent in 2001. Their share fell to 4 per cent of the total in 2005 and 3.7 per cent in 2006, while the total number has fallen from 3,371 in 1999 to 2,410 in 2006. Moreover, a decade ago the share of extra-marital births by mothers aged less than 25 years was 58 per cent; today it is down to about 41 per cent (Figure 4). The change is also reflected in the increase in the average age of unwed mothers when their children were born from 23.6 years in 1990 to 27.1 years in 2006. In the case of married women, the rise was from 30.6 to 32.9 years. Presumably many, if not most, of the children born outside marriage to older women are “planned” and associated with stable and viable family units.

Was the reduction in teenage births associated with a reduction in teenage conceptions?  Here data on abortions carried out on Irish residents travelling across the Irish Sea offer a partial answer. Overall, since 2001 there has been a significant reduction in the number of abortions carried out on Irish residents in the UK (Figure 5). The shift tallies with the impression to be gained from Figure 4 that the proportion of “crisis” pregnancies has been declining. It is sometimes claimed that increasing recourse to abortions elsewhere distorts the impression given by British data. However, recent data from Belgium and the Netherlands – the countries highlighted most in this respect by pro-choice activists –would also seem to rule out any significant increase in the traffic from Ireland.

Equally striking is the reduction in the number of terminations by young women as a proportion of the total (Figure 6). At the same time there has been a rise in the proportion of teenage pregnancies that ended in terminations. For other age groups there have been slight falls in the recent past in the proportions ending in terminations.

Although these are indeed in several respects the best of times, Panglossian claims that they are the best possible times and that they are irreversible should be discounted. After all, a significant minority in the community continues to be “socially excluded” from the boom or to have benefited little from it (compare Jacobsen, Kirby, and Ó Broin 2006).  Moreover, the link between material affluence and life satisfaction is not straightforward.  Figures 7a and 7b, based on Eurostat data from Brussels, plot the trends in life satisfaction in Ireland since 1973, as reported to opinion surveyors on behalf of Eurobarometer. The index of life satisfaction used is based on a weighted average of responses to a standard set of questions about happiness by large, random samples of people. In Figure 7a, both the sharp decline in the index to 1988 and its recovery thereafter are plausibly squared with broad macroeconomic trends – economic underperformance and crisis before 1990, recovery thereafter. At the same time, it is rather striking that by this criterion the average Irish resident feels no better about himself or herself today than the previous generation did in the early 1970s.(4) Nobody quite knows why this is so.  It may well be – as many songwriters remind us – that the connection between riches and happiness is looser than most economic and political commentators are inclined to assume. 

Figure 7b charts the trend in the spread of happiness across the community.(5) To find a reduction in the variation in happiness at a time of rising income inequality is curious.  Perhaps it is telling us two things. First, the huge drop in the unemployment rate since the late 1980s – nearly twenty per cent then, about five per cent now – may have played a more important part in the happiness stakes than the huge income gains of the filthy rich at the very top end of the socioeconomic ladder. Second, insofar as unemployment and deprivation concerned not just those most immediately affected, the reduced variation in life satisfaction may have boosted the overall sense of wellbeing in the society as a whole. There is a double reason, then, to avoid major increases in unemployment as the economy adjusts to some new post-Celtic Tiger steady state.

Finally, as Brendan Walsh (2008) noted some months ago, accounting for the sudden shift in Irish mortality rates in the new millennium is “a challenging task”. The trouble is that many of the factors that might account for such a shift “changed gradually over time”.  Walsh’s comment has a broader resonance. Like the change in life expectancy, the near-coincidence in timing of shifts in several other demographic measures is remarkable and remains puzzling. Which raises the still unanswerable question: which of these changes are permanent, and which are reversible? As the late Zhou Enlai might have replied, “it is a little too soon to say”.

1. This paper is an extended version of a contribution to a symposium in the Economic and Social Review. The helpful comments of colleagues Ann Carlos, Denis Conniffe, Kevin Denny, Colm McCarthy, David Madden, John Sheehan, Brendan Walsh and the editors of the drb are gratefully acknowledged.
2. “Lethal indifference that drives up road carnage”, Irish Independent, March 4th, 2008
3. “Junior Minister Devins vows to cut suicide rate by 10%”, Sunday Independent, August 26th 2007;   ‘Suicide rise linked to closure of rural pubs’, Irish Examiner, February 14th, 2008.
4. That does not mean, of course, that Seán or Sinéad Citizen, cast back into the 1970s by a time-machine, would be just as happy with their lot as they are now.
5. Taken together, Figures 7a and 7b hint at a negative association between the spread and average happiness; the correlation coefficient between the two over nearly three and a half decades (1973-2006) is a striking -0.68, while the correlation between their first differences is -0.22. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Becker, G.S., T.J. Philipson and R.R. Soares. 2005. ‘The Quantity and Quality of Life and the Evolution of World Inequality’, American Economic Review, 95(1): 277-91.

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Jacobsen, David, Peadar Kirby, and Deiric Ó Broin. 2006. Taming the Tiger – Social Exclusion in a Globalised Ireland, New Island, Dublin.

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Nolan, Brian, Philip J. O’Connell and Christopher T. Whelan (eds.). 2000.  Bust to Boom? The Irish Experience of Growth and Inequality.  Dublin: Institute of Public Administration.

Ó Gráda, Cormac. 2007. ‘You take the high road and I’ll take the low road: economic success and wellbeing in the longer run’, in T. Hatton, Alan Taylor, and K. O’Rourke, eds. The New Comparative Economic History, Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, pp. 343-63.

Walsh, B.M. 2008. ‘Wealthier and healthier: the recent decline in Irish mortality rates’. Paper presented to the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, 16th January.

Whelan, Shane 2008.  ‘Projecting Irish Life Expectancy’, Paper presented to the SSISI, 16th January.

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