Description
Charles Haughey is grudgingly credited today with some achievements, but his overall strategy to transform the Irish economy and how it succeeded remain little known. This deeply researched, compelling and lively book aims to rectify this.
By the 1990s, an almost entirely new economy had been created, populated by new industries and social institutions and based on high-tech exporting industries, a financial services framework, an industry/research/education nexus and a firm EU integration orientation. This “Irish Model” with its dual goal of a globally-integrated economy and a socially inclusive society, won international acclaim. Critical in achieving it was social partnership, a singular system of collaboration between the major socio-economic interests and the State to generate and sustain consensus national strategies. The Irish Model proved so robust that even the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-12 that destroyed so much purely credit-based wealth failed to seriously dent its industrial base, and it quickly revived to return to its growth trajectory.
Anything and everything is credited with having created the “Irish miracle” – from globalisation to the EU, the visionary foresight of agencies like the IDA, an explosion of artistic creativity, or even just good luck – anything, that is, apart from the policies pursued just prior to it aimed precisely to achieve it!
This book argues that it was these policies and their consistent implementation that were the source of the success. Based on interviews with key players and deep research in government and other records, many never examined before, the author reconstructs the extraordinary story of this “Very Political Project” and the conflicts and accommodations at the heart of it. It places it in the continuity of Irish political and economic policy development since the foundation of the State and up to the present day.
“Very likely to be the definitive work on the subject… It will in time take its place as a masterpiece of modern Irish scholarship.”
Prof. Gary Murphy, scholar and author of Haughey.
“Philip O’Connor’s study of social partnership, both in its origins and its practice, breaks new ground. It also highlights the value to a country of serious professional political leadership and the determining role of Charles Haughey as Taoiseach between 1987 and 1992.”
Dr Martin Mansergh, Special Adviser to Taoisigh Haughey, Reynolds and Ahern.
“This book … undertakes the much-needed task of examining the archives on social partnership in great detail … Perhaps most important, it places social partnership in the context of Ireland’s profound development challenges, both economic and social … Anyone who wishes to offer solutions … to our current challenges would be well advised to ponder the evidence and analysis offered here.”
Dr Rory O’Donnell, former Director of the National Economic and Social Council