Ship of Fools Read Online Free PDF Page A

with no costing and no detail, the folly of the so-called ‘decentralisation’ of government departments and agencies to provincial towns which meant, for example, buying five large sites at the height of the property
boom for €16 million and allowing them to lie idle indefinitely, and a running total of €230 million spent on the schemes by 2008. Both of these policies were straightforward pre-election gimmicks.
    And all of this was done in a way that was deliberately socially regressive. McCreevy made sure that the boom would preserve the deep inequalities in Irish society by using his budgets to redistribute income upwards. His budget for the year 2000, for example, made the incomes of the poorest 20 per cent of the population rise by less than 1 per cent, those of the middle-income groups rise by 2-3 per cent, and those in the top 30 per cent by about 4 per cent.
    McCreevy gave priority to tax cuts over everything else. The cumulative effect was to create a fantasy land in which taxes could be cut while public spending was rising. People were encouraged to think that they didn’t have to make choices - lavishly wasteful public expenditure didn’t matter because no one had to pay for it. And the long-term effect of pumping all of this money into the economy through tax cuts and an artificial property boom was a massive rise in inflation which seriously damaged economic competitiveness. Inflation under McCreevy rose at twice the rate of Ireland’s EU partners. Prices in Ireland in 2004 were 28 per cent above what they were when McCreevy took office in 1997; the corresponding figure for the EU was 14 per cent.
    This stupidity was not about a lack of intelligence: McCreevy, Harney and Ahern were all very bright people. It was induced by a lethal cocktail of global ideology and Irish habits. On the one side, so-called free market ideology held government in contempt. When McCreevy boasted of spending money when he had it and not spending it when he didn’t, he was expressing a deeply held belief that it was not the business
of governments to interfere, for good or ill, in the workings of the economy. More broadly, if you believe, in accordance with the doctrines that dominated official thinking, that government itself is essentially evil, the very idea of using political power to effect the long-term transformation of a society is anathema.
    On the other side, there was the ingrained Irish political habit of thinking only in the short term. Fianna Fáil in particular existed as a machine for the gaining and holding of power. It was in general inimical to political ideas that could be spelled out in detail or tested against reality. If ideas had to be worn at all, they could also be easily discarded. Bertie Ahern brought the party’s contempt for coherent political values to new heights. This was a man who declared himself a socialist in 2004, having told his biographers six years earlier that ‘I don’t believe in all that socialist stuff. I’ve never met a socialist in my life’. This free and easy way with ideas meant that there could not be, from the top, any kind of vision for how Irish society should develop. When Ahern remarked, of his dream for a €1 billion white elephant sports stadium on the far outskirts of Dublin (quickly dubbed ‘the Bertie Bowl’), that it would be the legacy of the Celtic Tiger, he betrayed the staggering poverty of social ambition that underlay the second phase of the Irish boom.
    McCreevy and Harney were not personally corrupt, but Ahern saw nothing wrong with accepting large sums of cash from businessmen. In general, the government did not just tolerate low standards in public life and business by doing little to challenge them. It preserved the attitudes that kept them in place. In doing so, failed to alter the well-established climate of financial adventurism, in which recklessness was encouraged by impunity. An atmosphere of