OPINION: A rummage through Ireland’s economic closet

I was recently decluttering and came across a mountain of old reports and documents from an era before scanners were available or the ‘cloud’ had been invented. It brought home to me how document generation and storage (not to mention gender balance) has changed since I entered the labour force in the early 1970s.
As a graduate student I acquired rudimentary typing skills writing up various theses. On my joining the Central Bank in the mid-1970s, I arrived with my typewriter under my arm and placed it on my desk. A few hours later I was summoned to a higher being and told that there were lower beings called ‘typists’ (all women, of course) who did the low-caste job of typing up manuscripts written by higher beings (almost all men, of course), and that my typewriter was a potential destabilising force within the organisation.

Screen time
During the 1980s, typewriters came under threat from the personal computer. Computers had been widely used since the 1960s in government and businesses, but they were expensive, monstrously large and communicated with humans through punched card input and paper output. The president of IBM, Thomas Watson in the late 1940s thought that there might be a world market ‘for maybe five computers’ and ‘5,000 copying machines’.  Probably the worst forecast ever made!
Apple and IBM came up with the idea of a ‘personal’ computer that was about the size of an old-style valve radio and communicated with the world through a keyboard and a monitor. I was the first person to bring a personal computer into the ESRI in the early 1980s, when Sanyo produced a PC clone that was ten times cheaper than the expensive Apple/IBM models. It took a decade for keyboard skills to be accepted as a necessary requirement at all levels of organisations, a transition accelerated when e-mail started to replace letter post and the fax. I recall a friend remarking about that time that when men started typing, it became known as ‘keyboard skills’ overnight.
Since the arrival of the cloud, printing on paper has declined dramatically and we entrust our documents and photos to electronic storage. Big media companies, such as Google, Apple and Amazon, have created massive data storage banks, many of them located in Ireland and guzzling our electricity. But the cost of storage to the individual is tiny.
A crucial problem with the old paper-based filing system was that it only worked if you set it up properly and maintained it. Few of us are able to do that, so filed documents get lost in an impenetrable jungle that has no search function to assist with retrieving anything.
In the course of my paper decluttering I came across three curious supplements published by The Economist magazine where they reviewed the Irish economy in 1977, 1988 and 1997. The Economist never paid much attention to Ireland, but proximity and our relative importance as a customer of UK goods appeared to merit a glance every decade. Such attention is rare, and that was probably why I filed them.
The 1977 supplement was written at an interesting time. The OPEC-1 oil crisis had plunged the global economy into recession and Ireland was struggling with high inflation, high unemployment and a wave of emigration. The supplement cover image (in black and white) showed people coming out of a small, rural church. The text laid great stress on the traditional nature of the economy, the dominance of agriculture, and the deeply Catholic conservative tone of our society. The general view was that our politicians were ill-equipped to address our problems, although there was great admiration for Conor Cruise-O’Brien, then Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, and the only minister with an international reputation that could catch the eye of the British establishment.
The 1988 supplement was notorious for the photograph on its cover. Titled ‘Poorest of the Rich’, it showed a mother and child begging on a pavement as a man walked past. Once again, 1988 was an interesting year. The European Single Market was being finalised in Brussels, and Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Greece were poised to obtain massive development assistance through a greatly expanded European Regional Development Fund.

Turnaround
Ireland was struggling to escape the massive debts that had been racked up during the profligate Fianna Fáil administrations of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The turnaround in our fortunes was about to arrive, but The Economist had no understanding of how the Single Market would transform Europe’s less-developed nations.
While the supplement covers of 1977 and 1988 were cringe-making, the 1997 cover bounced in the other direction. This was the build-up to what became known as the Celtic Tiger of 1995-2005, before we lost the run of ourselves and wrecked the economy in the mid-2000s. The title was ‘Europe’s Shining Light’ and showed an illuminated 26 counties in an otherwise dark Europe. The subsequent dying ‘Light’ was spectacular when it arrived with the banking crisis.
I was reluctant to discard these three iconic supplements, even in a frenzy of decluttering. Their tattered and yellowing state served as a stark reminder that British economists actually know little about the forces that drive a nation as it emerges from under-developed colonial status. The real role of economics should be to try to understand what happens in such countries, and why. The Economist supplements singularly failed to do this.
I am left pondering three questions. Would AI, which did not exist back then, do a better job than The Economist? Will gender balance make for a better understanding of the world? Should Mayo encourage Data Centres to locate here?

•  John Bradley is a former ESRI professor and has published on the island economy of Ireland, EU development policy, industrial strategy and economic modelling.