MANAGING IRELAND'S FUTURE- 2005-2030

© 2005 Magill Summer School

Contents:

Chapter One
Managing the Future

The Future Demographic and Labour Market
AIDAN PUNCH, Central Statistics Office

Will There be Enough Children?
TONY FAHEY, Research Professor, Social Policy, ESRI

Have We A Coherent Political Vision?
MICHAEL McDOWELL TD, Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform

Slow Burners and Catalysts
PAT RABBITTE TD, Leader of the Labout Party

Achieving the Goals of 1916
NOEL DEMPSEY TD, Minister for Communications, Marine and Natural

Michael McDowell TD
Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform

Born in Dublin and educated at Pembroke School, Gonzaga College, UCD and Kings Inns. Formerly Senior Counsel. First elected to Dáil Éireann for Dublin South-East in 1987. Attorney-General 1999-2002. Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform since 2002. Chairman of the Progressive Democrats 1989-92. President of the Party since 2002.

A Coherent Political Vision tor Ireland In the 21st Century?
Too often it is said that Irish politics and politicians lack vision. Instead of being led by statesmen, we are constantly told, the Irish Republic is led by time-servers, appeasers, and 'political night-watchmen'. The young generation of patriots who established independent Ireland in the early decades of the 20^th century, it is argued, have been replaced by an older, jaded, more calculating, cynical, political elite which has, in turn, been seen to betray the high ideals of the national revival and revolution.

Greed, self-interest and cynicism, we are told, have swept away the former civic virtues of patriotism, self-sacrifice, altruism and solidarity. Is this analysis true? Is it true in whole or in part? Are we frittering away our heritage – in terms of identity, culture, moral outlook, values, and environment – in a squalid orgy of mediocrity, in pursuit of banality?

These questions, and similar questions, form the usual charges on the bill of indictment preferred against modern Ireland by the Moral Inquisition which sits in the judgement seat reserved for social commentators in our political culture.

For my part, I have no problem wit self-questioning. On the contrary, the absence of self-questioning in any political culture would constitute some form of necrosis. Nor have I any problem with a healthy leavening of self-doubt. If everyone is a cheer-leader for the status quo, an apparently healthy society may be teetering on the edge of terminal decline.

Self-questioning and self-doubt are necessary actors on the social stage in the theatre of Irish life. But I do have a problem with 'self-loathing' masquerading as moral superiority. And I also have a problem with intellectual self-indulgence posing as serious social commentary. I have a problem too with the internal anger of those who suffer from middle-class self-loathing being directed against everyone who questions the moral orthodoxy of the politically correct, self-appointed lay hierarchy who direct modern Ireland's Moral Inquisition.

Left and right
Let me exemplify. There is a strong element of an Orwellian 'Left Good, Right Bad' theme to much of what we read and hear in some quarters of the media. This is hardly surprising – since what is 'Left' is heavily sanitized and what is 'Right' is heavily caricatured to fit that mind-set. Those opposed to the 'Left agenda' are, by definition, 'Right'. The 'Left' is never reactionary; the 'Right' always is. Holding on to 'Left' positions is never 'conservative'; challenging them always is. That is the way our social discourse goes and, if you read our newspapers, you would think that this is the way everybody in Ireland thinks.

Europe
Another example is the Irish debate on Europe. The orthodox analysis of 'commentators' has been to attempt to corral all participants in the debate into two camps. On the one hand were the Eurosceptics; on the other hand we had the Federalists.

People, including myself, who over the last five years challenged the federalist vision of Joshka Fischer set out in his famous Humboldt University speech were labelled 'Euro-sceptic' because we argued for what has now become fairly obvious – namely that there was no substantial popular support for that Federalist project and that it was a 'top-down' rather that a 'bottom-up' project for a super-state that was bereft of a democratic foundation.

The mere possibility that it was possible to be pro-European but anti-Federalist, that the EU could develop more as a close partnership than as an integrated polity, that there was a clear middle course between a mere customs union and comprehensive integration was discounted as unhelpful and almost heretical by those in particular who looked to Social Europe as the test-bench for political projects that failed to muster democratic mandates in the individual member states.

The implication that such a middle course is second best, that it lacks ambition and vision, that it represents partial abandonment of the ideals that drive the people of Europe, still permeates much of what passes in Ireland for commentary on the EU. Among the Left, the only legitimate ground for dispute centred on the militarization of the Union. There is a bigger issue here. It is not a case of Eurosceptics versus Eurofederalists. The great majority of people have a different vision of Europe and, come what may, it is that vision, that partnership of member states, that is going to win out in the end.

Tax
There are many other dogmas which are to be enforced by Ireland's Moral Inquisition. I will mention just one.

This is the doctrine that low tax rates are inherently wrong. Tax the rich must be good. This 'doctrine' is ruthlessly championed by those Inquisitors of the true faith who 'know' that the more tax rates are 'progressive' in the technical sense, the more 'progressive' they must be in the political sense as well.

To them, it is heresy to suggest that the high yield of low tax rates may be more socially just than the low yield of high tax rates. The old chestnut: 'That's all right in practice, but how will it work out in theory?' springs to mind. I remember being seriously taken to task by one Inquisitor for describing the then existing tax regime, which took more than 60% of marginal earnings of single workers earning below the average industrial wage, as 'confiscatory'.

My first 'error' was to question the moral right of the State to set such tax rates as it thought fit and my second 'error' was to imply that such workers might have moral first call on their own earnings.

Another Inquisitor memorably described the decision to halve capital gains tax from 40% to 20% as a 'fiscal obscenity' – even though that raised its annual yield by 500%. It increased the yield of capital gains tax by five times. It increased it from roughly 160 million to over 600 million in the first year alone but that was a 'fiscal obscenity' because it cut across the theory, the ideology of the 'Moral Inquisition' in Irish society.

The low rate of Corporation Tax, which also yields multiples of what it used to yield, is likewise morally impermissible, doctrinally erroneous and politically heretical.

The pursuit of unhappiness
Having dwelt briefly on some of the beliefs of the modern Irish Moral Inquisition, I should briefly add that international surveys (such as recent flattering surveys by The Economist) suggesting that things are going well for the Irish are hugely despised by the Inquisitors.

The scarlet woman of contentment is the evil temptress. It is not that such surveys are 'inherently evil'. They are a useful aid to 'national self-mortification' if they disclose any fault or short-coming in Ireland. The Inquisition relishes any slippage or unfavourable comparison which can gleaned from international surveys. 'Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness' may have been the base instincts of the founding fathers of the American Republic, but they fall far short of what is appropriate for Ireland in the view of our Moral Inquisition.

We don't do success
Tom Lehrer, the brilliant musical satirist and composer of 'Poisoning Pigeons In the Park', is also the author of the song about Werner Von Braun, the German scientist who designed Hitler's V2 and later developed early American ICBMs. The song contains the memorable couplet:
'Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department!' said Werner Von Braun.
Those lines often come to mind when I think about the attitude of Irish social moralists who claim to speak with moral authority on economic questions but resolutely refuse to dirty their hands intellectually with base and profane issues such as incentive, enterprise, the profit motive, innovation, obsolescence, competition, risk-taking or growth.

Many of those social moralists simply 'don't do prosperity'. They 'do' justice, however. The factors that create prosperity –and differentiate between successful, or sluggish or failing economies – are simply beneath their moral radar and intellectual gaze and are far too tedious and distasteful to warrant their study or understanding.

Their analysis of society and economy is notoriously static. The resources of society are a zero-sum game. If one person prospers, it must be at the expense of another. One country's wealth explains another's poverty. The cake is always a 'given' to be divided. Wealth creation is itself morally suspect. Wealth consumption is more so. Absolute levels of prosperity are, largely speaking, irrelevant. Comparative prosperity and poverty is much more morally interesting and intellectually challenging.

Contrary to the thinking of the US Declaration of Independence, happiness is not to be pursued: It is to be somehow meted out. The dynamic of a liberal society or of a liberal economy is, of course, much harder to grasp from the academic, abstract, intellectual viewpoint favoured by these social moralists.

So most of them give up on attempting to grasp dynamics, and fall back on statics.(In fairness, Marxists must be exempt from that criticism – they have created their own entirely mythical political and economic dynamic with which to re-assure themselves that they can understand and predict social and economic change. For some reason, they can never persuade a free electorate to share their analysis.)

I believe that one of the problems with Irish society is that we put up with half-baked moralising which isn't underpinned with genuine analysis.

Fit to guide or govern?
Would it be churlish to point out that if wealth creation isn't 'your department', to paraphrase Tom Lehrer, if you 'don't do prosperity', you really have very little justification to seek to control or direct the democratic process in a society which depends, at its core, on the successful functioning of a market economy.

If you are uneasy with the very notion of growth, with liberal economics, with risk-taking and with incentives, the question arises as to whether your values are fundamentally consonant with the political and economic realities.

If you believe that the market is a necessary evil, a pragmatic but inevitable derogation from a just social order, are you really in a position to offer social leadership or guidance – as distinct from simple social criticism?

Hostility to the cornerstones of success
I believe that the Irish Moral Inquisition is so hostile to the market economy that it has almost become impossible for anyone in public life to describe himself or herself as an economic liberal. There is here a curious transatlantic symmetry – for very different reasons, the Left in Europe and the Right in America both use the term Liberal as a term of abuse.

And yet, the facts are that Ireland has only prospered in the EU since the decisive shift in economic orthodoxy towards liberal market economics. Our 32 years experience in the European mainstream divides fairly neatly into two halves.

From 1973 to 1987, Ireland's performance as an economy and as a society was an abject example of opportunities lost, failed exercises in command economics and monumental failure with high unemployment, mas emigration and mass despair. From 1988 to 2005, Ireland has got its act together.

True, there has been social partnership in the latter period. But even that only emerged as an alternative to the abyss into which Ireland was sliding in the mid-80s. And the social moralists are still spitting out the term 'neo-liberal' as a label with which to describe all they dislike about modern, successful Ireland. Environmental and political globalisation, apparently, is good; but economic globalisation is bad.

The palpable pleasure and relief exhibited when the Celtic Tiger seemed to falter in 2002 and when familiar failure loomed once again on the political horizon was indeed a wonder to behold. There was even a hint from some that cultural and artistic selfexpression, not to mention social cohesion, might benefit from a good dose of privation. Failure, like penance, is good for the soul.

An alternative vision
I believe that there is an alternative vision for Ireland. I think that it is a vision that builds on political and economic liberalism. I think that its values can be based on principles of civil republicanism. That entails a recognition that society is in tension between the social and the individual – between autonomy and solidarity. It entails a recognition that the State serves everyone and that the rule of Law is the true master.

The vision for a new and better Ireland involves the espousal of social values that equally celebrate success and remediate failure – that are comfortable to liberally encourage the strong while fiercely protecting the weak.

I believe that the new Ireland can be true to the traditions of old Ireland but, at the same time, self confident enough to build a society that constantly reinvents itself – not by plan but by spontaneity and courage to change. I believe in a society that values education not merely as the means of personal liberation but also as the well-spring of social awakening and social innovation. I believe that a society that simultaneously values both religious conviction and philosophical freedom is not only possible but attractive and I have to say that one of the things that I find strangest about modern Ireland is the hostility to the public practice of religion. It is amazing to see how public rhetoric in Ireland is bereft now of any reference to religious values. There is very little willingness to tolerate any form of public recognition of religious practice in our society.

I believe that it is possible to strike a happy balance between social diversity and social cohesion, a happy reconciliation between the rights of freedom and the duties of solidarity, and to effect a reconciliation between the ethics of altruism and individual responsibility.

I strongly believe that liberal societies must strike a pragmatic balance between the need to plan and the need not to plan. There simply has to be a liberating balance between social deliberation and spontaneous change.

It is not always the function of government to plan the future and a balance between the planned and the unplanned is the hallmark of a vigorous, vibrant society, which is liberal in its outlook. In concrete terms, I see Ireland rapidly becoming a successful, selfconfident member of a partnership-based EU. I envisage Ireland as an island with seven or eight million inhabitants.  I believe that the great project of reconciling Orange and Green will succeed, and that both parts of Ireland will become partners in a common political enterprise. I believe that a much more diverse, heterogeneous sense of Irishness will replace the narrow, official self-image of monochrome Catholic nationalist Ireland which characterised the Republic in the 20th century. I believe that the challenges of such a vision for a new Ireland are at least as great as those which faced the patriots of the struggle for independence. Of them it can be truly said:

 'Whatever their failings, their virtues outweighed them'.

Can the same be said of the modern generation of Irish politicians? Can the same be said of the participants in the political discourse of modern Ireland? Will those who write our history a generation hence judge that among our leaders and our thinkers we had a fair proportion of statesmen and patriots? Will those statesmen number among them a reasonable proportion of visionaries to act as leavening for the pragmatists? Will our politics be seen to rise above the rancorous and to touch the patriotic?

Time will tell. But escape from the suffocating intellectual dishonesty and self-loathing of much of what passes for contemporary social commentary in Ireland will, I think, turn out to be a necessary condition for those important questions to be answered in the affirmative.

Social commentary will have to give way to a much more honest, realistic self-appraisal. We will actually have to learn to like ourselves, learn to be confident about ourselves, receive in our newspapers the odd article which says things are going well and giving the reasons as distinct from the proliferation of articles that sifts through everything for the negative and the self- deprecatory in Irish society. I think that if we break out of that mindset and embrace a vision of Irishness with which we are comfortable, a concept of Ireland which is open, reinventing and which is tolerant internally and, at the same time, positive about itself, if we set ourselves agendas in our relationships with the majority community in Northern Ireland based on these concepts, then we have a chance.

If we deal with the issues I have raised here and if this generation of Irish politicians decide whether they are to be statesmen or simply politicians and if our politics, in 25 years time, will have touched the patriotic rather than the mundane, rancorous, partisan stuff, then we have a chance. But it requires a bit of transformation of attitudes and it requires the Irish people to stand up for something better than that which passes for social and political discourse in Ireland today.

Pat Rabbitte TD
Leader of the Labour Party

Born Claremorris. Educated St. Colman's College, Claremorris, UCG. Formerly Trade Union official. President Union of Students in Ireland 1972-4. First elected to Dáil Éireann for the Workers' Party 1989. One of the six WP deputies to form Democratic Left. Returned to the Labour Party, of which he had been a member until 1976, in 1999. Minister of State to the Government and at the Department of Enterprise 1994-7. Member, Dublin County Council 1985-95. Elected to succeed Ruairí Quinn as Leader of the Labour Party 2002.

Slow Burners and Catalysts
What will Ireland look like 25 years hence? Starting to think in terms of that time frame begs so many questions. On the international stage, will the US remain the dominant global power, perhaps with one of the Bush twins fighting it out with Chelsea Clinton for the Presidency?

Will Chinese economic success be channelled into Chinese military prowess? Will Africa remain condemned to endemic poverty, or will the world face up to its obligations to the people of that continent?

On this Island, will the peace process have actually delivered peace and democracy? Will we be living in an agreed Ireland, or in a permanent process? Will we still have a marching season, or the comparative sanity of a 'silly season' like any other country? Will the only weapons of persuasion be words and policies, sentences and speeches rather than Semtex, bigotry, intimidation and deception.

Will Ireland be able to sustain its exceptional economic growth? Will we have managed in the first decade of this century to put down the foundations of sustainable prosperity for the long term? How successfully will we have corrected the failure of recent years to convert a successful economy into a successful society?

Will the West of Ireland have benefited economically, or will the country have tilted on a north-south access, weighed down by all the people who live on the Eastern seaboard? How many of those people will have been born in other countries, and how well will they integrate into Irish society?Will the UN ever be reformed? Will Europe have a constitution? Will Willie O'Dea be Secretary General of NATO? Will Michael McDowell be content to write his memoirs on Shannonside? Will Harry Potter be headmaster of Hogwarts School? Most crucially of all, will Mayo have won the All-Ireland football and Dublin the hurling?

Trying to look into the future – in particular the long-term future – is a tricky business. To prepare this address, I looked back to 25 years ago, to 1980, and asked myself the question, what would one have then seen as the issues, agendas and prospects for Ireland for the next 25 years, i.e. the period 1980 to 2005?

I doubt if many people in 1980 would have realistically seen Ireland's prospects as much better than 'average to poor' – or so the economists, almost without exception, told us - with the future likely to be much the same as much of the past – more emigration, a stop-start economy, inferior living standards by comparison with much of the rest of Europe and so on. Britain may have then been the economic slow boat of Europe but it provided homes, jobs and incomparably higher living standards for tens of thousands of our people.

Certainly, as the 1980s rolled out, it all suggested as much, as the economy and the public finances sharply deteriorated and there was a severe collapse in public confidence as well as a sharp bout of cultural doubt and political instability. We seemed forever destined to be, in the words of an Economist profile in 1988, 'The poorest of the rich.' As Joe Lee wrote, in his famous history of Ireland, published in the late 1980s, a time of deep pessimism in Ireland:

 'It is difficult to avoid the impression that Irish economic performance has been the least impressive in western Europe, perhaps in all Europe, in the twentieth century.'

Lee's analysis in the late 1980s happened to coincide with the beginning of the transformation of our economy. There have also been major social changes. The social power of the Catholic Church has been dramatically diminished – ironically, largely by the Church itself. The collapse also was quite sudden. Even in the mid eighties, things seemed relatively stable. Divorce was a distant prospect. In 1985, everything seemed quite normal as it were, as evidenced in the phenomenon of the moving statue at Ballinspittle and the throngs drawn to that spot that summer.

Today, however, the Church as an institution is much less powerful than it was, the seminaries are empty, and faith has increasingly become part of the private sphere of life. An interesting recent statistic from the CSO, for example, is that more than one third of marriages in Dublin in 2002 were civil ceremonies.

Imagine if, in 1980, I had stood here at the first MacGill Summer School and announced a vision for Ireland in 2005, 25 years into the future:
• a vision that had Ireland one of the richest nations in the European Union, at least as measured in terms of per capita GDP and ranking strongly in terms of per capita GNP; • a land of milk and honey characterised by virtually full employment, yet with endemic pockets of disadvantage, early school dropout, homelessness and widespread drug misuse.
• a country in which it was as common to hear Mandarin, Russian, or Spanish or all of these and a few more languages besides being spoken, as much as English and more commonplace than Irish;
• a place of great ethnic and racial diversity;
• Moore Street transformed into a cross between downtown Lagos and Chinatown;
• a global financial centre;
• a land of 4m people and growing.

Had I set out such a vision, I would have been removed from the building encased in a straitjacket. My audience would have fallen helplessly to the floor laughing and seeking their own medical assistance, some perhaps murmuring 'he was a nice young man, what a pity.' Other speakers this week have conducted similar mental exercises in time-travel, casting minds back to 1980. For my part, in doing so, I want to concentrate on two questions that have a bearing on how we think about the future, as well as how we understand the past.

Firstly, what are the forces that have shaped Irish society over the past twenty-five years, resulting in the society we have today? How much of what we see around us is our own doing, and how much the result of forces beyond our control?

Secondly, if the MacGill school of 1980 had been focused on 2005, what kind of society would we have wanted to build, and have we succeeded in building it? Answering those two questions is central to how we think about the future.

One very useful body of work in looking back at how we have changed is that of the UCD economist Brendan Walsh, in particular, materials on the Irish economy in the 1980s and 1990s that he maintains for his students on the university web site. The story of Ireland in the last quarter century is one of remarkable transformation. From seemingly perpetual economic failure, lightened occasionally by brief bursts of growth, to almost overnight, sustained, record-breaking growth and development. It is also in the words of the sports commentator, a game of two halves: a rotten first half and a stunning transformation in the second half.

What I find interesting in Brendan Walsh's research is the distinction that he makes between what he calls 'slow burners' and 'catalysts' in seeking to explain the recent success of the Irish economy. In his metaphor of slow-burning fires, what Brendan Walsh has in mind are those policies or measures that really only pay off in the very long term: for example the long-term commitment by all political parties from the mid-sixties onwards to education and, equally, the sustained commitment to a stable approach to industrial development based on attracting foreign direct investment and offering a low corporate taxation regime favouring exporting companies.

There are other factors that may be regarded as slow burners – our (common law) legal system, the fact that we are English-speaking and so on. The point Walsh makes about slow burners is that they do take time to take effect – and there is no guarantee that they will: the distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions.

Then there are the catalysts, the more sudden factors, many from outside sources that also sparked growth. Walsh here includes among the catalysts for Ireland's transformation in the 1990s the vast EU transfers under the structural funds, the devaluations of the 1980s, the prolonged US technology boom of the 1990s, the tourism boom sparked by the deregulation of access transport and so on.

In other words, we can in part thank Jacques Delors and Helmut Kohl, and people like Donogh O'Malley, Seán Lemass and T.K. Whitaker who, in the 1960s, laid much of the groundwork for what happened in the 1990s. What is useful in this approach? I think the slow-burning fires are, to a significant degree, things we can ourselves control or influence or shape.

Catalysts are a somewhat different story. Some are surprise packages – shaped essentially, though not exclusively, by external factors and events and catching us unawares. I think the US technology boom of the 1990s with its associated flow of FDI comes under this heading. One can keep an eye out for such external developments and try, as the IDA has, to leverage some gain from them but we cannot really make them happen. We can 'land' Bill Gates, but we didn't make him happen.

But some catalysts also are within our power to influence and are part of the domestic landscape. Here one might instance, as Walsh does, the restructuring of industrial policy, particularly in the 1990s and the decision to push the continued development of the IFSC in the face of some considerable international resistance and opposition, including from Germany and Denmark.

Of course, some things are hard to categorise. Was the restoration of order to the public finances after 1987 a catalyst, or was it simply getting something right which we should not have gotten wrong? Today, we correctly see stable public finances as a basic precondition for prosperity – a slow burner, not a catalyst.

It is perhaps little appreciated today how significant Ruairí Quinn's contribution was on all these fronts – the reshaping of industrial policy institutions, the development of the IFSC and the restoration of fiscal prudence. I hope Ruairí's memoirs, which he will publish in September, will help to redress the balance somewhat in that regard.

Catalysts, of course, can act against you as much as work in your favour. One need only think of the oil shocks to see this. So, the society we have today is the result of a range of factors, some slow burners, some catalysts, some within our control, some outside of it. And of course, when I say that something is within our control, that statement is really a shorthand for saying it is the outcome of a domestic political decision-making process.

Where has all of that left us? Is this the society we would have hoped to create if we had been sitting here in 1980, trying to plan ahead. The answer to that must be, of course, yes and no. Certainly, we are a wealthier country. Income per capita is substantially higher. Unemployment and inflation (something which we would all have been far more worried about in 1980) are far lower. And, as someone who grew up in Mayo in the 1950s, the end of forced emigration is a plus on the national balance sheet that cannot be underestimated. The economic transformation has been profound and welcome.

But, there is, I believe, a major disjuncture between the success of our economy and the problems within our society. We have created away of living for ourselves which often just doesn't make sense. Why, despite all our wealth, do we not have an adequate health service? Why do young families have to turn themselves inside out to juggle the demands of home and work and end up paying more for childcare than for a mortgage? Why do people living in and around Dublin and other cities spend too much of their lives in traffic jams, when other European countries have managed to construct decent transport systems?

Why does one in seven of our children live in the type of poverty that means being deprived of decent food and living conditions? Why is so much of our economy concentrated on the Eastern seaboard? There is, too, I believe, a deeper sense of unease that sits beneath the surface of our national life. I have, over recent years, repeatedly raised the issue of anti-social behaviour. This is something that is different from the usual debate about crime.

What we are talking about here is, and I believe it is the source of considerable unease to many of us – though almost completely unknown to others – a breakdown in patterns of mutual respect and social order which people of my generation grew up taking for granted. I simply do not accept the assumption that, if you believe in robust civil liberties, you cannot at the same time expect to have a society that demands responsibility and mutual respect.

The Ireland I want to see develop in the next 25 years would be different. For some time now, I have been describing the vision I have of that Ireland as 'The Fair Society'. Let me put it to you this way: In the year, 2003, there were 61,517 children born in Ireland. Among those children the most popular first names, the CSO can tell us, were Emma and Seán. By 2030, those Emmas and those Seáns will be about 27 years old, reaching a critical point in their lives. They will, we would expect, be contemplating settling down, perhaps after a number of years of working or studying in other countries. Perhaps, they will be thinking about buying a house and having children themselves.

The question we should ask ourselves is what kind of life will Emma and Seán be able to live? What kind of opportunities for learning and growth will they have had between now and 2030 and what kind of opportunities will be available to their children, in 2030? To me, the 'Fair Society' is founded on the notion that we are all born with gifts and abilities, which we develop over the course of our lives.Human potential is sometimes quite extraordinary. The elite sportsperson, the mathematical genius, the great artist, all demonstrate the extent of human potential.

Equally, as we all learned when the Special Olympics were held in Ireland, sometimes the extraordinary is to be found in people overcoming barriers that others don't face. Each of us is born with our own set of talents and abilities. More often than not, the development of our human potential is to be found in the ordinary business of life – earning a living, relating to those around us, raising a family, learning a new skill, giving something back to our community. If we were to proceed over the next 25 years to abandon the values of the past – community, fraternity – at the same rate as we have abandoned them over the past five or ten years, we are destined to aggravate the divisions and create an ever more unfair society.

To me, the 'Fair Society', the Ireland I want to see in 2030, is one where Emma and Seán, their children and, indeed, any of us who are still here, are able to develop their potential to the full. As Richard Tawney wrote:
'A society is free in so far and only so far … as its institutions and policies are such as to enable all members to grow to their full stature.'
That means that Emma and Seán, and the children they will have together in 2030, will have the freedom, the resources and the support to live life to the full, as a necessary part of which, they will make a meaningful contribution to the community and society in which they live.

For that to be achieved, we need to create a number of things. We need a strong, sustainable, prosperous economy. We need a far more egalitarian society that not just allows people to get ahead but positively encourages and facilitates them to do so. We need an open, liberal and tolerant society, built on a foundation of personal freedom and, of course, we need a vibrant democracy.

Whether we achieve these ends is not entirely within our control but, over a twenty-five year period, we should be much closer to the 'Fair Society' than we are now. My earlier analysis of the last 25 years, though, tells us two things: Firstly, we need to have before us a clear vision of the society we want to create. If you set out on a journey not knowing where you want to go, you are unlikely to get there. It is important that we have debates of this kind, so that we all, and politicians in particular, can articulate where we think the country should go. If, for example, it is official policy that a measure of inequality is necessary to make our system work, then we shouldn't be surprised if we end up with an unequal society. Twenty-five years may be a bit beyond the immediate planning time horizon but it is, nonetheless, important to have a picture before you of what you are striving to create.

Secondly, while there are many factors that are outside our control, equally, there are many which are within it. The catalysts, of their nature, are hard to predict. But the slow burners are easier to see, and we absolutely have to get those right.

Just because something is a slow burner, doesn't mean that you can afford to be slow in addressing it. There has been a culture in Ireland of late, perhaps not as bad now as it was a couple of years ago, of selfcongratulation. Please, don't misunderstand me. I'm all for acknowledging the positive. Indeed, one of the problems with opposition politics, is that one can all too often be forced into a mode of negativity, because it is your job to hold Government to account, and because the opposition's attacks on Government are a better story than the ideas that opposition parties themselves produce. But, self-congratulation can too easily become complacency. If the slow-burners take time to have an impact, then you can't afford to wait before you put a match to them. And I do have a number of worries in that regard.

The truth is that the society we have in 2030 will depend on the investment we make in Emma and Seán over the next twenty years. Moreover, the opportunities available to Emma and Seán's children when they are born in 2030, will depend to a huge degree on the system of pre-school education that is put in place between now and then. None of this is new. We have known it for some time. We have had a childcare crisis for some time. And yet we simply have not moved in any serious way to address it. There is still no sign of a national system of childcare, of an entitlement for every child to free pre-school education, and parents continue to pay more for childcare than they do for their mortgage. The present Government simply has no conception of the scale and nature of the challenge involved or, if they do, have no intention of addressing it. That is but one example. Across the full ambit of Government, we have seen paralysis and delay. The decision on how to address the chaos in Dublin Airport has been held up for years, for no apparent reason. We have been promised a ten-year transport plan, but that has been held up for months because of disagreement between the departments of transport and finance. Delay after delay. Procrastination on procrastination.

We are now a wealthy economy and a society capable of generating large flows of exchequer resources from a greatly expanded tax base without any significant increase in tax rates being necessary. But that will mean little if we cannot invest those resources efficiently and effectively. Instead, for the past eight years the emphasis politically has been on synchronising the political and fiscal cycles in the pursuit of political power – as opposed to sound government. Not to mention the vanity projects and the sheer scale of waste.

Ireland has, in the past, been capable of successful strategic thinking.

But strategic thinking is only useful if it is followed by strategic action.

We simply have to get the slow burners right.
• We have to invest in education at all levels, but particularly at preschool.
• We have to restructure our health service.
• We need housing that is affordable for our people.
• We have to build the infrastructure that will support a 21st century economy.
• We have to build a society that sees equality as a virtue, not an economic impediment.
• We must invest in genuine regionalisation and decentralisation as distinct from dispersing civil servants.
• We must make the Oireachtas more relevant and restoring the stature of Parliament vis-à-vis the dominance of Government.
• We have to ensure that essential institutions like the Garda Síochána are accountable.
• We have to invest in and facilitate the emergence of intercultural diversity in a society where it is official policy to attract more than 30,000 immigrant workers each year.

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