If such discussions are to produce the outcome that republicans so vocally desire, those who currently reside north of the Irish border will, among many other things, need to be persuaded that their material interests would be better served by partition coming to an end. It might have been anticipated then that the Sinn Féin position paper would have set out in detail the economic vitality of the actually existing republic into which the people of Northern Ireland might in time be absorbed.
Strangely, however, the discussion document says remarkably little about the fact that the Irish Republic has for much of the last three decades registered the highest rates of economic growth in the developed world. Rather more energy is devoted to attributing the relative poverty of the southern border counties to a polity other than the one that has governed them for the last century. The casual reader approaching these matters for the first time would certainly come away with the knowledge that the Irish Republic has a more productive economy than its nearest neighbour but would not learn a great deal more. The debates that Sinn Féin so earnestly invite us to join require rather more information than that, so let’s put a little more flesh on the bones.
It is certainly true that the often highly questionable strategies – as we will explain in the next essay - employed by successive Dublin governments over the last three decades or more have led to impressive levels of economic growth. While the Irish economy is one in which enormous wealth is created, those resources tend to end up in remarkably few hands. The vast riches enjoyed by the country’s elite continued to grow even during the recession, and the 300 wealthiest people in the state together now command treasure to the value of more than €100 billion.[1] While the advent of Covid-19 has spelled crisis for a great many ordinary people in the Irish Republic, the same cannot, predictably, be said of the country’s small band of billionaires. A recent Oxfam report suggests that this select group has added a further €3.3 billion to its already obscene wealth since the onset of the pandemic.[2]
In contrast, vast swathes of the rest of the population – even those earning what appear to be generous salaries – often struggle to make ends meet. The median salary in the twenty-six counties is now a little over €36,000[3] - a figure which might seem substantial in other European contexts but which is quickly whittled away by the high cost of the living in the Irish Republic. The principal demand on people’s incomes is, needless to say, the hugely inflated cost of accommodation, especially in the rental sector. At present, the monthly price of renting a two-bedroom dwelling is, on average, €1419, with rents in Dublin often far exceeding €2000.[4] By comparison, private sector rents in Northern Ireland are £625 on average (at current exchange rates €702), rising to £699 in the Belfast area (€785).[5] The seemingly generous salaries in the Irish Republic also need to be adjusted to acknowledge the costs arising from the absence of an adequate public health system which means that a routine trip to the doctor costs upwards of €50, an unexpected visit to the Accident & Emergency Department will set you back €100, and prescriptions can range in price up to a monthly maximum of €114 per family or individual. Only one in three people are entitled to free medical care, a state of affairs which has compelled almost half the population to take out private health insurance policies that, on average, cost €2059 a year.[6] That leaves around one in five Irish citizens who find themselves in the decidedly precarious position of being entitled to free treatment in neither the public nor private systems.
While journalists have become rather preoccupied with the fate of the ‘squeezed middle’ in recent years,[7] the principal casualties of the dramatic inequalities that scar the Irish Republic are, inevitably, those on lower incomes and in precarious work.
The Sinn Féin position paper draws our attention, not unreasonably, to the high incidence of low pay in Northern Ireland, but it forgets to mention that the problem exists on both sides of the border. Indeed, a recent OECD report suggests that the Irish Republic now has a greater proportion of poorly paid workers than any other developed country, with the inevitable exception of the United States.[8]
Given the coincidence of low levels of pay and a high cost of living, it is entirely predictable that appalling levels of deprivation have survived the end of the austerity years in the twenty-six counties. Immediately before the onset of the coronavirus crisis, there were 680,000 people living in poverty – 200,000 children among them - in what is, on paper at least, one of the wealthiest countries in the world. As elsewhere, the Irish Republic has seen the growth of the ‘working poor’ with more than 100,000 employees now falling into that abject category.[9] Even more sobering has been the rising number of people in the twenty-six counties who cannot afford a roof over their heads. The decision of the Irish government to lure ‘vulture funds’ into the property market from 2013 onwards had the desired effect of inflating economic performance metrics. It also drove up rents to the point where many people found themselves out on the street.
In the days before the pandemic broke, there were more than 10,000 people officially homeless in the Irish Republic, among them more than 4,000 children.[10]
What the metanarrative of Irish economic success often serves to obscure, then, is a whole series of other stories about the poverty, inequality, and injustice that have accompanied the boom years south of the border. If people are to have a genuinely informed debate about the political economy of an Irish Republic that might exist then people need to be informed of the political economy of the Irish Republic that actually does exist. That Sinn Féin fail to mention the dark side of the Irish economic model in their discussion document is not, of course, because republicans are unaware of those sordid realities. Consider the opening lines of the party’s impressively comprehensive, and evidently persuasive, manifesto in the 2020 Irish General Election, which mark the void between the founding ideals of the state and the prevailing circumstances south of the border:[11]
Is the ideal of the republic reflected in scenes of homeless children eating their dinner off the pavement outside the GPO?
Or in the indignity of elderly people left to suffer for days on hospital trolleys?
Is it reflected in the horror of people fored to live in tents, because they don't have a home?
That none of these critiques even surface in Sinn Féin’s recent position paper reveals once more the profoundly bipolar nature of the republican mind. While republicans are keenly aware that the economic model adopted by the Irish government has widespread social costs, they are also deeply mindful that it has advanced the case for a united Ireland in a way that the ‘armed struggle’ never could. As a consequence, although Sinn Féin are among the most vehement critics of these neoliberal strategies in debates about the current direction of the Republic of Ireland, they implicitly endorse them in debates about the future direction of Northern Ireland. This fundamental contradiction means that contemporary republican discourse is marked by an increasingly explicit form of doublethink. Or, to invoke a metaphor widely used south of the Irish border, republicans are wont to talk out of both sides of their mouths at the same time.
Among the ironies of the current debates about the near political future is, therefore, that they have served to betroth republicans to an economic strategy they know from hard experience to entail widespread social injury. But what if that development model is in fact living on borrowed time? In the final of our three essays, we consider how the parameters of debate might change should the insidious role the Irish state plays in the tax evasion strategies of multinational capital begin, finally, to catch up with it.
Notes
[1] Samantha McCaughren, 2017, ‘Wealth of Ireland’s top 300 inches above €100bn,’ Irish Independent, 3 April 2017. Available at: https://www.independent.ie/business/irish/rich-list-2017/wealth-of-irelands-top-300-inches-above-100bn-35584157.html.
[2] Steven Heaney, 2021, ‘Report: Wealth of Irish billionaires increased €3.3bn since beginning of Covid-19 pandemic,’ Irish Examiner 25 January. Available at: https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-40213496.html.
[3] Central Statistics Office, 2019, Earnings Analysis using Administrative Data Sources 2018. Available at: https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-eaads/earningsanalysisusingadministrativedatasources2018/annualearnings/. Dublin: CSO
[4] Ronan Lyons, 2020, The Daft.ie Rental Price Report, Third Quarter. Available at: https://ww1.daft.ie/report/2020-Q3-rental-daftreport.pdf?d_rd=1.
[5] Northern Ireland Housing Executive, 2020, Performance of the Private Rental Market in Northern Ireland July - December 2019, Belfast: NIHE. Available at: https://www.nihe.gov.uk/Documents/Research/Private-Rental-Market-CURRENT/performance-private-rental-market-NI-july-december.aspx?ext=.
[6] Paul Moran, 2020, A review of Private Health Insurance in Ireland 2019, Dublin: Health Insurance Authority. Available at: https://www.hia.ie/sites/default/files/17th%20January%20Kantar%20Report_0.pdf.
[7] Rosie Meade and Elizabeth Kiely, 2020, “(Neo)Liberal populism and Ireland’s ‘squeezed middle,’” Race & Class 61(4): 29-49.
[8] Social Justice Ireland, 2020, Low pay in Ireland still a huge issue, Dublin: SJI. Available at: https://www.socialjustice.ie/content/policy-issues/low-pay-ireland-still-huge-issue.
[9] Social Justice Ireland, 2020, Poverty Focus 2020, Dublin: SJI. Available at: https://www.socialjustice.ie/sites/default/files/attach/publication/6310/2020-05-18-sjipovertyfocusmay2020final.pdf?cs=true
[10] Focus Ireland, 2021, Latest figures on homelessness in Ireland, Dublin: Focus Ireland. Available at: https://www.focusireland.ie/resource-hub/latest-figures-homelessness-ireland/.
[11] Sinn Féin, 2020, Giving workers and families a break: A manifesto for change, Dublin: Sinn Féin, p. 3.
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