The resource curse, Irish style

Back in the youth of this blog, there's a post describing the Republic of Ireland as the world's richest banana republic. Indeed. The election now takes Fianna Fáil, out of power for just 2 of the last 20 years, into another 5 year term.

Tourists in Ireland this summer can decide whether they think that the quality of life in the country warrants such incumbency, as they drink only bottled water in Galway, stand in monumental check-in queues at Dublin Airport (assuming they even get there with the clogged roads) and find themselves wondering why everything is so damned expensive. And that's before you start talking to the locals on the busy roads to the airport who will explain, if given the chance, what it's like to live in a country where there's a priority for building houses but not much in the way of services for them (e.g. schools).

So where did it go wrong? Our working hypothesis is that the Celtic Tiger stunted the country's progression out of parish pump politics by giving the government enough revenue to make the parish pump into a much slicker operation. Indeed, Bertie Ahern revealed his methods perhaps more than he intended in his late count night interview on RTE --

It's a great night for FF, it's a great night for the party machine

Because machine politics is what it is. A top-down patronage system, in which Bertie has lots of ministers, who get lots of civil servants, who write lots of letters for constituents ("representations"), some of whom can hope to get appointed to an ever increasing pool of public sector jobs -- all made possible by the gusher of tax revenue that has come with the Celtic Tiger, a boom which owes little to the specific policies and performance of the current government.

Our point is that the only other countries with such lengthy runs of power for not especially talented rulers are ones where a natural resource (usually oil) has allowed the government to become a distributor of sufficient number of favours to keep the machine running, even while the performance of the economy outside the resource sector is not that impressive: the resource curse. In Ireland, the resource is the multinational sector (and to some extent a housing bubble), and that feeds the rest of the machine.

One of these years, at a United Nations meeting, Bertie might notice that only a select few like him and Omar Bongo, president of Gabon, keep showing up to every event, while other leaders come and go. But if even Bertie notices, it's not clear that his 40 percent electoral base will, yet some of them may be aware of problems with their day-to-day life. That raises the more general topic of the strange alienation of many Irish people from their surroundings, which will be a topic for a much longer and more philosophical future post.