Politicians take a step backwards

Sometimes you just have to stop and think, "Hang the new paradigm! Give me back the old ways!"

Moments like these occur in the day-to-day life of the white collar, deskbound worker, when you face your unread, red emails, when the fax spews out endless paper and when the mobile curse rings.

You are driven to reminisce about ancient times almost "before rock 'n' roll, before television, before this was the way it was".

If you worked in the Civil Service, you can think of halcyon days when the only messages you got were those which landed in your in-tray on twice-daily deliveries by the messengers. You think of times when "immediate delivery" meant one of the stalwarts of the service walking across Stephen's Green, envelope in hand, rather than the instant popping up on a screen somewhere halfway around the world.

You think of times when the black phone on your desk had no dial at all, but would only ring the telephonists who would connect you to America or to the next room. How measured the 1980s were, and how we thought even then that we were working hard. The temptation to despair of the new also occurs when you read about our tourism and our welcoming attitude going to pot.

Or when you read a cri de coeur from a returned emigrant disappointed and disillusioned with what we have let happen to the State, and what we have not bothered to do for the State.

You ask, can we not have the jobs, the budget surpluses and the growth without our people, our culture, becoming self-centred and consumerist? Did we really have no choice but to trade our reviled, cowed, conformist past with the damning, and even smug, fecklessness of much of today's attitudes? "Give me the old way", is a tempting thought also as we begin to contemplate the new challenges of managing an economy which just might sustain income and wealth generation at quite high levels. This State may yet manage to create a bedrock of wealth - generating businesses which will provide sustainable levels of income and wealth and will allow us to build the type of social and physical infrastructure that other countries, which have long since been wealthy, have built up slowly. I don't think we have yet secured that bedrock. We are only beginning to grasp what it might mean.

It would be altogether easier to assume that we face the same issues fundamentally as in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and that growth in recent years is just an aberration.

If we wished, we could always keep things that way, sort of surviving on the edge as a developing economy but one which did not yet need to face the challenges of managing wealth sustainably and equitably.

Such wistful moments always pass. Just as it would be futile for the white collar worker to try to revert to old technology, it would be tragic for the State not to address seriously the new economic challenges and opportunities we now face. For example, having a highly-educated workforce has been a good sales line, but maintaining a relatively highly-educated workforce in an era of increasing, global competition will surely mean we cannot stand still at today's levels.

Our State will need more people with post-graduate degrees to stay here to have a relatively "highly" educated workforce.

If high-tech industry clusters are to remain here, we must have no limits on who may work in them. We cannot limit our workforce to just the best people in Ireland, or even in the EU. We must allow the best in the world to build businesses here.

There are hopeful signs. The economic policy debate is moving in a direction where there is convergence even between the PDs and Labour on the need for investment in social and physical infrastructure. There is still lots of party political jibing and jeering, but paradoxically, it tends towards reversion to the past.

In contrast to the subterranean flow of policy towards agreed objectives, the Labour-Democratic Left merger brings us closer to the old, 1970s party system. If Labour were to succeed in driving the PDs out of business, we would have three main parties again, with Labour conveniently as the permanent government (on the assumption that Fianna Fail would not get an overall majority). The Humpty Dumpty mould that Dessie O'Malley broke would be put back together again. How bizarre. Even as the policy debate addresses new challenges, could the dynamics of party politics really be saying, "Hang the new, give me the old?", in a wistful, but futile, moment?

Oliver O'Connor is an investment funds specialist