I’M NO economist, God knows. But if all else fails to get us out of the hole we’re in, I humbly suggest that the Government should consider splitting the country into separate, mutually independent, entities, known loosely as “good” and “bad” Ireland.
"Good" Ireland would retain most of the national territory, including islands and seas; all working parts of the economy; success in the arts and sport; a reputation for friendliness; any remaining tours of Riverdance, etc. "Bad" Ireland (BI) would take over the mess left by the construction bubble. In this respect, BI wouldn't be so much a country – at least initially – as an asset company with impaired loans.
Its vast debts thus moved “off-balance-sheet”, Good Ireland would (one hopes) soon recover a triple-A credit rating and be borrowing money again at under 3 per cent, like the Germans. Bad Ireland, meanwhile, could test the thesis – popular among some economists – that markets have short memories, and that having failed to reward us for being virtuous, they might equally fail to punish us for defaulting.
This is a radical proposal: untried at national level anywhere. So in breaking new ground, there would be many big questions to answer.
Speaking of ground, for example, would Bad Ireland need a territory? Arguably not. It could be just an accounting exercise, run from a back-office in Dublin, like those tax-avoiding multinational subsidiaries that have no employees but control billions of their mother company’s profits. In this sense, bad Ireland could be a logical progression of an idea beloved of business leaders: “Ireland Inc”.
But maybe some geographical identity would be advisable, if only to distinguish it from Good Ireland. There are several possibilities. One is that, while moving debts off-balance-sheet, we could also move them off-shore: to one of our abandoned islands, which – in a swift referendum on Article 2 – would be declared independent for the purpose. If the mainland was deemed preferable, however, a greenfield site near Malin Head might suit. Not only would it be safely distant from good Ireland’s HQ, benefits might also accrue from that part of Donegal’s mythical location. As Ireland’s most northerly point, while also being firmly in the “South”, it could encourage the creative ambiguity that my two-state solution requires.
Speaking of two-state solutions, another possible model would be along the lines of the Palestinian territories. The borders of Bad Ireland need not be contiguous. On the contrary, there’s an argument that, as well as nominally owning all the country’s ghost estates, abandoned building sites and empty office blocks, the administration of Bad Ireland should be physically based there too.
Hence there might be a “Gaza strip” in every Irish town, self-governing and connected to each other by “corridors” through Good Ireland. Yes, it would be a nightmare to run such a state. But in my ideal scenario, the territory would be administered by those people who love saying – vis-a-vis the causes of our economic disaster – that “we are where we are”. Maybe after a year or two of getting lost on backroads, they might finally drop that phrase.
On the other hand, the Palestinian model could make Bad Ireland bigger than Andorra, San Marino, and several other European states that have their own football team. I’m not sure we want that. So getting back to more concentrated territories, my last suggested location is the site earmarked for Thornton Hall prison. This would be apt for many reasons: including the possibility that, eventually, certain people would be deported there to help run the new country, as part of their community-service sentences.
Bad Ireland would need an official name: perhaps “Namaland” or the “Anglo-Irish Republic”. It would also need a flag. I suggest the existing Tricolour with skull-and-crossbones, or a harp with all the strings broken. Ideally, the statelet should not be too political. It would, after all, be a business arrangement. So whatever its name (this is important), it should have the letters “PLC” after it. And rather than a president, it would have a chief executive.
The dangers of this new form of partition would be numerous, of course. They include the possibility that the bad Ireland would in time prove more successful than the good one. Indeed, if it pulled out of the EU and euro, as it likely would, the resulting freedom could be exploited at Good Ireland’s expense.
The breakaway state might also develop in unexpected ways, like Dublin’s Temple Bar area did when CIÉ tried to turn it into a bus garage. At the least, it could become an alternative tourism destination: attracting people via casinos, duty-free cigarette sales, Jedward concerts (in my ideal, the brothers would be among the first deportees), cock-fighting, etc. Or it might just concentrate on being a low-wage economy or a high-finance tax haven. Or all of the above.
By the next global boom, it might have turned into Europe’s Hong Kong. But these are desperate times, and we may have to take that risk. Besides, I suggest that Good Ireland should hedge itself against all such eventualities, by granting Bad Ireland complete independence, but only on a 99-year-lease.
