The passage of time allows us the luxury of viewing periods of history in a more considered and rounded context.
In the years that followed the banking collapse and the bailout paid for by Irish citizens, the phrase “Celtic Tiger”, which was once a source of pride, became synonymous with gross economic incompetence, greed and vulgarity.
The damage has been exhaustively documented – the austerity that hit the poorest communities, the young people forced to emigrate, the builders that went bust, the young couples trapped in negative equity, the middle classes who invested in property and bank shares as a one-way ticket to prosperity only to find themselves facing hardship in their old age.
The collapse of the Celtic Tiger was all of these things, but to view it entirely through the prism of how it all ended is to miss the point.
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The Troika left town more than a decade ago. Now, the ratio of Ireland’s debt to gross national income has fallen to 70 per cent from 170 per cent at the peak of austerity. Everybody who wants a job has one. Ghost estates, once seen as the most visible manifestation of that period and all its follies, have vanished from the landscape. There were 3,000 in 2010; there are less than one per cent of that figure now.
What is the real legacy of the Celtic Tiger? Look around you. In the noughties, more than 600,000 homes were built. The State built a motorway network between 1991 and 2010, which made it immeasurably easier to get around. The tailbacks of Monasterevin and Moate, to name but a couple of bottleneck towns, are a distant memory.
The M50 faced multiple objections and was eventually finished in 2005. Would it get built now?
The Port Tunnel (2006), Terminal 2 of Dublin Airport (opened in 2010, but built during the boom), Cork suburban railway (2009), the Aviva Stadium, Croke Park, Dublin docklands and Temple Bar - which dates back to the Charles Haughey era - are long-term projects that will outlast the memories of those austerity years.
The Celtic Tiger was informed by a can-do attitude and a spirit of optimism. Despite recovering our prosperity, we have not regained the optimism of this heady time.
The most basic metric of confidence about the future, the number of children being born, has declined precipitously since peaking during the boom years. Twenty thousand fewer children were born in the State last year than in 2007, despite a significantly bigger population.
This has mirrored trends throughout Europe, but Ireland in the 2000s was an outlier in having a birth rate at or around the replacement rate of 2.1 children per women. That number is now 1.5 and declining. Nevertheless, because of the Celtic Tiger era baby boom, Ireland will have a relatively healthy demographic well into the 2040s.
Huge mistakes were made during the Celtic Tiger era, but huge things were accomplished. We have spent too long dwelling on the former and not enough on the latter.
Few would argue with this policy, but it also abolished tax relief for investors and developments
Fifteen years on from the nadir of the bust, the Troika bailout of 2010, perhaps the most important lesson from the Celtic Tiger is that we got things done.
The post-boom recovery has been a time of crippling inertia exemplified by the National Children’s Hospital, over-budget and long-delayed. Dublin Metrolink, the country’s longest-running joke, is a manifestation of how not to get things done.
The State’s most acute problem, the housing crisis, is a side effect of prosperity, not austerity. Everybody knows there is a serious problem, a bigger and more intractable one than faced when the Troika arrived in town, yet attempts to resolve it have foundered repeatedly because they have been inadequate.
Banks lent irresponsibly during the Celtic Tiger years and we all paid a price. We went from being incorrigible spenders to incorrigible savers. Irish people have €156 billion in saving and as a result, the banks are now stuffed with money, yet small and medium-sized developers claim they can’t get credit and the equity they need to purchase zoned land is too high. The banks want the Government to offer a State guarantee credit scheme to developers.
The Government’s response to the property-induced economic crash was to make credit much more restrictive to those wishing to buy a home. Few would argue with this policy, but it also abolished tax relief for investors and developments.
Section 23 exemptions were first introduced in 1988 to give a boost to apartment development in inner-city areas of towns and cities which had suffered decades of flight to the suburbs. Developers and investors could write off the costs of investing in apartments against their rental income over a period of 10 years.
By 2011, they were in such bad odour that the coalition government of Fine Gael and Labour abolished them for new entrants at the behest of the Troika. They had an inflationary impact on housing, they allowed wealthy people to shelter taxable income, they were expensive for the State, or so the arguments went.
Countering that fact is that they were a huge success in getting homes and apartments built – at least 60,000 over the duration of the scheme.
At this remove, the question that the Government should be drawing from the Celtic Tiger years is how so many homes were built - about 90,000 in 2006 alone - and what positive lessons can be drawn from that.
