FROM THE ARCHIVES:Seán Lemass's second Programme for Economic Expansion was effectively abandoned after three years because of failure to reach its targets. In this article Garret FitzGerald worried that the decision would discourage future economic planning. – JOE JOYCE
ECONOMIC PLANNING is, above all, a discipline. It forces governments and State agencies, and also, although less compellingly, the private sector, to state explicitly what results they expect from current policies. Then, if these results are not achieved, new and powerful pressures build up in favour of a review and reconsideration of ineffective policies, and in favour of a much more realistic future assessment of the results that can be achieved by such policies.
Without such a discipline democracy tends all too easily to relapse into inefficient demagogy – a position in which wasteful popular policies are persisted with indefinitely. This is perhaps especially true of Ireland, and we have a particular need of the disciplines of economic planning to offset the weakness of a political system all-too-subject to popular pressures.
In these circumstances the abandonment of an economic programme because its targets are not being attained is nothing short of tragic. To the extent that this new policy of dropping the Second Programme and bringing forward the starting date of the Third Programme is successfully implemented, to that extent we shall have thrown away most of what we could have secured from the Second Programme.
If the process of reviewing progress with the Second Programme had been loyally followed, the failure to secure the programme’s targets would have created powerful pressures in favour of a complete overhaul of agricultural policies, which have given us persistent stagnation in that sector instead of the 3.8 per cent annual growth of output projected in the programme in favour of a reconsideration of our investment plans, and especially of public investment, which has failed to yield adequate returns in the form of economic growth or social progress; in favour of a much more realistic approach in future to employment projections; and in favour of closer control over the relationship between public current expenditure and national output, designed to prevent a repetition of the over-rapid increase in the burden of taxation that has occurred during the first three years of the Second Programme.
Without the kind of public pressure that would be generated by a national debate on the failure to attain the Second Programme targets, it will be very difficult to secure these advances. By seeking to sweep the debris of the Second Programme under the carpet, the Government is . . . risking the loss of all these potential benefits of economic planning . . .
No doubt there are some who would take up precisely the opposite position . . . claiming that public exposure of failure to attain programme targets would weaken public confidence in planning. This view is certainly short-sighted and mistaken.
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