Back to the future - again

Here is a typical left-wing critique of the Celtic Tiger delivered in a major speech last week: "The modern problem is the conflict between economic activity and the quality of life. Despite all the impressive technical advances that have been made, in spite of increasing gross national product, life for many in the community is not as good as it could be.

Poverty, in the physical sense, has to a large extent been eliminated, but it still persists in other forms. Loneliness, anxiety and insecurity exist on far too wide a scale. The community's physical needs are provided for by economic growth and development but on the other hand two things are clear. Firstly, the expansion of a modern economy can steadily worsen our natural environment and, secondly, increased consumption does not necessarily increase the enjoyment of life. How are we to deal with this dilemma?"

Having outlined the contradictions of 21st-century Ireland, the speaker went on to identify the need for major shifts in public policy. He argued, in essence, that economic growth must cease to be a goal in itself and become a means to a larger end. "In future every project, every course of action, must be subjected to both an economic and a social test, before being adopted . . . Projects must be examined, not alone on how they will contribute to the gross national product, but how they will affect people's lives, their enjoyment, their environment."

There will have to be "an equitable distribution of the produce of economic growth". The "inflexible, authoritarian" bureaucracy of the State will have to learn to "serve rather than to rule". Planning will have to get away from the "insatiable pressure" to provide new houses and learn to "see the community of the future in the round". It should aim at the "elimination of social gaps by a continuing process of levelling up. There should be no social backwaters."

And all of this is achievable. "We have the resources of spirit and intellect. What we need is a vision of the future and the will to make it a reality."

Okay, I'm telling lies. The speech wasn't delivered last week. It wasn't about the Celtic Tiger. And it wasn't coming from a left-wing perspective. The speaker was Charles Haughey. The year was 1970. The occasion, ironic as it may seem in retrospect, was a dinner in Wynn's Hotel in Dublin for Cairde Fáil, Fianna Fáil's fundraising arm, so it is probable that much of the audience was made up of the very builders and developers that Haughey was ostensibly criticising. The context was a reflection on a decade of sustained and unprecedented economic growth, a time when it seemed safe to say that prosperity had arrived for good and its consequences could now be analysed.

Yet there is not a word of Haughey's speech that could not be delivered now by a politician, a bishop or a columnist and have us all nodding our heads in recognition. This tells us a few interesting things. The most obvious is that a lot of what we take to be new, in our current discourse about the state of the nation, is actually mere repetition. Archbishop Seán Brady told us recently, for example, that the insecurity and stress of contemporary Ireland is rooted in the loss of religious faith. Yet, 37 years ago, when the Irish church was at the height of its power, Haughey was talking about the "loneliness, anxiety and insecurity" of Irish society. However tempting it may be to imagine a return to a past in which we were all happy, we have to remind ourselves that that time never existed.

That Haughey's speech about the limitations of a model of economic growth which fails to account for equality, community and the environment could be repeated word-for-word in 2007 tells us something else. It marks the abject failure of those who have shaped development over the last half century (principally Fianna Fáil) to develop a concept of the future that is not merely rhetorical. From the 1960s boom, the lessons were that the fruits of prosperity must be distributed equitably, that quality of life and environmental protection must be central considerations of the political and planning processes, that the bureaucracy must be reshaped and that never again should we build massive housing developments without putting in place the supports for lively and balanced communities. And the lessons from the Celtic Tiger boom? Ditto.

The Irish future as it looks from 2007, in other words, is the same as the future as it looked in 1970. All the tectonic shifts that have happened in Ireland and the world over the last 37 years have done nothing to change our official rhetoric of what we're going to do now that we're rich. Power has passed to a new generation: Charles Haughey's protege is now Taoiseach and has a decade of unbroken power behind him. The same impulses, the same instincts, the same intellectual models and the same rhetoric govern us. And the question arises: If they failed to bring about the future they promised 37 years ago, why should we believe they'll bring it about now?