Measuring success by growth rates only is a joke

If it really wanted to win a replay of the Nice Treaty referendum, the Government would have sent us all on European holidays this year. Not to the Costa del Sol or Crete or Majorca or even the French Riviera. Not even to the great cities of Europe, to Florence or Paris, to Stockholm or Barcelona, where grandeur reigns, historical treasures accumulate and money hangs discreetly over the streets like a puff of white cloud.

Those, after all, are the places we go of our own accord at this time of the year and, to judge from the crowds at the airports, now more than ever. The lure of sun, sea and shops works a magic that doesn't require any assistance from our leaders. They would send us instead to small, relatively ordinary places, to the continental equivalents of Waterford or Sligo or Letterkenny.

Sea, sun and sand are gifts of nature, and the Greeks, Spanish, French and Italians can hardly expect praise for the blessings of location. A great metropolis like Paris has a dynamic of its own for which a particular culture cannot entirely claim the credit.

If you want to see what a society has made of itself, you have to look at the middling towns and small cities, the places that get a couple of pages in the middle of the guide book, the places you wouldn't really go unless you had either a special reason to be there or a lot of time to fill.

I happened to be in two such places this year, for no better reason than that I was invited to speak to conferences. One was Perpignan, a smallish city in the south-east of France. The other was Burgos, a similarly sized city in the heart of Spain. Although both have their treasures and their beauties, neither is an awesome place.

Although both have been at one time or another of some importance in European history, neither is now of great geopolitical consequence. Some memories of medieval glory may linger, but the shifting sands of economic and political power have buried most of them. Apart from the great Gothic cathedral in Burgos, neither city has anything you would go far out of your way to visit.

And yet what struck me almost as a disturbing presence in both places was the simple, inescapable air of wealth. Not in a strict monetary sense, although both places seem prosperous enough, but in the much more important sense of having a rich quality of life. Dublin may be bigger, wealthier and trendier. We may have become hyped up on our own, half-demented pursuit of material status. But for the ease and pleasure of day-to-day living, there is simply no comparison.

Public spaces are clean, well planned and safe, occupied in the daytime by old people and children, and in the evening by families out for a stroll. The medieval core of the cities is treated with respect and affection, beautifully preserved but also lived in without either a pedantic pomposity or a frantic need to turn everything into a commodity for tourists.

There are chain stores and the odd fastfood joint, but also hundreds of small shops and restaurants selling local produce and offering a choice beyond our familiar alternatives of pretentious food at fabulous prices and cheap muck doled out with bad grace. Trains, trams and buses get you where you want to go.

It is not that these are placid places untouched by the kind of disruption and chaos by which we often excuse our own failures. Like most of Europe, they have known occupation, civil war and political crisis much more recently than the Republic has.

Neither France nor Spain is an idyllic polity, full of idealistic citizens and inspired leaders, free of greed and corruption. What they do have is an underlying civic culture that values the quality of life, enhanced and allied to a political culture that treats a willingness to invest in public services as a source of pride rather than a crime against free market orthodoxy.

That system of values would not tolerate the sale of a city's development plan to a circle of private investors, as happened in Dublin in the 1980s. Or the almost complete takeover of its retail sector by foreign-owned chain-stores. Or the higgledy-piggledy spread of a city into the countryside through a flood of one-off, haphazard housing developments. Or the complete domination of car culture over civic culture that makes the notion of strolling around the city for pleasure into an image of pure perversity.

Or the steady encroachment of work into free time that makes enjoyment a slave to the demands of productivity. Or the grotesquely inflated property prices that make it impossible for many people to live close to their work.

Sending us to such places would do more than anything else to reawaken the appeal of Europe. But it would also put a stop to the ludicrous swagger of recent times in which senior members of the Cabinet have implied that all those unfortunate continentals are jealous of our wonderful success. The stupidity of measuring success only by reference to growth rates and not by the ability to lead a pleasant life would be apparent.

The notion that we are better off in our American-style economy than our continental cousins are in their horrible social democratic prisons would be seen for the wonderful joke that it is.