Pretending we're on top of the world

The notion that 'we' are rich and successful is an illusion. The new self-image contains a large degree of self-delusion, writes Fintan O'Toole.

I was writing last week about the way Ireland's broad sense of its place in the world has changed in the last decade. You don't hear anyone talking, as was common in the late 1980s, of Ireland as a Third World country anymore, or even bracketing the country with Europe's Mediterranean fringes like Turkey or Greece. Third World people now are the ones we round up in our periodic swoop on those who are deemed guilty of being illegal immigrants until they can prove otherwise. People from the fringes of western Europe are the ones who serve our meals in Irish restaurants and clean our rooms in Irish hotels. They are no longer us.

The reason is obvious. The boom of the 1990s has lifted Irish standards of living, which were way below the EU average even a decade ago, towards the very top of the world's league table of prosperity. The recent United Nations Development Programme report ranks Ireland as the fourth-richest country in the world, with a per capita gross national product (GNP) exceeded only by Luxembourg, the United States and Norway.

We are, therefore, a very long way on the right side of the great dividing line between the winners and the losers in the game of global capitalism. To talk of Ireland as a Third World country now would be to engage in the most cringe-making exercise in self-pity. Who would be brave or crass enough to try out the idea on a malnourished child in Malawi, whose parents have died of AIDS, who has no chance of getting a basic primary education and whose life expectancy is getting worse, not better?

It is not just that Ireland has got richer in the last decade but that large parts of the world have got poorer. In Sub-Saharan Africa, 242 million people were living on less than a dollar a day at the beginning of the 1990s. At the end of the decade, there were 300 million people at this level of absolute poverty. In central and eastern Europe, the fall of communism has produced a drastic decline in living standards that no one in the West wants to talk about because it is ideologically inconvenient. The Russian Federation and Ukraine have fallen by 20 places on the UNDP's Human Development Index since 1990 - and Moldova and Tajikistan have fallen by 30 or more places.

The world is grotesquely unequal (the richest 1 per cent of the world's people receive as much income each year as the poorest 57 per cent) and the price of being at the bottom of the heap is appallingly heavy: at worst famine and epidemics, at best a life of unrelenting, hopeless misery. No one in their right mind wants to be associated with the unlucky majority. Having escaped their fate, the impulse to distance ourselves from them is increasingly powerful.

Yet the notion that "we" are rich and successful is an illusion. The new self-image is swallowed with a large degree of self-delusion. When the UNDP report points out that Ireland is right up there among the richest nations, we revel in the news. When it also says that Ireland is also the most unequal of the Western societies, alongside the US, the official response is that this is simply a glitch in the statistics.

Launching the report a few weeks ago, Minister of State Mr Tom Kitt was quick to say that some of the data used were up to five years old. The clear implication was that they are therefore misleading. Yet there is no reason at all to believe that Ireland has become less unequal in the last five years. The richest 10 per cent of the population received 25 per cent of the budget giveaways during the five years of the last government's term, while the poorest 20 per cent received less than 5 per cent.

The richest 10 per cent of the Irish population is 11 times wealthier than the poorest 10 per cent. Even after the relatively benign effects of the last Budget, one household in five has less than 50 per cent of the average income. This inequality of income manifests itself, as it does in the world as a whole, in disastrous levels of functional illiteracy and very high mortality rates. In a less extreme but nonetheless very obvious way, Ireland's internal distribution of wealth continues to mirror the gross inequities of the world as a whole.

Placing ourselves on the right side of the global divide between rich and poor is a useful way of forgetting this. It makes us arrogant when we should be humble. It gives us a swagger that is as dangerously self-deluding as it is insufferably smug.

To put our new place in the world in perspective, we should remember that the period of global economic growth in which Ireland finally thrived is a historical anomaly.

The growth in global economic output in the miracle years of 1995 to 1998, when our boom really took off, was greater than that experienced in the entire 10,000-year period between the invention of agriculture and 1900. Growth in 1997 alone was greater than that in the entire 18th century.

We were lucky enough to be in a position to ride that wave while others drowned in it. That doesn't give us the right to behave like lords of the universe.