THE NEW NATIONALISM: THE REPUBLIC OF IRELAND: PERILS OF PRAGMATISM
Jacobsen, John Kurt
In a quaint Easter day speech delivered in 1943, Eamon de Valera, patriarchal prime minister of the Irish Free State (it became the Republic of Ireland in 1949), described his cherished vision...
...Although government waffling on a proposed 2 percent farm levy ignited the simmering anger, soon now the entire developmental wisdom is likely to be at stake...
...Agricultural employment has fallen from 36 percent in 1961 to approximately 22 percent today, with the attendant increase in service and manufacturing marred by the emigration "residual...
...Fed by the EEC's Common Agricultural Policy, farm income increased by 20 percent in 1978...
...Accordingly, the book value of American manufacturing investment rose 186 percent from 1973 through 1977, while worldwide book value increased by a comparatively paltry 47.7 percent...
...Just in time for the recession...
...An accentuation of this trend would call for the most fundamental reappraisal...
...The U.S...
...8 As of mid-June 1979, the Irish pound—to the government's surprise --has been falling against sterling since Ireland joined EMS...
...Fianna Fail spokesmen, on the other hand, expect non-U.K...
...NOTES I For a more detailed discussion, see my "Changing Utterly?: Irish Development and the Problem of Development," in Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Winter 1978...
...The new Irish state, after winning its political independence from Britain in 1921, was indeed a deeply bourgeois product...
...Expansion of public enterprise (into commercial activities) was dismissed with the smug tautology that "four private sector jobs are needed to support one public sector job...
...But then the lackluster party was illuminated by the inflow of such talents as Justin Keating, Dr...
...By 1958 the autarkic economic policies pursued by his party since 1932 were abandoned without fanfare or remorse, for the Republic was adrift in a stagnant economy from which capital and people fled in frightful numbers...
...The "strategy" was the soul of pragmatic simplicity—force-feed profits to private industries, and they will gratefully create more jobs via productive reinvestment...
...The temptation to speculate in this direction must have soared after the Irish Congress of Trade Unions rejected the government's first inadequate appeasement offer (given the merry misnomer, the "National Understanding"), voting against it on May 23 with a resounding 318 to 119...
...These people have a right under the law as it stands apparently to object," the minister of Industry, Commerce, and Energy ominously grumbled...
...No wonder that the party remained a marginal influence...
...The Industrial Development Authority (IDA) doubled expenditures from £63.2 million in 1976 to £121 million in 1977, but "jobs projected" increased by only one-third, from 17,893 to 24,028...
...To "get the country moving again," the new Fianna Fail government abolished local property taxes, road taxes on smaller cars, and the wealth tax...
...This year Ireland is entering the European Monetary System...
...THE IRISH LABOUR PARTY was severely handicapped by the clerical climate, the small industrial work force that was further divided by the Ulster border, and by the incessant emigration of its recruiting pool...
...While British and West German investment is substantial (and the Japanese coming on), American firms provided the lion's share throughout the '70s...
...I°In November 1977, a Dutch multinational firm —in the process of worldwide retrenchment —pulled out of the City of Limerick during an intra-union dispute and left 1,400 workers unemployed...
...Today more than 1 million Irish natives live and work overseas...
...Last year, even tourism receipts had risen by 20 percent, challenging the familiar Irish lament that "you can't eat the scenery...
...But Fianna Fail isn't renowned as the party of pragmatists for nothing...
...Though founded with the widespread and loyal support of small farmers, Fianna Fail also snared in business support with its import-substitution policies...
...This docility was reflected in a midrecession (May 1975) survey conducted by the European Community that measures "overall life satisfaction" and "happiness...
...Fianna Fail organized into a potent electoral machine, enabling the party to form governments for 35 of the next 41 years...
...Irish bishops can no longer demand and get offensive references, such as "workers' republic," deleted from Labour party documents...
...3 Given a government that is hell-bent on wage restraint and crying for "competitiveness" in this painfully open economy, the stage is set for an outbreak of what Irish politicians call the "British madness...
...The general motivation is much less greed then sheer need...
...The latter is reflected in the rising costs of job creation...
...6 A sentiment that Minister of Finance George Colley shares with his Fine Gael predecessor, Richie Ryan...
...If the taxation issue is to be brought into the purview of National Wage bargaining, the government will have expanded an agenda that may eventually also encompass investment policy...
...The government borrowing requirement rose to 13 percent of GNP in 1978 in order to raise the level of demand through state spending...
...the party of the "Soldiers of Destiny") set out, so the saga goes, to steer their fragment of the island into Europe (i.e., the Common Market) and the era of push buttons...
...That policy results in fewer jobs due to weak multiplier effects (55 percent of their exports consist of interaffiliate trade), weak linkages, and control of approximately 60 percent of total manufacturing assets in the Republic today...
...8 Any deflationary measures taken to maintain EMS parity, of course, will prove most harmful to small firms affected by slackening domestic demand, and to employment...
...In a quaint Easter day speech delivered in 1943, Eamon de Valera, patriarchal prime minister of the Irish Free State (it became the Republic of Ireland in 1949), described his cherished vision of a self-sufficient nation— replete with comely maidens, cozy homesteads and, of course, a reunited Ulster...
...For Fianna Fail, the European Monetary System (EMS) was a godsend from the secular mainland...
...Always pragmatic, the party filled in the large entrepreneurial gaps in the economy with a growing set of semiautonomous public enterprises designed to supplement, not challenge, private enter75 prises...
...Blaming wage rises and strikes for the shortfalls, the government maintained an awfully civil stance toward private companies, well indeed expressed last November by Prime Minister Lynch: While he commented that the substantial increases in the profitability in private companies had not been reflected in increased employment, Mr...
...By the end of 1978, the government plaintively announced that while it had influenced the creation of 30,000 new jobs, industrial redundancies had nibbled the net total down to just 17,000—thus 3,000 shy of target—during a year brimming with impressive growth statistics...
...Competing imports, as a percentage of non-food manufactures, had risen from 19 percent in 1965 to 31 percent in 1973, as Ireland enacted tariff reductions with Britain alone...
...Department of Commerce cites Ireland as the most profitable location in the world, with a 25 percent average profit rate for U.S...
...Ireland did, indeed, want to be a nation once again but not to discard the old peasant ways, the old respectable vices and virtues...
...5 Bowyer Bell, The Secret ,4rmy (London: Sphere Books, 1970), p.441...
...A lively antinuclear campaign, long before Three Mile Island, squarely opposes the current logic of development, promoting instead alternative energy research, smaller-scale industry, and shades of de Valera—a more self-sufficient approach...
...The sex appeal of the scheme was the "rigid discipline" it would instill into the wage front in order to remain within the band of currencies...
...Emigration had risen from a rare net inflow of 9,480 [est.] in 1973 to a more customary outflow by 1977 of 13,800 [est...
...The minister of Finance recommended the creation of a National Hire Agency that would cast off the dole anyone who refused the first available form of employment...
...In disarray after the 1977 election, Fine Gael's right-wing leadership was displaced by Garret Fitzgerald—one of the brighter lights in European politics—who is arduously reorganizing the party structure and character along social democratic lines...
...To compound injuries, the Irish electorate lately indulges environmental issues—pollution control, a nuclear power debate, conservation of historic landmarks— with an energy most unbecoming to a developing nation...
...Less than two-thirds of "jobs projected" actually materialize...
...Though dole recipients declined by 11,000, renewed emigration alone could easily account for the drop...
...Irish Times, November 18, 1978] "The correct approach," said the undaunted minister for Economic Planning and Development, "is to intensify our efforts and to press ahead with an even faster rate of job creation in 1979...
...Where the U.K...
...The evident quid pro quo for Labour's minor reforms was Fine Gael's recklessly zealous security policy, which alienated many citizens who found they needed guards for their guardians...
...Relegating the donkey-and-cart age to Tourist Board posters, the Republic of Ireland leaped forward industrially over the next 20 years by recreating itself as the most alluring haven for footloose capital this side of Singapore) A 15-year export-tax holiday and, since 1973, access to the European Economic Community (EEC) crown the incentive package to foreign investors, who have located hundreds of industrial projects (though little actual capital) in this hospitable economic and political climate...
...Bowyer Bell summarizes the postrevolutionary consequences with acerbic accuracy: The judges would still have worn wigs, the pound sterling circulated, and the priests banned innovation...
...The agency has developed an imaginative scheme to promote native entrepreneurs and small industries, but it clearly relies on large foreign capital-intensive enterprises to supply the bulk of jobs necessary to meet the government's employment goals...
...Ireland imported the Common Market price structure but, alas, omitted comparable wages...
...The small Irish fishing fleet nets a mere 15 percent of the total catch in the 200-mile zone...
...Despite the U.K.'s assurances that it will independently stay within range of EMS, the wisdom of a link-up with currencies that appreciate against sterling was not compelling...
...The remainder constitutes the work of the vaunted "engine of growth": private enterprise...
...Since 1960, Ireland has averaged better than 4 percent annual growth and, in 1978, it led the EEC with a GNP growth of 6 percent...
...See A. Desmond O'Rourke, "An Unofficial Reappraisal of the Irish Economic Dilemma," in Studies, Autumn 1978...
...It is particularly unacceptable if those with secure jobs use their position in such a way as to destroy the job prospects of others worse off than they are," he admonished...
...125-44...
...On March 20, in the largest demonstrations in the history of the Irish state, 150,000 Pay-As-You-Earn employees (PAYE) in Dublin displayed their collective displeasure about the highly skewed tax structure, while 40,000 simultaneously protested in Cork, "the second city...
...Employment in the clothing industry, for example, has shrunk from 22,000 to about 14,000 over the last 20 years...
...Both institutions foster continuity, minimal change, appropriate conformity, the quiet life, and moral righteousness...
...As the massive tax protest in Dublin and the increasing strike activity broadly hint, Irish citizens are beginning to oppose Fianna Fail's efforts to take the "correct approach" any further...
...The government announced a projected reduction in borrowing (its debt service absorbed 30 percent of all tax receipts) and in social spending, from 20.9 percent in 1978 to 18.9 percent by 1980...
...But by then a renovated Fine Gael-Labour coalition, sporting its own manifesto of remedies, will be poised for combat...
...A faltering job-creation strategy may combine with the taxation issue to fuel a leftward turn in this country afflicted with the lowest levels of both incomes and social services— and also with the highest debt in the EEC (92.8 percent of Ireland's GNP...
...Indeed, strike activity now surpasses the worst historic levels in terms of lost manhours...
...2 See an analysis of the survey in Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977...
...The Irish ranked second in "life satisfaction" (defined in terms of realistic expectations), while coming in at a more fitting eighth place in reported levels of "happiness" (implying "an absolute state of being, something more emotional and less cognitive...
...By fall, the government ordered a credit squeeze and amplified its campaign for wage restraint...
...With the pump-priming fiasco, the next step for this government, burdened by precise promises to keep, is a "blame-sharing" scheme designed to enable it to elude the cost of carrying out its threats to outlaw strikes and impose a statutory wage policy (for the present...
...Value-added taxes were removed from food and medicines, and wellheeled tax evaders were sometimes genuinely hunted...
...That portion of his thesis could not be borne out better by the Irish case...
...They accounted for nearly all such growth during the 1973-76 period, when the Irish cost of living doubled and the unemployment rate—averaging 6.5 percent over the 1960-72 period—exceeded 12 percent in official 73 (understated) figures...
...Cabinet ministers admonished the unions to moderate demands, since their wages—and their wages alone either squeezed the profit margins of vulnerable Irish industries or else motivated the substitution of more machinery for men...
...Various agencies estimate that 25 percent of the population lives not in the famous "frugal comfort" but in outright poverty...
...firms in 1977 (compared to a 14.3 percent return to U.S...
...The job tally appears all the more anemic considering that the state created 10,487 new posts in the nonproductive public sector...
...In addition to a host of less glamorous minerals, explorations have launched the largest lead and zinc mines in the world at Navan, natural gas works off the southern coast, and several promising but hitherto noncommercial offshore oil finds...
...A prudent act of fiscal juggling would have defused the protests, protected other tax inequities, and encouraged the restricted view of the tax issue as a purely urban-rural conflict...
...To increase foreign debt through "soft" loans—not a real "transfer of resources"—is certainly a curious way to go about controlling inflation...
...Of Ireland's 13 million agricultural acres 2 million stay unused...
...Rarely have finger-wagging cabinet ministers so assiduously provoked the economic predicament they so piously deplore...
...Pension age was not lowered...
...The Ireland we dreamed of would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as the basis of a right living," the Fianna Fail party leader intoned, "of a people who were satisfied with a frugal comfort and devoted their leisure to things of the spirit...
...Last year the diminutive Republic (population: approximately 3.2 million) ranked second in number of U.S...
...Minerals are exported in unsmelted form, so that little downstream industry develops around it...
...and 139 percent lower than for EEC's leader, Holland...
...Most spectacularly crippling was a telecommunications and postal strike that left the Republic incommunicado for many months...
...Last year, a multinational chemicals firm "took its business elsewhere," when planning permission was held up by local residents who were seeking assured antipollution controls...
...The current job creation strategy appears to be unraveling due to (1) the exposure of the Irish market to its alleged saviors in the EEC and (2) the trend toward capital-deepening, which characterizes what Ernest Mandel terms the "third technological revolution...
...The spending spree was unintentionally accelerated as wages and salaries in the "hot" economy doubled the 8 percent government guideline, so that the real purchasing power of the average married industrial worker rose by 7.25 percent...
...The IDA has set an unprecedented "projection" target of 30,000 jobs for 1979—well in line with the annual employment goal the National Economic and Social Council deems necessary for the attainment of full employment by the end of the 1980s (Ireland has the fastest population growth, the youngest age structure, and highest dependency ratio in the EEC...
...The coalition government discarded its initial grand designs as it increased the borrowing requirement from £134 million in 1972-73 to some £500 million in 1976 (23.2 percent of this from foreign sources) in order to uphold social services and stimulate the economy...
...These "grant-aided industries" (including a native minority) accounted for almost three-quarters of Ireland's growth in industrial output and employment from 1960 until the recession set in...
...However tempting a turn rightward to full-blown state corporatism may be, 9 the uncertain capacity of the state to enforce such an arrangement against an increasingly urban industrial work force will probably counsel more moderate future behavior in order to muster support—not only "to get the country moving again" but in order to get the beleaguered Fianna Fail reelected...
...On the sources of this attitude toward productive state activity, see Claus Offe's essay in Leon Lindberg, et al., eds., Stress and Contradiction in Modern Capitalism: Public Policy and The Theory of The State (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1975), pp...
...Characterizing the objectionable objectors as "unrepresentative," the IDA nevertheless threatened to completely drop the district of County Clare as an industrial zone...
...The result was a revived Fianna Fail, armed with a 47-page manifesto, sweeping into office with an unprecedented popular vote and 84 of the 148 parliamentary seats...
...But then Labour formed a coalition with Fine Gael (which, to its own discomfort, was harboring a growing social democratic wing...
...Now pressed by its rank and file, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (62 percent of the employed population is unionized) withdrew from National Wage negotiations—which 74 have loosely reigned since the government imposed them under statutory threat in 1970—until tax reform is effectively installed on the agenda...
...3 In 1973, for example, "Irish households on an average spent 32 percent of household expenditures on food, compared to about 22 percent in West Germany...
...Indeed, in 1978 manufacturing output rose by 10 percent and manufactured exports by 11 percent...
...The £8 million so meagerly raised by the now-abolished wealth tax was to be met almost exactly by the proposed taxation of Children's Allowances...
...With emigration outlets closed by high unemployment elsewhere, job-creation schemes were the most critical source of the party's appeal...
...Pressured on the left by the energies of the Sinn FeinWorkers party (which is more orthodox in its communism than the infinitesimal Communist party itself), and by the lively intelligences in the breakaway Socialist Labour party, the demoralized Labour party will resurrect and update the 1969 party program —all but the go-it-alone clause...
...For the first time, farmers now were drawn into the tax net...
...Children's Allowances were not increased...
...How could any family man, be he postman, busman, binman, or whatever," an Irish editor rhetorically asks, "exist with dignity on £60 a week at today's prices...
...4 Viewing a 65 percent unofficial strike rate last summer, Prime Minister Jack Lynch scolded the errant work force for their wicked, wicked ways...
...The most telling testimony to the authoritarian arrogance of the Fine Gael-Labour coalition is the utter lack of preparedness with which it entered the June 1977 election...
...Though they may worship devoutly at the altar of private enterprise, party members will not flagellate themselves there...
...This international investment paradise, fashioned so painstakingly by past government policy, now is tottering...
...Yet, even a redemptive burst of spending in the run-up to the 1981 or '82 election will not erase serious shortfalls in manifesto targets for employment and standard-of-living levels...
...As a recent National Economic and Social Council report urges, and in response to the PAYE workers' campaign for tax reforms, the government will probably decrease its scheduled borrowing reductions, increase farmers' taxation, and redistribute (some) of the revenues to urban workers and social welfare recipients...
...In 1973 this coalition displaced Fianna Fail after 16 consecutive years in office...
...Strikes have disabled many vital areas such as water supply, electricity, bus transport, air travel...
...The U.K...
...So it incurred a 30 percent rise in trade deficit 76 (August '77 to August '78)—a record sum of £672 million...
...2 A fresh survey might well detect striking shifts from that grudging tranquillity...
...According to accurate Irish lore, Labour is a policy in search of a party while Fine Gael is a party in search of a policy...
...A very large section of public opinion in the recriminatory aftermath held the unions exclusively to blame...
...It placed capital gains on a new sliding scale, substantially increased incometax allowances, and sweetened its bid for the youth vote with £1,000 grants to first-time housing purchasers...
...Noel Browne, the late David Thornley, and Conor Cruise O'Brien...
...This campaign was distinguished by its hostile ineptitude...
...Of more immediate importance, the campaign challenges the "beggars can't be 79 choosers" attitude, which has so effectiveli stifled debate on developmental alternatives Another event of wide, popular symbolic value was a massive march protesting agains' the destruction of an ancient (accidentl3 uncovered) Viking settlement site that was tc be obliterated in order to erect civic office buildings upon the ruins...
...78 Whatever the economic consequences, EEC membership has had a progressive impact on social and political attitudes and values throughout this formerly inward-looking island...
...With both inflation and unemployment dipping below double figures in an agreed-upon conservative policy that, at least, acquiesces to a "jobs at any cost" imperative, an incumbent government might easily blend complacency with arrogance toward a customarily docile electorate—and it does...
...in the same spirit of blithe fatalism that characterized earlier EEC negotiations, the Irish now have opted to break the nefarious link with sterling for the steadier and sterner discipline of the West German mark...
...While Irish governments assured the less privileged taxpaying population that foreign enterprises would indeed remain fastened to Irish soil when the initial tax holiday expires in 1990, no unnecessary chances are taken...
...It soon expanded and embedded itself as a premier "catch-all" party in Ireland's political landscape...
...A "worksharing" scheme proposed by Fianna Fail amounted to mere income-sharing among workers living on overtime or in debt...
...PAYE contributions to the total income taxation had risen relentlessly from 61.8 percent in 1969-70 to an infuriating 87.5 percent, as manufacturers, large farmers, and non-PAYE professionals chipped in a dwindling share...
...Late last year, the Minister for Industry and Commerce announced a tax reduction on all manufacturing enterprise from the nominal 45 percent rate to a more civilized 10 percent...
...manufacturing projects committed to Common Market countries...
...9 On various forms of "corporatism," see the essays by Philippe C. Schmitter and by Leo Panitch in Comparative Political Studies, April 1977...
...Labour's proposal to create a fuzzily defined National Development Corporation (NDC) that would coordinate activities of the private and public sectors (and would expand the latter's commercial operations) was shelved along with all other really radical departures in policy...
...Alas, the new enthusiasm sputtered out with a dismaying 1969 electoral performance and the failure of the anti-EEC campaign in 1972...
...However, a new government might well find itself too debtridden to maneuver in those areas by the time Fianna Fail calls an election...
...By conventional standards, this "opendoorand-red-carpet" policy that is to lure potential investors has paid off handsomely for both sides...
...With total consumer spending up by 9 percent, the exposed Irish economy was predictably inundated by imports...
...Little wonder that pragmatic politicians appear slightly confused these days...
...Now a new generation of selfproclaimed pragmatists in the Fianna Fail party (Gaelic...
...The puritanical and incredibly parochial Catholic Church, and the more recent but equally inviolate tradition of bureaucratic government controlled by democratic means, have hardly been challenged except by a few men of the most radical persuasion...
...Only the minister of Health— waging a fight to succeed Prime Minister Lynch—deviated by introducing a progressive hospitalization scheme last April...
...6 So much for the wage-earners "incentive package...
...But I feel their democratic right should not extend beyond a democratic right to object...
...Last year, Ireland's cost of living, for example, was 12 percent higher than that in Britain (and 5 percent higher than in Northern Ireland), with wages 12 percent lower than in the U.K...
...Socialism is not so unsavory a word today...
...still is the market for 47 percent of Ireland's exports, and small Irish firms relying on it would most likely be hard-pressed should a total "break" come to pass...
...7 Irish wage costs per unit of output experienced the lowest rate of increase among EEC members between 1974 and 1977, though you would never guess it from commentary by employers or the government...
...The coalition did introduce a modest wealth tax and the first capital-gains tax ever imposed in the Republic of Ireland-with the result that a £141 million capital inflow in 1974 changed to a £68 million outflow by 1976...
...The possibility of a corporatist outcome— despite the earlier sorry example of Britain's Heath government cannot simply be dismissed...
...Farm income, however, is most unevenly divided: a minority of onethird of the farmers accrue 70 percent of all agricultural profits—and 60 percent of Ireland's farms have less than 50 acres of land, and thus are targeted for Mansholtian extinction...
...If the present framework of dependent capitalist industrialization aggravates unemployment woes and standard-of-living losses, a prospective coalition program emphasizing the expansion of productive state enterprises will acquire much more appeal (with attendant measure for workers' democracy...
...investment to flood in and, quite plainly, it would be difficult to design a better incubator for foreign investment...
...Minister of Industry and Commerce Justin Keating engineered the repeal of an absurdly generous mining tax holiday —a 20 years' total tax exemption for mines with even briefer life spans while anguished cries in the Fianna Fail benches declared that this moderate measure signaled "the end of private property...
...Food processing is underdeveloped (and actually discriminated against by earlier EEC incentives...
...Irish citizens can hardly be blamed for detecting a Swiftian "modest proposal" at the core of that sweet reasoning tone...
...firms in the EEC as a whole...
...But the party manifesto's centerpiece was a pledge to create 20,000 new jobs within a year...
...The IDA—on the firing line—has responded to mounting criticisms with creditable efforts...
...This practice, however, had been inaugurated by the Fine Gael government when it created the Electricity Supply Board in 1927...
...With trade diversifying outlets among other EEC nations, the wobbly Irish reliance on the British export market has diminished from 83 percent in 1959 to about 47 percent today...
...feared to enter, the Irish government lunged in with suspiciously scant regard for the potential EMS impact on balance of payments, employment, and competition...
...It had never exceeded 17 percent of the vote, and it did not present a distinctly left-wing program until the late '60s ("The '70s Will Be Socialist...
...There also have been substantial recent additions in exploitation of natural resources...
...As of 1978, there were 52 undeterred companies actively prospecting for minerals in Ireland...
...4 Fred Block argues that "the openness of an economy provides a means to combat the demands of the working class for higher wages and for economic and social reforms," in his The Origins of International Economic Disorder (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p.3...
...Over the five-year 1973-77 period, the IDA claims it has created 57,500 jobs, while Irish industry "neutralized" the increase with 55,600 redun77 dancies due both to the recession and to increasing competition from other EEC enterprises...
...Fianna Fail generated and pandered to "welfare fraud" hysteria...
...The £78.7 million lost in property taxes were to be offset by £63 million from the abolition of food subsidies (these had been introduced by the coalition government to induce a National Wage Agreement in 1975...
...ANY FUTURE IRISH GOVERNMENT will have to cope with an electorate that will question not industrialization itself but the form of industrialization, an electorate that will resist the "New Jerseyization" of Ireland...
...What Fianna Fail ministers propose as a better means to achieve their manifesto targets is viewed by critics as a less than sly effort to renege without appearing sinful...
...The "bashability quotient" is currently quite high (and rising).' 0 Perceived interference with industrial development draws heavy fire...
...Lynch said he felt sure that "industry will themselves appreciate that it is to their own long-term interest that further expansion is reflected in significant job creation...
...The current credit squeeze harms the growth prospects of smaller Irish industries while foreign companies are immunized by their access to the Euro-dollar market...
...Ireland teeters on the brink of profound politico-economic change, but the land of frugal comfort may teeter there a long, long time...
...but two-thirds of Irish households actually spent more than 32 percent, and at least one in five spent more than 40 percent on food...
...While certain industries were bound to decline, critics decry an excessive promultinational corporation policy...
...On the peculiar impact of personalism and authoritarianism upon Irish political culture, see David E. Schmitt, The Irony of Irish Democracy (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1973...
...5 The embittering 1922-23 civil war generated Fine Gael, the right-wing, propertied party that governed until 1932, and also the initially populist Fianna Fail party...
...Answering the dilemma of chronic unemployment, the Irish Industrial Development Authority (IDA) announced further fruits of the "pragmatic way" last year in the form of 27,000 jobs promised through grantaided industries...
Vol. 27 • January 1980 • No. 1
