Reflections on the Celtic Tiger
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A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Coulter, Colin (Ed.); Coleman, Steve (Ed.) Book — Published Version The end of Irish history? Reflections on the Celtic Tiger Provided in Cooperation with: Manchester University Press Suggested Citation: Coulter, Colin (Ed.); Coleman, Steve (Ed.) (2003) : The end of Irish history? Reflections on the Celtic Tiger, ISBN 978-0-7190-6230-8, Manchester University Press, Manchester, http://dx.doi.org/10.7228/manchester/9780719062308 This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/181917 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle You are not to copy documents for public or commercial Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ www.econstor.eu The end of Irish history? eih prelims.P65 1 26/3/03, 15:03 eih prelims.P65 2 26/3/03, 15:03 The end of Irish history? Critical reflections on the Celtic Tiger edited by Colin Coulter and Steve Coleman Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave eih prelims.P65 3 26/3/03, 15:03 Copyright © Manchester University Press 2003 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed exclusively in Canada by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 0 7190 6230 6 hardback 0 7190 6231 4 paperback First published 2003 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Typeset by Ralph J. Footring, Derby Printed in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, Guildford and King’s Lynn eih prelims.P65 4 26/3/03, 15:03 This book is dedicated to the memory of Joe Strummer, 1952–2002 With love and admiration and endless gratitude eih prelims.P65 5 26/3/03, 15:03 eih prelims.P65 6 26/3/03, 15:03 Contents List of tables and figures page ix Notes on contributors x Acknowledgements xii 1 The end of Irish history? An introduction to the book 1 Colin Coulter 2 Macroeconomic policy in the Celtic Tiger: a critical reassessment 34 Denis O’Hearn 3 Neither Boston nor Berlin: class polarisation and neo-liberalism in the Irish Republic 56 Kieran Allen 4 Welcome to the Celtic Tiger: racism, immigration and the state 74 Steve Loyal 5 Irish women and the Celtic Tiger economy 95 Sinéad Kennedy 6 Globalised Ireland, or, contemporary transformations of national identity? 110 G. Honor Fagan 7 Millenarianism and utopianism in the new Ireland: the tragedy (and comedy) of accelerated modernisation 122 Kieran Keohane and Carmen Kuhling 8 Fear and loathing in lost ages: journeys through postmodern Dublin 139 David Slattery vii eih prelims.P65 7 26/3/03, 15:03 viii Contents 9 Contemporary discourses of working, earning and spending: acceptance, critique and the bigger picture 155 Anne B. Ryan 10 The centralised government of liquidity: community, language and culture under the Celtic Tiger 175 Steve Coleman 11 Northern Ireland: a reminder from the present 192 Pete Shirlow Index 208 eih prelims.P65 8 26/3/03, 15:04 List of tables and figures Tables 2.1 Percentage real economic growth rates in the 1990s in the Republic of Ireland 36 2.2 Fixed industrial investments in the Republic of Ireland, by country of origin, 1990–98 39 2.3 Employment and percentage employment change during the 1990s 42 2.4 Changing composition of GDP during the Celtic Tiger period 46 3.1 Declining economic dynamism: average annual percentage change in gross domestic product 63 3.2 Adjusted wage share of the total economy in Ireland and the EU 67 11.1 Community attitudes to peace building and reconciliation, 1999 and 2002 203 Figure 4.1 Annual numbers of asylum applications in Ireland, 1992–2001 77 ix eih prelims.P65 9 26/3/03, 15:04 Notes on contributors Kieran Allen lectures in the Department of Sociology, University College Dublin. His most recent book is The Celtic Tiger: The Myth of Social Partnership in Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Steve Coleman lectures in the Department of Anthropology, the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He is an associate of the Humanities Institute of Ireland. At present he is working on a book about the Irish language and culture. Colin Coulter lectures in the Department of Sociology, the National Univer- sity of Ireland, Maynooth. He is the author of Contemporary Northern Irish Society: An Introduction (London: Pluto, 1999). G. Honor Fagan lectures in the Department of Sociology, the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. She is the author of Cultural Politics and Irish Early School Leavers: Constructing Political Identities (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 1995) and is presently working on a book on culture and globalisation. Sinéad Kennedy is a doctoral student in the Department of English, the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. She is working on a forth- coming book dealing with the issue of abortion in Ireland. Kieran Keohane lectures in the Department of Sociology, University College Cork. He is the author of Symptoms of Canada: An Essay on the Canadian Identity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997) and has written on environmentalism and popular culture in an Irish context. Carmen Kuhling lectures in the Department of Government and Society, University of Limerick. She has written a number of articles on the New x eih prelims.P65 10 26/3/03, 15:04 Contributors xi Age movement in Ireland and is the co-author of a forthcoming book on the ‘collision culture’ in contemporary Ireland. Steve Loyal lectures in the Department of Sociology, University College Dublin. He is the author of a forthcoming book on the social theory of Anthony Giddens. Denis O’Hearn lectures at the School of Sociology and Social Policy at Queen’s University, Belfast. He is the author of a number of books, including Inside the Celtic Tiger: The Irish Economy and the Asian Model (London: Pluto, 1998). His latest book, The Atlantic Economy: Britain, the US and Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002) won the American Sociological Association’s PEWS award for outstand- ing book in 2002. Anne B. Ryan is a researcher based at the Department of Adult and Community Education, the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. She is the author of Feminist Ways of Knowing: Towards Theorising the Person for Radical Adult Education (Leicester: National Institute of Adult and Continuing Education, 2001) and Balancing Your Life: A Practical Guide to Work, Time, Money and Happiness (Dublin: Liffey Press, 2002). Pete Shirlow lectures in the Department of Geography, the University of Ulster at Coleraine. He has written widely on issues of identity and division within Northern Ireland and is the co-editor of Who Are ‘the People’? Unionism, Protestantism and Loyalism in Northern Ireland (London: Pluto, 1997). David Slattery is Dean of Arts at Dublin Business School. His recent publications include ‘Paradigms of British social anthropology’, in Euro- pean Paradigms of the Humanities, edited by Thomas Keutner (Hagen: Fernuniversity, 2000). His books include The End of the Anthropological Self: Foucault in the Trobriand Islands (Poznan: Adam Mickiewicz Uni- versity Press, 1993). eih prelims.P65 11 26/3/03, 15:04 Acknowledgements We would like to express our gratitude to everyone at Manchester Univer- sity Press for their assistance in the production of this book. In particular, we would like to thank Tony Mason for his commitment and patience. We are grateful to Andy Storey for his invaluable assistance. Apologies to the countless individuals who were neglected while the book was being completed. The authors wish to acknowledge the generous support of the National University of Ireland in the form of a Grant in Aid of Publication. xii eih prelims.P65 12 26/3/03, 15:04 1 The end of Irish history? An introduction to the book COLIN COULTER During the Easter vacation of 2001, I happened to be travelling through the United States and picked up a copy of a renowned popular music magazine to pass the time on a short internal flight. While leafing through the publication, I stumbled across a feature that struck me as having no little cultural significance. It was a single-frame, full-page advertisement for some commodity or other set in a stylish contemporary bathroom that could have been located in more or less any major city in the western world.