The value of the Humanities and Social Sciences

Below is the keynote address to the Conference ‘Innovation, Reflection and Inclusive Societies: The Role and Contribution of the Humanities and Social Sciences’ by Commissioner Maire Geoghegan-Quinn at the The Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, Tuesday, 7 May 2013.

It sets out a very clear and strong position regarding the value of the social sciences and humanities research and scholarship and it is heartening to hear a politician speak about HSS that both understands and champions why HSS is a vital part of the academy and the contributions it makes to society.  Certainly one of the best political speeches I’ve been in attendance at and I’ve no doubt I’ll be waving it under the noses of funders and university administrators quite regularly in the coming years.

 

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am delighted to be here at the Royal Irish Academy at this Irish Presidency event. I would like thank the organisers, Professor Kelleher, Dr Geary and Dr O’Brennan, for inviting me.

As the European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science, over the last three years I have had many chances to discuss, with many top researchers, issues such as the science of climate change, innovation and new technologies in energy and transport, or breakthroughs in cancer research.

Areas like these grab the lion’s share of the research headlines and are sometimes perceived as the ‘hard’ sciences, in comparison to the ‘softer’ areas of research, such as the social sciences and humanities.

But to my mind, yours are the hardest sciences of all. If there is one thing that I have learned in my years in politics and public service, it is that nothing ever stays the same. The world is constantly changing.

And big changes force hard choices. Hard choices for politicians like me. We need the social sciences and humanities to analyse the options, situate the decisions and guide and inspire the choices.

Ireland, for instance, has seen profound changes in only the last five years, and many since it joined the European Economic Community forty years ago.

It takes great insight and depth of knowledge to really understand the changes and how they affect us.

We need to keep asking who we are and what our identity and culture means to us.

That is why the social sciences and humanities are more essential than ever.

They’re not the cherry on the cake or an indulgence when we can afford it.

We need them to understand ourselves, our society and the challenges we face.

A knowledge society needs to know itself, and the social sciences and humanities are the keys to do this.

They are the hardware of society, on which all the other sciences depend.

Society is hardwired by ethics, identity, belief, reflection, psychology and culture. There is no science without reason. No reason without understanding. No understanding without humanity. Without Greece, there is no Rome.

The scale and importance of the task demand excellent standards.

Excellent researchers generate new knowledge. And that’s what drives progress. And, if Europe is about anything, it’s about progress.

So, excellence in research is an aim in itself, and aiming for excellence is a conscious political decision that we have made at the European level.

I know that you share this ambition for the social sciences and humanities. Indeed, I understand that one of the primary goals of the Royal Irish Academy is to ‘vigorously promote excellence in scholarship’.

Excellence in the humanities and social sciences is as exacting a standard as excellence in the natural sciences.

And we need excellence across all disciplines, to create the research biodiversity that acts as the foundation of a sustainable knowledge economy and a vibrant society that produces the ideas and innovations needed to tackle its biggest challenges.

We also need this rich biodiversity of research disciplines to be ready for the problems and challenges that we can’t yet predict.  For example, we are now turning to historians, social scientists, political scientists and psychologists to make sense of the motivations, ideologies and identity politics that are leading to new conflicts and terrorism in different areas of the world.

Answers to the toughest questions can’t always be found in a laboratory. You are the key to decoding some critical problems, not least in Europe. Decoding is not just for DNA!

Europe has arrived at a critical point in its development, a development that has seen us shift numerous times between integration and fragmentation.

We need institutional and political innovation to resolve issues that weren’t even on our radar ten years ago. And for that to work, we need to understand our diversity and what binds us together. We need to understand each other’s histories and perceptions of the past. To plot any course, you need to know where you have come from.

We can’t improvise. We need to dig deep into our understanding of our history and our present, and deep into issues concerned with our identity and culture and our sense of belonging.

But events are moving so quickly that, in the heat of the moment, there is less and less time to dig deep, to reflect and weigh options.

So my challenge to you is to use your insights – whether societal, political, economic or cultural – to give us the answers we need, to provide clear options for Europe’s future.

‘Made in Europe’ doesn’t just mean cars, aeroplanes, chemicals or financial services.

It doesn’t just mean excellent design, world-beating food or fashion.

‘Made in Europe’ also means ideas, culture, art.

These are intrinsic to identity – whether we are talking about our identity as someone from  Dublin, or Ireland, or Europe.

As Jean Monnet, the father of the European project said… “If I had to do it again, I would begin with culture”.

The great movements that changed the world for the better were ‘Made in Europe‘: the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution – Democracy itself.

Unfortunately, many of the most damaging movements and events were also ‘Made in Europe’, whether, genocide, colonialism or totalitarianism.

These ‘-isms’ are vital areas of research. Remembering and studying the past is essential to understanding the present and key to making a better future.

We see this in Ireland, where the past echoes in politics and everyday life, even as Irish society moves through immense changes.

Solutions to conflict and violence will only be found in understanding. And lasting solutions will only survive if we keep on remembering and we preserve and respect our cultures.  We will soon reach some very important anniversaries for Europe and Ireland. We will look to the social sciences and humanities to help us remember the events of 1914 and 1916 and understand how they still shape our world today.

The humanities and social sciences can influence nearly every aspect of our lives. Few of us perhaps realise the extent of that influence. So many concepts that were nurtured on the fringes of academic debate have moved into the mainstream and have profoundly altered the way we live.

Simone de Beauvoir, for example, thought that “One is not born a woman, one becomes one.” Just think of the power of that idea. It revolutionised our lives, making us think that age-old stereotypes were not set in stone and eventually leading us to start breaking them down. This led to the entry of women into the labour force, probably the most significant and lasting change of the 20th century.

Europe is a world leader in SSH research. I want to help maintain that position. Indeed, I hope we can build on it and increase our lead. I am ambitious for the social sciences and humanities. I know you are too.

Our collaborative research programme in the Social Sciences and Humanities is already the world’s largest.

So far, over 2,000 institutions have participated in 200 projects under the 7th Framework Programme for Research – FP 7.

It will have invested an estimated 623 million Euro in Social Sciences and Humanities research by the time it finishes at the end of this year.

One of the success stories of FP 7 is the HERA network. It is made up of Humanities Research Councils from across Europe.

It links national research programmes and has resulted in the creation of two joint research programmes.

It is making an important contribution to the development of the European Research Area, and I am very pleased that Ireland is playing a leading role in it. I know that Professor Sean Ryder, who chairs it, is with us today.

It must be said, however, that only around 1% of participants in the FP7 social sciences and humanities programme come from Ireland, and those participants have drawn down less than 1% of the available funding.

I want you to work together to improve this record under Horizon 2020, and initiatives like the new Humanities Alliance is a very positive step in the right direction.

I am delighted that you have put such a strong focus on preparing for Horizon 2020.

The European Commission’s commitment to the social sciences and humanities will not  change under Horizon 2020.

But we want to do things differently. Multi-, inter-, or even transdisciplinary approaches are often needed to tackle today’s highly complex challenges.

That is why, instead of programmes dedicated to particular disciplines, we will have programmes focused on our biggest challenges, such as climate change, health and food, and energy security.  SSH in all its various disciplinary guises will be firmly embedded in each of these challenges.

The Commission’s proposal for Horizon 2020 has not, of course, been adopted yet, but this vision is shared by the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers.

This is a bold, new vision. It will require openness on all sides. I know that there are major obstacles to multiple disciplinary approaches. I hope that the way in which we have constructed Horizon 2020 will help to encourage this kind of research.

For the vision to work, both humanities and social sciences researchers will have to be fully involved in the decision making about how the challenges are developed and implemented.

They must be present in the relevant advisory groups and programme committees. I will ensure that this happens.

The addition, at the request of the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers, of a new activity called ‘Reflective Societies’ is, I think, a positive step. It will allow us to better capture the full range of possible contributions of humanities research.

SSH research will also continue to be supported under the first pillar ‘Excellent Science’, including through the European Research Council, as well as the Marie Skłodowska Curie actions and research infrastructures.

In September, the next Presidency of the Council, the Lithuanian Presidency, will hold a conference on the future role of the Social Sciences and Humanities.

This will give us an opportunity to further discuss how best to apply, over a wide range of challenges, the knowledge, methods, and experience that the Social Sciences and Humanities have to offer.

Ladies and gentlemen, In his ‘Two Cultures’ lecture, over 50 years ago, C.P. Snow lamented the gap between the sciences and the humanities. He fretted that the sciences were  undervalued. In today’s climate, we may be at risk of making the opposite mistake.

But this debate as to the relative value of the arts and humanities is a senseless one. They are both valuable and they are inter-twined.

Europe is focusing on research, technology and innovation as ways to renew our economy. There is a strong justification for continuing to invest in these areas even when public finances are tight.

This can put the humanities and arts on the defensive, and similar economic arguments are used to justify expenditure in these areas.

The economic arguments are certainly there; just think of how important the content industry is becoming. It is a major focus area for us in Europe.

But the economic justification is a reductive way of looking at the humanities and social sciences.

To borrow an idea from Oscar Wilde, a society that focuses only on the economic benefits of knowledge is one that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Indeed, I am reminded of John Henry Newman’s belief that students should receive a ‘balanced, well-rounded, tranquil and moderate’ education, which would produce freedom of thought.

He was right!

What matters is not whether a particular discipline belongs to the humanities, the social sciences or the natural sciences, but the quality of the scholarship. Excellence is the key.

So, I am a friend of the natural sciences, certainly, and a champion of the social sciences.

But I am also aware of what Matthew Arnold called “sweetness and light” – in other words, the intelligence and beauty that the humanities bring to life.

Thank you.

 

In Celebration of Grafton Street

I have commented on Grafton Street before (here and here), while also discussing Schemes of Special Planning Control (SSPC) and Architectural Conservation Areas (ACAs) (here). In light of the current draft for the renewal of the Grafton Street SSPC, there are, I feel, a number of elements that need to be discussed about the relationship between land-use, social space, and heritage in Grafton Street, which are, to a certain extent, reflective of wider dynamics in Dublin more generally. The revision of the Grafton Street SSPC provides the opportunity to redress the bias towards elite notions of heritage and instead celebrate the role of contemporary social life in the street.

The current draft of the Grafton Street SSPC opens with the following vision: “To reinvigorate Grafton Street as the South City’s most dynamic retail experience underpinned by a wide range of mainstream, independent and specialist retail and service outlets that attract both Dubliners and visitors to shop, sit and stroll, whilst re-establishing the area’s rich historic charm and urban character.” The language of such documents tells a very interesting story.  There is an explicit perspective within the Scheme of Special Planning Control that the area of Grafton Street has somehow lost some form of character that needs to be re-established or reinvigorated. How this is to be achieved is perceived to require a set of processes that promotes certain forms of land-use over and above others.

In drawing on an imaginary of some unspecified ideal time, the document naturalises the connection between elements such as prestigious forms of consumption and architectural conservation: “A number of uses on Grafton Street are of special significance through their long association with the street. Businesses such as Brown Thomas, Weir and Sons and Bewley’s Cafe are now an essential part of the street’s character and continue in the tradition of providing prestigious products and fine service in high quality surroundings.” When taken at face-value, such language might seem innocuous, and it is difficult to dispute the relative importance of such establishments to the commercial core of Dublin. However, when looked at in more detail, I would argue that in privileging the connection between what are deemed as prestigious land-uses with notions of ‘character’, the SSPC presents an elitist ideal of what the street should be, and, by connection, whether it is intended or not, who Grafton Street is for.

This is not a desire to argue for the retention or promotion of poor signage and shop fronts (however they may be defined), but to seek to expand the remit of what is valued beyond the supposed virtues of exclusive high-end retail and a loosely defined notion of what the street is imagined to once have been. From a broader perspective, it can be argued that in light of the evolution of Dublin over the last number of decades, Grafton Street – and Dublin city centre more generally – has to distinguish itself to compete with the out-of-town centres. Yet, there is also a need to at least try to imagine or think through what the social life of the street might actually look like if the vision of the SSPC, as it currently stands, is achieved. Would it still be a container of a rich variety of social life that it is today? Would it be the street of buskers and flower sellers? Would it still be the street on which younger age-groups gather outside McDonald’s?

The street has and will evolve in response to the dynamics of wider social and market changes. Yet, there also seems to be a need to actually think through what the social dynamics of such streets are beyond the conception of notions of urban character and heritage-value as being directly connected to upmarket land-uses alone. Celebrating those social dynamics of the present and recent past which serve to define the everyday life of Grafton Street rather than decrying some loosely defined imaginary of what has supposedly been lost would be a start to such.

Philip Lawton

 

Satiric Video Wins Uniquely Dublin Competition

City branding is a tricky thing.  Cities are complex constellations of people, places, and events that although perhaps characterised by particular overarching ‘auras’ are nevertheless experienced in subjective ways.  Moreover, city branding is also generally concerned with presenting a marketable version of the city that can be used to attract inward investment.  So there is a constant tension then between giving voice to a version of the city that is reflective of the reality of urban life and presenting one that is going to be appealing to an external audience.  Even outside of such economic concerns, there are many different ways to represent the city in both positive and negative terms.  The city is a many-splendored thing that also encompasses the less desirable aspects of urban life that banding campaigns tend to obfuscate.

This may have been a lesson learnt by many in Ireland’s capital last week when the Uniquely Dublin competition announced its perhaps unlikely winning entry.  Uniquely Dublin was organised by Dublin City Council and the Little Museum, along with Tourism Ireland and Dublin Bus.  The competition website gave the following instructions:

“We’re looking for entries that celebrate Dublin today. If you have something original to say, we want to hear it. Show us something that surprises or delights us. It could be a cartoon of your favourite character or a poem on Sandymount Strand. It could be a poster for the new Dublin or a piece of local slang as we’ve never seen or heard it before. It could be a painting, a slogan, a piece of propaganda or even a song. Make us look at Dublin with fresh eyes. Your eyes.  All you have to do is make a piece of work in one of the competition categories [film, animation, photography, graphic design, written word, visual arts, music] and send it to us. Works will be shortlisted by our distinguished panel of judges and then the public will decide the overall winner”.

Some of the shortlisted entries (which can be viewed here and here) are earnest in tone, but the eventual winner took a more irreverent approach to representing the city.  The winning video entry entitled “Dublin City: a Radical Science Guide”, produced by Oisin Byrne and Gary Farrelly, has been described as “Flann O’Brien-esque satire” by the competition organisers.  In the video we are guided through a Dublin where Liffey water cures syphilis, the national parliament shares its premises with Europe’s largest brothel, and the Spire is a commemoration of Ireland’s space programme.  But as with any satire worth its salt, underneath the absurdity the video also presents an exaggerated depiction of current social realities in Ireland: gorgeous Georgian frontages masking cheap social housing and ‘Grafton Street’ a consumer wasteland of boarded-up shops.

Though tongue-in-cheek the video stands in clear contrast to the version of Ireland Inc that has been presented to the world, a depiction that frequently underplays the impacts of austerity in favour of putting a positive spin on the country.  That the overall winner of Uniquely Dublin was decided by public vote is perhaps significant.  Who knows, maybe the fantastical depiction of Dublin presented in Byrne and Farrelly’s video seemed more real to the voting public than the rosy outlook of the official discourse.

Cian O’Callaghan

 

What kinds of unfinished estates are exempt from the local property tax? A snapshot from North Tipperary

A few weeks ago, before the return of the snow and rain, I spent a cold bright day visiting a number of unfinished estates in North Tipperary.  A former resident of one such estate kindly took me on a tour of some of the local unfinished developments.  Being from the area himself, and having worked on construction projects in the past, he was in a position to impart to me some background information about the developments.  Anecdotally, he was able to tell me that, having visited the estates himself in the past, some minor demolition work had been carried out in places.  Rather than finished houses, the demolition that had been carried out had been of partially completed structures: essentially where construction had been started but had barely gotten beyond the foundations.  Additionally, there had been some attempts to erect more secure fencing around the unfinished portions of the estates.

As a student of quantity surveying, my guide also had a research interest in what was being done about these estates from a policy perspective.  And during the day we also talked about the overall response to the problem.  I gave him my personal opinion that not enough was being done by the state to combat the problems posed by the estates.  Whilst it was clear that some small progress had been achieved with regard to individual estates, the mechanisms that had been put in place (primarily site resolution plans) were voluntaristic and somewhat ad-hoc and, consequently, offered little guarantee that uniform progress would be made.  We both agreed that the most pressing concern was the health and safety problems posed by the estates that, despite the €5 million safety fund made available by the Government, clearly remained an issue affecting residents on most estates.

We visited four estates that day.  All but one of the estates had residents living on them.  What we saw there was perhaps not shocking.  To a certain extent unfinished estates have become a normalised part the Irish landscape, places we anticipate and expect, especially in the more rural parts of the country.  But equally, these estates are not, nor should they be considered, ‘normal’ places for people to live.  I say this despite the fact that, for thousands of households around the country, living on estates such as these is the new normal.

We are now over four years into a crisis that was both precipitated by and reflected in a catastrophic property crash.  Unfinished estates quickly became the symbol of the crash, and the iconic monument of the ideologies and development politics that drove the Celtic Tiger era; the vast glut of physical excess all too perfectly symbolising Ireland’s ‘era of excess’, our ‘greedy decade’ (as various newspaper articles deigned to dub it).  For a while these estates were big news, offering an empty (or at least partially vacant) signifier into which various commentators could pour their anxieties and outrages about the crisis and their hopes for the future.  But four years on the media frenzy has died down and the estates and their residents have receded from public view.  In the intervening years the unfinished estates of the Celtic Tiger have been engulfed in the general din of the ongoing crisis, swallowed by the war of attrition that is austerity.   They became one more problem in a country beset by a million problems.

Within this context it is easy to forget just how shocking these estates initially were.  In the initial reportage (even allowing for a level of hyperbole) these were truly alien landscapes that left journalists reaching for visceral language and allusions to grasp the social and moral catastrophe that the estates represented.  Take, for example, these two descriptions from May 2010:

“It was like a scene from one of those Chernobyl documentaries. Empty houses rotting away, broken pavements, no street lighting, rubble everywhere and pools of water that you just knew stank to high heaven. Except there were some people living there, young homeowners who were trapped paying premium mortgages to live in an unfinished estate where sewage bubbled up outside their door in houses they knew were worthless because they were unsellable” (Irish Times, 15 May 2010).

“How do you know you are in a ‘ghost estate”? Often, from the outside, they look like any other new housing estate. The houses are neat and freshly painted, lending an air of suburban order and respectability. They are quiet, but that could just be because the adults are at work and the children are at school. But when you get closer, you can tell. You notice, for instance, that the manhole covers and storm drains stick up out of the street because the final layer of the road surface hasn’t been laid.  And there are little lumps outside every door which, on closer inspection, turn out to be decaying phone directories and copies of the Golden Pages.  Where the doorbell should be, there is only a dangling wire…” (Irish Independent, 22 May 2010).

These examples are from a time period that perhaps constituted the most intense debates about unfinished estates.  And, of course, there is a certain inevitability that as these landscapes become more familiar they become less strange.  But paradoxically the inverse is equally true.  In a kind of parallax view reminiscent of a David Lynch film, these estates are so strange because for us they are now so normal.

This week the Government’s announced that of the 1,322 developments that were previously exempt from the household change only 421 developments would be exempt from the local property tax.  As Rob Kitchin suggested in his post yesterday, this substantial drop in eligible developments is the result of a reclassification of types of estates that qualify.  Thus, it is by no means guaranteed that substantial work has been completed on all of the developments that have dropped off the list, whilst it is extremely doubtful that these estates are now free of problems.  Furthermore, this latest episode follows similar statistical adjustments to the 2012 National Housing Development Survey that changed the definition of an unfinished estate.  There is a sort of politics of numbers happening here.  Judging by the figures being released by the Government, to the (very) casual observer it would appear that the number of unfinished estates that constitute a serious problem has reduced from 2,876 in 2011 to just 421 in 2013.  Any bit of research into the issue will suggest that this is not the case, particularly when we consider that housing vacancy (in the absence of outstanding construction work) is no longer considered a problem by the Government.

The estates I visited in Tipperary are all (with the exception of the completely vacant development) exempt from the local property tax.  It could be argued then that they constitute some of the more severe cases.  However, they didn’t particularly strike me as better or worse than many other estates I have visited, some of which have dropped off the list of exemptions.  Unfinished estates are not a homogenous category and individual estates face diverse problems.  ‘Unfinished’ is a slippery category and it is disingenuous to label any estate that is ‘complete’ as unproblematic when there are high levels of vacancy.  A vacant house may soon become again an unfinished house if it is not being maintained.  And the simple fact remains, the vast majority of these estates are still not the places they were planned to be and that were promised to the residents who moved into them.  They remain unfinished.  Before we find ourselves too jaded by crisis, it is worth reminding ourselves that we once found these estates very strange indeed.  They were not ‘normal’.  They are still not.

Cian O’Callaghan

 

Property tax evaluation model and what it means for residential property owners

The Revenue Commissioners have published a technical paper setting out the method used to calculate the estimated property tax values to guide home owners in the self-evaluation of the tax due on their property.  The model is a hedonic econometric regression model, which is the standard method of estimating and tracking property values.

In many ways, the problem for the Revenue has not been the method to use, but assembling a set of data that can provide robust estimates.  To this end, they have bought together property characteristics from a range of sources:

• Valuation data from the Revenue’s electronic stamp duty system, NAMA, and valuations commissioned by Revenue from professional valuers.

• Geo-Directory (the national address database): a list of all properties in Ireland, their type and location;

• Spatially derived data that indicate relative distances of all residential properties from a series of key amenities and services that add value to property;

• Geographically linked data from sources such as the CSO’s 2011 Census that provide characteristics about areas.

Sources of data used in estimating property tax

Having excluded a number of transactional data for various reasons (where the return indicates the transaction is a part of a larger series of transactions; where the return indicates a fractional interest in the property is being transferred; where the return indicates shared ownership; values under €25,000) the result is a dataset of 17,400, 15,000 and 19,200 transactions for 2010, 2011 and 2012 respectively.  This set is relatively small as it based only on transactions since 2010.

34,400 (67 per cent) of these 51,600 properties were successfully matched to a Geo-Directory address point, thus providing property values for units at known locations. These are spread:

• Dublin (Dublin City Council, Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, Fingal County Council and South Dublin County Council) – 15,693 properties;

• Other cities (Cork Corporation, Limerick Corporation, Galway City Council and Waterford Corporation) – 3,039 properties;

• Rest of the country (all remaining county councils) – 18,014 properties.

These properties with known values provided a basis on which to estimate the value of near-by property with similar characteristics in each Electoral District in the country. Ideally, it would have been preferable to provide estimates for Small Areas given the variation in stock in an ED, but the relatively small data set precludes doing this robustly and EDs are the best that can presently be achieved.

Given that the value of property varies geographically, rates differ across the country, with the highest mean values in Dublin and the Leinster region.

The vast majority of properties are valued in the lower bands, reflecting the 50% fall in residential prices since 2008.  Indeed, 91.3% of residential units are estimated to be worth less than 300K, with 60.6% less than 150K.  I can imagine that the low estimated value of many properties might come as a shock to many homeowners and reveal the extent to which they might be in negative equity.

What this means is that the property tax value for 60.6% of residential property owners is estimated to be €225 or less per annum.  For another 22.7% it will be €315, 8% it will be €405, and 3.1% it will be €495.  Only 8.3% of residential property owners will pay €585 or more.

As with any model, the one developed by Revenue is not going to be 100 percent accurate and they provide some estimate as to the probability that the valuation is in the correct band.  91% are either in the right band, or one band above or below.

This suggests that there might be some horse-trading between property owners and Revenue as to whether they are in the right band or one very close to it, but in the main their estimates will be quite near to the actual value and the haggling will be over c.80-90 euro difference in cost between adjacent bands (with I suspect all challengers looking to move downwards).

To be fair to the Revenue Commissioners the approach they have taken is the industry standard and they have used all the possible data at their disposal. Their problem has been the small number of known valuations to work from and a lack of information about every property (type, number of rooms, etc).  As such, the model seems to be as robust as it can be given the data constraints, though it is not without its issues such as having to provide estimates for EDs rather than Small Areas.

Rob Kitchin

 

Ireland’s house prices in comparison to EU27, 2007-2012

Eurostat, the European statistics agency, recently released the Q3 2012 results for its pan-European house price index (HPI).  The data charts house prices on a standardized basis for 2007-2012, baselined against Q2 2010 (=100).  The index tracks price changes of residential properties purchased by households (flats, detached houses, terraced houses, etc.), both newly-built and existing stock. The Member States’ HPIs are compiled by the national statistical institutes, while Eurostat calculates the euro area and EU HPIs.

The AIRO team have compiled these data into an interactive data visualization accessible on the AIRO website.

What the data allow is a comparison of whether house prices have gone up or down over time with respect to the baseline.  For example, if we consider Ireland against a baseline of 100 in Q2 2010, in Q3 2007 house prices were indexed at 151.7 but had fallen to 75.3 by Q2 2012.  In other words, house prices had halved in valued over that period.

What the data reveal is that during this period of European financial crisis property markets behaved in four different ways across Europe.

1. Prices have declined continuously, either steeply in the case of Ireland, Spain, Romania and Bulgaria or more modestly such as the Netherlands and Cyprus.

2. Prices declined and then have either levelled off (e.g. Denmark, Slovenia) or have bounced back modestly (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, which all experienced very dramatic and rapid declines).

3. Prices have bounced along within a few percentage points of the baseline (e.g., Austria, Czech Republic, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Malta, Slovenia, UK) and effectively have flatlined.

4. Prices have increased modestly but steadily (e.g., Belgium, Finland, Germany, Luxembourg, Sweden).

These differences arise due to issues such as the nature of the national housing markets (e.g. proportion of renters/owner-occupiers), the robustness of the wider economy during the crisis, and wider property market issues such as levels of oversupply where excess supply, coupled with a financial crisis linked to property, work to depress prices in the absence of sufficient demand that would halt decline.

There is tentative evidence that the Irish decline might be starting to level off, but we need a few more quarters of data to reveal whether this is a sustained trend.  The decline, however, has been the worst in Europe in terms of sustained, rapid decline with no levelling off or bounce back.

Justin Gleeson, Eoghan McCarthy, Rob Kitchin

 

Scrapping of the National Spatial Strategy

Yesterday Minister Phil Hogan announced that the National Spatial Strategy (NSS) is to be scrapped and replaced by a new policy in about a year’s time.  He said that said the present ‘strategy had failed’ because ‘the gateway and hub cities and towns never received the resources to ensure their development and “nothing has happened” in the ten years since they were designated.’  Continuing that ‘there was no point in having a designation without the resources.’

It is certainly the case that the NSS did not live up to its expectations, despite its promise and intent.  The initiative failed for a number of reasons, of which resourcing is just one.

First, there were flaws in its initial design with respect to the designation of too many hubs and gateways and there were accusations of stroke politics in location selection.

Second, because it was introduced in 2002 it missed its logical initial resourcing stream, the National Development Plan (NDP) 2000-06.  It did underpin the NDP 2007-13, but then the crisis hit and the NDP got quitely dropped and funding for NSS initiatives, such as the gateways fund, was one of the first things the DECLG dropped from its programme.

Third, there was weak political buy-in across the board, especially within government.  This was made abundantely clear by the decentralisation programme introduced by Charlie McCreevy in 2003 that sought to move government departments and state agencies to just about every location except gateways and hubs.  Decentralisation seriously undermined the rationale and impetus of the NSS.

Fourth, the NSS was not put on a statutory basis and up until 2010 planning authorities only had to give ‘due regard’ to it, rather than complying with it.  In a period of developer-led, laissez faire, localist planning this was a license to largely ignore it.

What this meant was a very partial implementation, though the NSS did have some effects on other policy (e.g. NDP, Transport 21, Rural Ireland 2020, etc) and was significantly boosted by the introduction of regional planning guidelines and the Planning and Development Act (2010) and the introduction of core strategies (in which planning decisions have to demonstrate they fit local, county, regional and national policy objectives).

So what happens now? Is this the end of spatial planning in Ireland?

Well one would hope not. If Ireland ever needed a strategic plan to make the most of limited resources in order to facilitate inward investment, stimulate and support indigenous growth, produce sustainable development and create of better places, it is now.

The logic of spatial planning is to align and coordinate sectoral initiatives (such as transport, energy, jobs, property, utilities, communications, public services, etc) across territory in order to leverage complementarities, reduce redundancy and duplication, increase competitiveness, and create multiplier effects (where the sum is greater than the simple addition of parts).  It does this by selectively prioritising areas for different kinds of activities in line with its demographics and local resources and distributing funds suitable to enable targetted investment and coordinating development across sectors.

Rather than abandoning spatial planning and the NSS, we need to do a fundamental rethink and produce a new NSS that is suitable to the present context. Localism and ad-hocism is not the solution to the economic and social crisis and will not create a sustainable, competitive country into the long term.

The challenge over the next year is to produce a new NSS based on a robust evidence base, learning from international best practice, and involving detailed stakeholder consultation, that is strategic and is prepared to make difficult decisions given limited resources.  Once agreed upon, the new NSS needs to be put on a statutory basis, as advocated in the Mahon Report, and it needs to be implemented through a series of interlocking programmes and initiatives.

My hope is that we can rise to this challenge and produce a spatial planning framework that will serve us well.

Rob Kitchin

 

For a good introduction to the present NSS, see the recent special edition of Administration 60(3), The National Spatial Strategy: Ten Years On, guest edited by David Meredith and Chris van Egeraat.

Revisiting the National Spatial Strategy ten years on – David Meredith & Chris van Egeraat

 

The National Spatial Strategy: Rationale, process, performance and prospects – James A. Walsh

Economics – The missing link in the National Spatial Strategy – Edgar Morgenroth

Perspectives on Ireland’s economic geography: An evaluation of spatial structures – David Meredith, Jim Walsh & Ronan Foley

Gateways, hubs and regional specialisation in the National Spatial Strategy – Chris van Egeraat, Proinnsias Breathnach & Declan Curran

Urban specialisation, complementarity and spatial development strategies on the island of Ireland – Des McCafferty, Chris van Egeraat, Justin Gleeson & Brendan Bartley

Governance and the National Spatial Strategy – Placing spatial policy at the heart of the diagonal public service – Séan O’Riordáin

Shrink smarter? Planning for spatial selectivity in population growth in Ireland – Gavin Daly & Rob Kitchin

 

Ireland and tax evasion

Yesterday’s Observer newspaper highlighted a shocking ActionAid report about the tax activities of Associated British Foods, a corporate giant with operations across the world. The report explains how ABF have managed to minimize the amount of tax they pay in Zambia, one of the world’s poorest countries, where they grow sugar under the name of Zambia Sugar, which is owned by Illovo Sugar, a member of the ABF group. Indeed, the report finds that “ABF’s Zambian subsidiary has, overall, paid less than 0.5% of its US$123 million pre-tax profits in corporate income tax,” even though the corporate tax rate in Zambia is actually 35%.

The role Ireland plays in all this is a disgrace. In stark contrast to the ‘development’ relationship between Ireland and Zambia (one in which Irish Aid provided €16.3m in development aid to Zambia in 2011 alone), Ireland thoroughly undermines Zambia’s tax-raising powers, to the tune of about US$17.7 million since 2007. For example, ABF has paid management fees to an Irish company that employs no-one here; it has exploited a lop-sided tax treaty between Ireland and Zambia to minimize tax it pays to the Zambian exchequer on interest on loans it took out; and it has taken advantage of tax treaty loopholes to shuffle profits via some of its subsidiaries, including in Ireland. Thus, as the report makes absolutely clear, ABF’s tax activities have been helped along by Ireland (including the tax treaty with Zambia and the ‘light tough regulation’ that oversees activities in the International Financial Services Centre). To their credit, ActionAid don’t mess about when it comes to noting the hypocrisy:

“Not only does this tend to nakedly boost Irish revenues at the expense of Zambia – ironically for a country which is one of Ireland’s nine long-term development partners – but it also allows multinational companies to ‘treaty shop’, as we have seen, using Ireland as a tax-free conduit for transactions between Zambia and other countries. While Ireland gives aid to the Zambian government with one hand, Zambian government revenues flow out again thanks to its Irish tax treaty” (p.24).

Given all this, the report recommends that: “Ireland should urgently either renegotiate or cancel its bilateral tax treaty with Zambia, to allow Zambia to levy the tax rates it chooses on payments of royalties, dividends, interest and service fees from Zambian to Irish companies” (p.36). I completely agree. But more also needs to be done. This issue isn’t just about Ireland’s tax treaty with Zambia. As Colm Keena reported in the Irish Times in NovemberIreland’s place in the world helps other giants minimize their taxes, including Microsoft. He writes, “The Irish centre is responsible for retail sales in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Because Microsoft Ireland Research has the right to sell Microsoft products in that geographical zone, profits on the sales of Microsoft products in that vast portion of the globe end up in 70 Sir John Rogerson’s Quay.” This sort of arrangement is great news for Microsoft shareholders: its Irish subsidiaries helped reduce the company’s 2011 US tax bill by $2.43 billion (€1.87 billion). But it absolutely stinks. As Keena says: “Seen from the perspective of Africans, it must be very rum indeed to see profits from sales in their countries being taxed in Dublin, to fund a society a million miles away from theirs in terms of development.” Thus, not only should Ireland renegotiate or cancel its tax treaty with Zambia, the government should also make a commitment to ending our involvement in this sort of tax evasion.

The even bigger story here is about what sort of post-crisis Ireland we want to see. Is scamming the neighbours – near or far – a good development strategy? Of course, we don’t want to have this image of ourselves. We’d probably all prefer to think of our country as climbing the development ladder by engaging in a race to the top, for example by attracting investment from the likes of Google and Facebook. Yet, what the ActionAid report highlights is the extent to which we’re also still very much engaged in a ‘race to the bottom’. By undercutting tax rates, undermining tax revenue regimes, and underpinning the tax evasion strategies of some of the world’s richest companies, we’re putting pressure on countries such as Zambia to reduce their corporate tax rates down to the Irish floor.

Maybe we’d prefer to celebrate our potential as a small country that can make a big difference. Indeed, just such a claim was made by Tom Arnold and Jamie Drummond in last week’s Irish Times, when they noted how Ireland, “can make a disproportionate impact at international level. Due to our 19th-century history of famine, we have a unique legitimacy in making hunger a priority of our foreign policy in the 21st century.” I’m sure Ireland can do a lot to help the fight to eradicate hunger while it has the EU presidency and then again at the G8 meeting in Fermanagh in June. But as the story about ABF’s activities in Zambia highlights, Ireland must recognize that its role in the eradication (or, indeed, the production) of hunger is absolutely also about how it facilitates tax evasion. Appallingly, Ireland is undermining the ability of foreign, often much poorer governments to address the sorts of inequalities that generate a prevalence rate of undernourishment in Zambia of 47.4% in 2011. This has to stop.

Alistair Fraser

 

Some Thoughts on the Introduction of a Planning Regulator

Yesterday, Minister Jan O’Sullivan appeared before the Oireachtas Joint Committee on the Environment, Culture and the Gaeltacht to outline her Department’s proposals to legislate for the introduction of a Planning Regulator in 2013. The introduction of an Independent Planning Regulator was a key recommendation of the Mahon Tribunal Report published last year. The Tribunal recommended that the Minister for the Environment’s planning policy enforcement powers be transferred to an Independent Planning Regulator who should also be charged with carrying out investigations into systemic problems in the planning system as well as educational and research functions.

The introduction of an independent Planning Regulator, which the Minister has publicly committed to, does not entail a simple ‘bolt-on’ addition to the planning system. It will profoundly alter and transform the entire way in which planning policy has to-date been implemented in Ireland. It is clear from the text of the Minister’s speech that in framing their policy proposals for the forthcoming legislation, the Department is grappling with the many complexities and difficulties at the heart of the problem – that is, that planning is fundamentally a political activity which does not lend itself neatly to simple bureaucratic regulation. In guiding the discussion at the JOC, the Minister posed a series of questions as follows:

• Should the Minister’s powers be fully transferred to an independent regulator or should the final forward planning decisions remain political in nature (i.e. to be taken by the Minister / Government / Oireachtas) with a regulator providing an independent advisory / supervisory role?
• If power is to be fully transferred, how can we ensure accountability by an independent regulator?
• What would be the limits of the regulator’s powers vis-à-vis the planning process and elected members? Is the regulator’s decision final?
• Should the role of a regulator be confined only to situations where a dispute arises over a plan?
• What is the most suitable institutional arrangement for delivery on the recommendation (e.g. new authority or some type of recast of existing framework)?
• If a new authority is to be established how would it interface with the existing institutional framework (planning authorities, regional authorities, An Bord Pleanála)?
• If existing structures are to be used, what entity could take on the function and how can the new function be taken on without eroding capacity to discharge existing roles or without being detrimental or damaging to well established and publicly accepted independent role’? For example, if the plan-making regulatory function is to reside in an existing body such as An Bord Pleanála, might that affect the other functions of the board creating an inherent tension between making the Board making decisions on forward planning, development plans and local area plans as well as individual planning cases?
• Is there not a case for the Regulator to be the person who conducts the fundamental assessment of the performance of the planning system, including an assessment of the effectiveness of the Minister, local authorities and so on rather than becoming a super-non accountable national planning body?

Firstly, it is worth commenting on what the Minister did not say in her speech to the JOC, but which is absolutely critical in framing this debate. It is essential that, as also recommended in the Mahon Tribunal Report, both the National Spatial Strategy and National Development Plan be placed on an explicit statutory footing (as is the case in Scotland, for example). The forthcoming legislation should specify that both the NSS and NDP be reviewed in parallel and be subject to Oireachtas approval. The legislation should place a mandatory obligation on government to jointly review both the NSS and NDP at a minimum each and every eight years; outline precisely what is required to be included in both plans (including delivery and implementation); the procedure by which they are to jointly be reviewed; and provide for transparent public involvement in the process i.e. a staged process similar to that required of local authorities in adopting development plans. The placing of the NSS/NDP on a statutory footing will require both plans to be subject to Strategic Environmental Assessment and Habitats Directive Assessment, – including an analysis of alternative future scenarios – and allow for a public and political debate which is desperately needed.

The placing of the NSS/NDP on a statutory footing will ensure that that national planning policy remains a political activity. However, the regulation and oversight of the system should be independent. There has been considerable reform and improvement of the planning system in recent years with the introduction of multi-level and multi-agency oversight. As a result, the scope for local authorities and/or regional planning authorities to deviate from national policy has been considerably reduced. However, the current system whereby the Department reviews, comments and potentially ‘calls – in’ local authority development plans through Section 31 of the Act needs to be replaced with a system of independent oversight. Planning in Ireland is mired in a public perception of corruption, cronyism and political interference and only an independent regulatory authority will suffice in undoing this perception. In doing this, the Department can get on with the important business of plan-making.

Accountability can be ensured by designing the system so as to be fully transparent through, for example, the full application of the Access to Information on the Environment Directive, requirement for the Planning Regulator to attend at Joint Oireachtas Committees as necessary, an open and transparent appointment process for a fixed term, full publication of all reports within mandatory time limits, and strong legal deterrents against lobbying, etc. The decision of the Planning Regulator should be final. This does not imply that the role of the Planning Regulator is designed so as to be inflexible. As is currently the case between, for example, the Department, the National Transport Authority, the Regional Planning Authorities and local authorities, the regulatory system can be designed so as to allow formal interaction with the Planning Regulator to reach consensual solutions where possible. It is accepted that there could be rare occasions whereby the Planning Regulator fails to act or acts inappropriately and a fail-safe mechanism is required. In such situations the Minister must remain ultimately accountable and the power should rest with the Minister to override the decision of the Regulator. Again, the legislation could be crafted such that, in such rare circumstances, a draft order be required to be laid out before each house of the Oireachtas and could only be proceeded with following a resolution approving of the draft has been passed by each house.

It is not appropriate that the proposed Planning Regulator be merged with An Bord Pleanála. In the same way as the Minister is precluded from commenting on any specific planning application and An Bord Pleanála has no role in the forward planning system, there should be a strict separation of powers. The role of the Planning Regulator should be confined to ensuring that national planning policy is correctly implemented and overseeing complaints against planning authorities. This should include complaints on allegations of corruption, improper procedures or systemic problems and undertaking periodic audits of the planning functions of local authorities – but not extending to a role in reviewing a decision on any specific planning application. For example, the Local Government Ombudsman currently has the powers to examine complaints about how local authority staff carry out their everyday executive and administrative activities in relation to the planning system. These include complaints about delays or failing to take action in relation to, for example, planning enforcement matters. These oversight powers should be transferred to the Planning Regulator.

The introduction of the Planning Regulator does not necessitate the creation of another expensive QUANGO. Throughout the ‘Celtic tiger’ period local authorities employed significant numbers of planners and other professionals to deal with the huge volume of planning applications. With the dramatic fall-off in new development proposals and the proposed reforms of local and regional governance structures, there is considerable scope for suitable professional staff to be seconded from elsewhere in the public service. There is also a plethora of agencies with some responsibilities in oversight, such as the Regional Planning Authorities, the National Transport Authority, the Local Government Ombudsman and the Office of Environmental Enforcement. An innovative and rationalised approach to oversight could yield significant savings and the establishment of a more coherent system. For example, the Planning Regulator could be housed as a sub-unit of the Local Government Ombudsman to ensure administrative synergies are maximised.

Finally, a further important recommendation of the Mahon Tribunal Report, also not referred to in the Minister’s speech, was that the Planning Regulator should be mandated to undertake educational and research functions. There is no doubt that heretofore planning education and public/political awareness of the important role of land-use planning in society has been abjectly lacking in Ireland. The abolition of An Foras Forbartha (similar to the Design Council in the UK) in 1988, the abolition of local rates and political cronyism and ineptitude all contributed to this end. The evidence-base for planning has improved dramatically with the development of tools such as MyPlan and AIRO. However, I am not convinced that a regulatory authority is best positioned to undertake planning education and research. It should be the role of the Department, unburdened by oversight responsibilities and with a new and focused national planning mandate, to lead in this important task drawing on the existing capacities within universities and other private and public bodies. For example, could the Housing Agency be reformulated as the ‘Housing & Planning Agency’ to provide a 21^st Century An Foras Forbartha?

2013 has the potential to be a landmark year. In the aftermath of the economic collapse, exactly fifty years after the introduction of the first planning acts in 1963, twenty-five years after the short-sighted abolition of An Foras Forbarhta and ten-years after the publication of the NSS, we have a once in a generation opportunity to reform the planning system, rethink the role of national planning for our long-term prosperity and to foster a new consensus in the public and political consciousness as to the value of planning in building a nation for the common good. We shouldn’t waste it.

Gavin Daly

 

New EU university ranking exercise – U-Multirank

This afternoon sees the start of the “Rankings and the Visibility of Quality Outcomes in the European Higher Education Area” conference in Dublin Castle, part of the events associated with Ireland’s Presidency of the EU.  A good chunk of today’s proceedings focuses on the adoption and roll-out of the EU’s new university ranking exercise, called U-Multirank, which aims to be live by 2014.

Since the initial global university ranking in 2003, there have been a plethora of ranking systems developed, with the big three being the ARWU (Shanghai) ranking, QS ranking, and the Time Higher Ed ranking.  These rankings have become key benchmarks for comparing universities within regions and across the globe, seized upon by some universities for marketing, and the media and government to either promote or denigrate institutions.  They are undoubtedly being used to shape education policy and the allocation of resources and yet they are routinely criticised for being highly flawed in their methodology.

Somewhat ironically, a sector devoted to measurement and science has been evaluated to date by weak science. There are several noted problems with existing rankings.

The rankings use surrogate, proxy measures to assess the things they purport to be measuring, and involve no site visits and peer assessment of outputs (but rather judgements of reputation, alongside indicators such as citation rates).  An example of such proxies include using the number of staff with PhDs as a measure of teaching quality; or the citation rate to judge quality of scholarship.  The relationship in both cases is tangential not synonymous.

The rankings are highly volatile, especially outside the top 20, with universities sliding up and down the rankings by dozens of places on an annual basis.  If the measures were valid and reliable we would expect them to have some stability – after all universities are generally stable entities, and performance and quality of programmes and research do not dramatically alter on a yearly basis.  And on close examination some of the results are just plain nonsense – for example, several of the universities listed in the top 20 institutions for geography programmes in the QS rankings in 2011 do not have a geography department/programme (e.g. Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Chicago, Yale, Princeton, Columbia; note the link automatically redirects to 2012 results for some reason) and other rankings barely correspond to much more thorough assessments such as the UK departments vis-a-vis the UK research assessment exercise (very few geographers would rank Oxford University as being the best department in the UK, let alone the world).  Such nonsense casts doubts on all the results.

The measures do not simply measure performance but also reputation judged by academics. The latter is highly subjective based on opinion (often little informed by experience or on-the-ground knowledge of the relative performance of universities in other country systems) and is skewed by a range of factors such as the size of alumni, resources and heritage (their past reputation as opposed to present; or simply name recognition), and is inflected by wider country reputation.  The sample of academics who return scores is also skewed to certain countries.

Because the measures add weight to data such as citation and research income they favour universities who are technical and scientific in focus, and work against those with large social science or humanities faculties (whose outputs such as books are not captured by citation and require less research funding to do high quality research).  They also favour universities with large endowments and are well resourced.  The citation scores highly skew towards English-Language institutions.

The rankings take no account of the varying national roles or systems of universities, but looks at more global measures.  Universities in these systems are working towards different ends and are in no way failing by not having the same kind of profile as a large, research-orientated university.

None of the ranking standardise by resourcing, so there is no attempt to see who is performing the best with respect to inputs; they simply look at the scale and reputation of outputs and equate these to quality and performance.  This conflation raises some serious questions concerning the ecological fallacy of the studies.

These failings favour certain kinds of institutions in certain places, with the top 100 universities in the three main rankings all dominated by US/UK institutions, particularly those which are science and technology orientated.  There is clearly an Anglo-Saxon, English language bias at work, hence the new EU ranking.  Very few people who work in academia believe that the UK has many more better universities than those in Germany, or France, or the Netherlands, or Sweden, or Japan, or Australia, etc.  Yet only a handful of universities in these countries appear in the 100, and hardly any at all in the top 50.

Whether the U-Multirank system will provide a more valid and robust ranking of universities, time will tell.  The full final report on its feasibility suggests a wider vision and methodology and some concerted attempts to address some of the issues associated with the other rankings.  One thing is certain, rankings will not disappear, as flawed as each of them are, because they serve a useful media and political function.  However, they should be viewed with very healthy scepticism, mindful of the criticisms noted above.

Rob Kitchin

For an interesting set of blog posts and links to media stories re. university rankings see these collections at Global Higher Ed and Ninth Level Ireland.