Based on the @IMFDublinDiary Twitter feed and stories in The Mire, The Eighty Five Billion Euro Man is a satire/farce, starting with the IMF’s first visit to Dublin and ending just a few weeks after Enda Kenny took office as Taoiseach. It covers a whole range of different events and parodies both the civil service and leading politicians. The story is told mainly through dialogue heavy scenes that work well to capture some of the absurdities, ironies and tragedies of the bailout and subsequent political shenanigans. There is a lot to like about the novel. Some of the scenes are very amusing and the caricatures of some politicians are particularly well done, for example, Brian Cowen, Mary Coughlan, Brian Lenihan, Michael Noonan and Joan Burton. However, the plot is a little uneven, with the tail end of the book, in the lead up to the election and afterwards, notably weaker (partially because it starts to stray too far from the situation it seeks to satirise – especially Mulhearn running for election). The level of satire also varies a little and whilst it is very amusing at times it’s never quite as biting or cutting as it could be, and it doesn’t have the sophisticated wit and cleverness of a political satire like Yes, Minister. Given the in-jokes, I’m also not sure how easy it would be for someone unfamiliar with Ireland to follow some of the scenes. That all said, The Eighty Five Billion Euro Man is a recommended read for anyone who is interested in the crash in Ireland and the government response. It’s an amusing read and provides a counterpoint to the dry journalistic accounts that have dominated the shelves to date.

Rob Kitchin

Ireland housing affordability

It is clear that Irish house prices have fallen dramatically over the past four years, decreasing by 46% nationally and 54% in Dublin according to the CSO.  There is no doubt then that houses are becoming more affordable in comparison to median household income (which has not fallen to the same degree).  Nevertheless in the case of Irish data, it would be really useful to be able to see the exact source of the median house price data used given the absence of detailed property price register and various estimates of present house prices (DECLG, CSO and Daft.ie are listed at the end of the report).  DECLG reports that average new houses for Q4 2010 (the last reported data) as €238,551 and for secondhand houses as €349,393; for Q4 2011 Daft.ie has average asking prices as 159K for the inner city, 211K for north city, 217K for south city; €215K for north Dublin county; €177K for west Dublin county; and €322K for south Dublin county – all but two areas are above the median Demographica house price of €178,000 for Dublin as a whole.  These sources though seem to be using averages rather than medians.  The household income seems to tally with SILC data for 2010, though that provides a national snapshot and is not disaggregated to cities.

The extent to which Dublin, Cork, Galway, Limerick and Waterford are now considered affordable, or indeed some of the most affordable cities outside of the US in the 8 countries surveyed, might seem fanciful to many.  There’s no doubt that housing has, however, become a lot more affordable in recent years given the extensive drop in prices, and Demographica’s data reflects this.  The data suggest though that there is still a little way for prices to fall before all areas become classed as ‘affordable’, but that an idealised bottom may not be too far off (assuming median incomes hold up and that Demographica’s data is a true reflection of median house prices).  The extent to which the wider public agrees with such sentiment and how access to credit, weak demand and oversupply plays out will probably determine where prices level off.

Rob Kitchin

Free Registration at: geography.department@nuim.ie
Conference details and list of speakers here.
For further information, contact: chris.vanegeraat@nuim.ie

The data generated by the AIRO mapping tool will provide a unique insight into the cross-border distribution of facilities and services. A key aim of the new mapping tool is to make evidence of the distribution of services more accessible, and to support evidence-based decisions in terms of planning and development. For policy makers, local authorities, businesses and communities seeking to make urban and rural environments desirable places to live and work, access to such tools are critical to planning, funding, implementing and monitoring new schemes and initiatives.

The All-Island Accessibility Mapping Tool provides an analysis of access to settlements and key service infrastructure such as transport, education and health facilities across Ireland. Accessibility scores to a range of services have been developed for every residential address point on the island (approx 2.7m) based on average drive-time speeds (average speed on NAVTEC road network plus 10% urban area congestion charge). For the purposes of the mapping tool the accessibility scores have been averaged at the most detailed spatial statistical unit available – Small Areas for the Republic of Ireland (approx 18k) and Output Areas for Northern Ireland (approx 5k), see Figure 1 and 2.

Figure 1: Average access score in Small Areas

Figure 2: Access to International Airports

The online accessibility mapping tool, developed using ArcGIS Viewer for Flex from ESRI, allows users to select from a variety of maps and query the accessibility score at the small areas level. Accessibility scores have been developed for the following services to date:

• Gateways, Gateways and Hubs
• Settlements > 50,000, Settlements > 20,000, Settlements> 10,000, Settlements > 5,000 and Settlements > 1,500
• Education: Primary and Secondary Schools
• Health: Full 24hr Emergency Hospitals, Full 24hr and Partial Emergency Hospitals, GPs, Pharmacies and Dentists
• Train Stations, International and All International and Regional Airports
• Emergency Services: Fire Stations, Garda/PSNI Stations 

Note: Origin datasets have been generated from a variety of sources such as NISRA/NINIS, HSE, Dept of Education, DubLinked/NTA etc

Brief overview of results

In general, average travel times to services in Northern Ireland are lower than the Republic of Ireland. Travel times to the nearest education services such as Primary and Secondary schools are roughly comparable whereas there is a noticeable difference in travel times to the nearest health services. Local health services and facilities such as GPs, Dentists and Pharmacies are marginally more accessible in Northern Ireland. However, access to more strategic health services such as emergency hospitals are quite different with average access to a 24 hour Full Emergency Hospital at 16 minutes in Northern Ireland and 21 minutes in the Republic of Ireland. There are of course regional differences across the island with services being most accessible in cities and urban areas where average access is less than 10 minutes; Local Authorities such as Cork City, Belfast, Dublin City, Galway City, Waterford City, Dún-Laoighre Rathdown, Castlereagh, South Dublin and Coleraine fall within this category. On the other end of the scale, the average access is in excess of 35 minutes; with Local Authorities such as Monaghan, Omagh, Tipperary North, Leitrim, Clare and Roscommon amongst the worst.

Access the All-Island Accessibility Mapping Tool

To get access to this free and interactive mapping tool and explore the different results please click the following link: http://airomaps.nuim.ie/airoaccessmap

To aid an analysis of the accessibility results at local authority level we have also developed an interactive data visualisation tool, the results of this can be viewed on the AIRO site at the following link: Click here

Justin Gleeson

“A chara, – May I ask your paper to stop referring to the years of unsustainable high house prices as the “boom”?  In the past few days alone this word has appeared several times in your paper.  “The habit acquired in the boom years . . .”, Conor Pope (Magazine, December 31st). “Lots of people took Spanish or French during the boom” (CC, Magazine, December 31st). “Boom-era debts take toll on big-name builders”, Barry O’Halloran (Business, December 30th). “The Elliott group . . . was one of the prolific players during the property boom”, Simon Carswell (Business, December 30th). “In 2007, Ireland’s long property boom ended”, Dan O’Brien (Business Review, 2011, December 30th).

The word “boom” infers there was economic soundness which lead to success.  In reality, a mass pyramid scheme has burdened thousands of people with unmanageable debts and meant that we have lost economic sovereignty because no-one else will lend us money on the international markets.

Perhaps as a New Year’s resolution your excellent writers could desist from using the word “boom” and henceforth refer to this infamous period by just using the more accurate word “bubble”? – Is mise,

ALEX STAVELEY”

Language is important because it creates perception and frames how something is discussed and understood. Referring to the Celtic Tiger years as a boom does, as Alex Staveley argues, suggest that this was a sustainable, well managed period of economic growth that would slow to a lower level of growth at some point; not that it was growth fuelled by massive debt that led to a huge reversal of fortunes and a deep recession and bailout.  To be fair, prior to 2001, Ireland was experiencing rapid economic growth based on exports.  After that, GDP growth was driven by borrowing money on the international money markets, property development and speculation.  It’s most definitely a bubble from this point on as history has demonstrated with its popping.  Boom suggests it is a period we aspire to return to; bubble reveals it for what it really was.

Rob Kitchin

Sometimes it’s difficult not to automatically rail against the CIF given that its members were a vital part of the country going bust, but in this case there is something here worthy of attention.  Whilst we do not need any housing or offices or retail parks or hotels any time soon, investment in new public infrastructures such as green energy, next generation telecomms, public transport, hospitals, schools, etc. through capital expenditure would have the benefits of creating work whilst investing in developments that would attract inward investment and stimulate growth.  The difficulty is that generating the finance for capital expenditure would necessitate further cuts elsewhere in government spend given that wider austerity measures mean that the markets are adverse to extending the state credit for such stimulus measures.

I think therefore it’s unlikely that the Troika will see anything differently after meeting the CIF.  They will agree that in principle capital spending would be good, but it must be created by further austerity elsewhere; in other words it is up to Ireland to work out how to do this within its existing arrangements, rather than through a re-jigging of the Troika terms.  That is likely to be politically inpalatable to the government.  We’ll see.

Rob Kitchin

Less positive, from the perspective of some of Ireland’s regions, is the regional distribution of the new investments. Newspaper reports for 2011 already suggested that a large part of the new IDA supported investments is concentrated in Dublin, Cork and Galway. This is now confirmed, with 72 per cent of investments located in the Greater Dublin Area and Cork alone (up from 63% in 2010). For a more detailed picture of all the regions we need to wait for the annual report. This does not compare well with the Horizon 2020 target of 50% of investments located outside Dublin and Cork. Foreign direct investment displays a growing preference for the largest urban centres of Ireland. This raises serious questions in relation to the effectiveness and practicality of the current National Spatial Strategy and the notion of balanced regional development.

Table 1:  Investment statistics IDA supported companies

Source: IDA End of Year Statement 2011; selected IDA Annual Reports.

Chris van Egeraat

Details of the fourth in the series of conferences on the Irish economy are below. Further details of talks will be posted here in advance.

Conference on Irish Economic Policy

Dublin

January 27^th

Clarion Hotel IFSC

On January 27th 2012, the Geary Institute will run an event on the future of Irish economy policy in Dublin. An era of unprecedented growth followed by a dramatic economic collapse is giving way to several years of sluggish growth. The main theme of the conference will be the development of more intelligent economic policy that enables substantial development even in the context of a tightened fiscal and monetary environment. The conference will take place over the course of the full day, with parallel sessions addressing employment, innovation, education and related themes. The conference aims to provide a forum for new ideas on the conduct of Irish economic policy, including the extent to which academic economics and related disciplines can make a bigger contribution to the conduct of economic policy in Ireland, and the extent to which policy can be designed more effectively.  The conference organisers are Liam Delaney, Colm Harmon and Stephen Kinsella. Please email to register attendance: emma.barron@ucd.ie There is no registration charge.

Rob Kitchin

Anglo Republic tells this tale through a forensic examination of Anglo Irish Bank. Anglo was the financial darling of the Celtic Tiger years. It grew from a small investment bank to become the third largest bank in the state. Each year it posted record profits and its share price grew accordingly. And more than any other bank its growth was tied to the property sector. Analysts were flabbergasted at its performance. Rather than questioning its business practices, they instead invested. Here was a bank that had seemingly found a magic formula. As Simon Carswell’s book reveals, however, it’s success was built on poor foundations and dodgy practices. Anglo was dependent on persistent high growth in the Irish economy to keep its house of cards upright. As soon as the economy started to slow, it started to fail. And it started using all kinds of tricks to keep the cards in place, including shifting money on and off the books when accounts were being audited and lending money to borrowers to buy shares to keep the share price up. If things were bad in the bank, things weren’t much different outside with the financial regulator, Central Bank and Department of Finance all working to keep a dying entity alive. Anglo was viewed by the Irish government as a systemic risk to the state and could not simply wound down. Its balance sheet was equivalent to 60% of Irish GDP (Lehman Brothers was 7% of US GDP), and represented a fifth of the banking sector. Globally, no bank that represented such a large proportion of a country’s banking balance sheet had failed before. All told, an entire year’s worth of tax receipts were pumped into Anglo and promptly written down, never to be seen again. When Carswell chose the subtitle, ‘Inside the Bank that Broke Ireland’, he was being literal.

Anglo Republic is a fascinating read for anyone interested in the present Irish crisis and how it unfolded from a wider banking perspective and within a single financial institution. Carswell has amassed amount of information on the company and how it operated, included access into board meetings, email between key players and dozens of interviews. He does a very good job at putting a shape to all this information, producing a compelling narrative that details what went on in and outside the bank. Crucially he manages to weave the main characters, their motivations and actions, into the story to lift the book up out of a rather dry history. Sean FitzPatrick, David Drumm, Sean Quinn, Pat Neary and Brian Lenihan all figure prominently. What is particularly interested is the ways in which FitzPatrick, Drumm and Quinn schemed to try and save themselves and their personal fortunes whilst trying to keep a sinking ship afloat. Where the book is a little thin is with respect to wider analysis and judgement. Carswell describes in great detail Anglo’s rise and fall, but does little to explain it; he shies away from commenting on the legalities and moralities of actions taken; and he fails to state how he thinks the system needs to changed to stop such a situation arising again. Overall, a book heavy on factual narrative that provides a very useful descriptive analysis of a banking and state failure. It’s also a book that should perhaps come with a health warning: ‘likely to make your blood boil’.

Rob Kitchin

This very savvy tagline is of course that of the global Occupy movement, which is also currently taking place in various cities across Ireland.  In one sense, this is a piece of inspired branding.  But the critique underlying the statement is also significant.  This stands for a number of things, but I will mention just two.  Firstly, it stands for the increasing concentration of wealth within fewer and fewer hands (the 1%).  Secondly, it aims to mitigate the possibility of a protest movement being divided and conquered by effacing internal differences under an umbrella banner (the 99%).  Occupy is a movement that incorporates multiple peoples and perspectives, political aspirations and pessimisms. It unites under a very simple principle; that the system as it currently stands is not fair and something needs to change.

All this is very commendable.  It is an inspiring sign of our continued capacity to seek a more socially just society.  But as my internal optimist wrestles with my eternal pessimist, I find myself wondering what protest can still achieve in the increasingly democracy-starved society we live in.

It is a society of spectacle.  Postmodern culture, particularly as channelled through the auspices of the internet, has multiplied the voices through which any event is represented and exploded the cacophony of perspectives through which it is read.  This has had the effect of bringing important new modes of analysis, such as gender, race, and sexuality, to bear on society, but it has also eviscerated the stability of fixed categories.  This is not necessarily a bad thing.  However, as postmodern sensibilities have been sucked into consumer culture one of the outcomes has been the creation of a society that passively engages with media, politics, and culture.

JG Ballard, in the last few novels he published before he died, captured this very well.  Books such as Millennium People and Kingdom Come present a society deadened by the bland permissiveness of consumer culture, wherein meaning is refracted through so many halls of mirrors that all we are left with is the mode of representation standing for nothing but itself.  Under this veneer of boredom, Ballard sees a society dreaming of violence, unconsciously searching for meaning through the visceral experience.  But in a consumer culture divorced from meaning, the violence that erupts takes the form of consumerism; violence as spectacle, violence as the experience economy.  “Look at the world around you, David”, proffers one of the characters in Millennium People, “What do you see? An endless theme park, with everything turned into entertainment. Science, politics, education – they’re so many fairground rides”.  The society of spectacle pushed to its logical endpoint.

Advertising slogan from JG Ballard's Kingdom Come, by Harper Collins Design Team

When I look at the world around me I see a lot of truth in this statement.  Political discussion in Ireland at the moment sees minor points of policy debated, while any major changes are precluded by the intractable system the state operates within.  The politicians argue, points are scored, and nothing changes.  Because, ultimately nothing can change if the locked-in system precludes it.

Within this post-politics, protest also has its place.  After all, everything is permissible, all points of view, all arguments.  In such a liberal climate, Zizek argues, we do not necessarily elevate the platform of discussion but rather everything gets reduced to zero, to an inchoate mush of jostling consensus, the only agreement the agreement to disagree.  This has the tendency to reduce politics to a mannered debate contest, pretty in discursive eloquence and nuance but with rules that are set in advance.  As we have moved into this post-political society of the consumer spectacle, the response by governments to protest, at least in the Western world, has been simply to ignore it.  Whereas in previous eras protest was frequently quashed or at least elicited some sort of response from those in power, now marches and demonstrations are tolerated without comment.  This strategy is not incidental.  Governments now know that in the majority of cases the best method for dealing with spectacles of dissent is to allow them to happen, to allow protest groups their fifteen seconds in the spotlight of information overload. Governments then ignore the issues these protesters raise and to get back to the neoliberal business at hand, safe in the knowledge that the spectacle will dissolve again into the informational mush.

This had also been, up until recently, the response to the Occupy movement.  In the early stages of Occupy Wall Street, there were some cases of police brutality, which were widely publicised and help politicise and popularise the movement.  But following this, as the movement spread viral-style across the US and Europe, on the whole the response from governments has been pretty tight-lipped.  Presumably, it was hoped that the Occupiers would soon run out of steam and their cause would be forgotten as another took its place in the spectacle spotlight.  However, despite tacit attempts to fragment the movement and to undermine it simply by attrition, the protesters have been tenaciously holding their ground… literally.  Last month, across the USA there appears to have been a crackdown on Occupy protesters, which Naomi Wolf writing in The Guardian suggests could only have been orchestrated from higher levels of Government.  She attributes this sudden flexing of state power to the congealing of a number of succinct demands on the part of the Occupy movement relating to financial transparency, which has the potential to make some elected representatives look pretty bad. While a similar crackdown has not happened in Ireland, there were rumours that the Occupy Dame Street protesters were to be hit with a court injunction for erecting a temporary structure.  But whatever the immediate impetus for these crackdowns, it seems to me that the Occupy movement has reached a certain critical mass in spatial and temporal terms that has taken the option of simply ignoring it away from governments.

Protester at Occupy Dame Street

This certainly suggests that the movement is having a political impact, does not necessarily mean that anything has been changed… at least not yet.

The computer scientist Jaron Lanier in his book You Are Not a Gadget describes a process he terms ‘lock-in’.  Lock-in describes what happens when particular programmes, despite their limitations, become the standard, and because it proves impractical to change or dispose of all the software and hardware that has been developed using this programming, the technology remains stagnated through its basic underlying architecture.  Lanier uses the example of MIDI, a programme that represents musical notes.  When developed in the 1980s, MIDI offered a very crude way to represent music digitally – it could represent the rather static expressions of a keyboard but not the transient expressions of a saxophone for example.  What perhaps started as a first step towards digital musical expression became widely used and, thus, became locked-in.  Thirty years after its inception then, MIDI remains the standard scheme to represent music in software, to the ultimate detriment of musical expression.  This occurs, Lanier suggests, because while it is easy to build small programmes from scratch, it is extraordinarily difficult to change existing larger programmes.

I think that lock-in offers a good metaphor for role of the state in terms of the current crisis.  For the past thirty years, nation states have been programmed into a mode of neoliberal thinking.  This mode of thinking is now to a large extent locked-in.  We can see this in the response of nation states to the financial crisis.  This crisis was brought about by an excess of neoliberalism – an all too optimistic faith in markets and the retraction of state oversight and regulation – but the solutions being proposed use the same neoliberal architecture as their foundation.  Like MIDI does to the musical note, these solutions diminish democracy so as to make it compatible with the limitations of the neoliberal programme.  Moreover, nation states do not stand in isolation, but are routed into global political and financial systems.  Thus, the ‘big’ programme gets bigger.

If the neoliberal project is the cumbersome ‘big’ programme, Occupy is the ‘small’ programme.  For the participants, it is a joy no doubt to watch it grow and flourish.  But the greater challenge for the group is to influence the architecture of the ‘big’ programme.  This is no small feat.  There is a lot at stake in the status-quo.  This is partly, as Marxists rightly suggest, because powerful interests exert political influence in order to retain or enhance their position in the system.  But it is also, I think partly down to a lack of political imagination.  The system stays the same because our leaders can’t imagine what it would be like to create something different.  There is a broad consensus calling for reform, but the programme is so big and so many interests are involved that these reforms become more and more inconsequential and we are left with lock-in.  Leaders are interested in fixing the bugs in the programme, not changing the underlying architecture.

But this is hardly reason to resign ourselves to a neoliberal future.  If the current trajectory continues we can only hope for further encroachments on democracy, deepening inequality, and the next crisis waiting around the corner.  This is an important junction to insert the possibility of alternatives.  But this is likely to be a long-term project.  After all, we are dealing with thirty years of neoliberal programming which we can’t expect to simply disappear overnight.  To those people who critique Occupy for their lack of defined alternatives, I would say, give them a chance.  Despite the way in which history is generally conceived through things like Hollywood movies, change does not happen abruptly.  Change occurs gradually through fragmented actions that coalesce into moments in which transformation seems to crystallise, although this is often only apprehended after the fact.  Occupy is one part of this process wherein alternative trajectories are being put forward.  Its’ very public face means that it plays a significant role.

One of the major pitfalls that Occupy potentially faces is that it will get locked-in to existing structures.  Having reached the tipping point where the movement can’t simply be ignored, Occupy are in the difficult phase of trying to turn the initial flurry of discontent into something more sustainable.  Part of this is creating a programme of succinct demands.  Another part is steering a difficult course between the rocks of public opinion and political discourse in search of a position of ‘legitimacy’ upon which to extend the movement’s reach.  This journey is precarious because it relies on the same fickle media/public machine, which inasmuch as it can be permissive of multiple perspectives can also be mobilised in intensely moralising ways.  We saw these two facets in action during the recent presidential election in Ireland.  The candidates’ characters were routinely assassinated, which clearly had a decisive influence on the outcome of their campaigns.  At the same time, this was treated by most of the public (perhaps rightly) as entertainment akin to the X-Factor.  This dual aspect of media culture is perhaps baffling, but ultimately is something that public figures and groups have to contend with.  Hence, Occupy’s policy of no drink, no drugs, and no violence on site.  Clearly there are many sides to this policy, including making the occupations safe environments, but one aspect of it is certainly an attempt to mitigate the usual suspects of negative press that are levelled at protesters.

Map of Areas Effected by Rioting in London August 2011

We saw this type of media backlash during one of the other major political moments the occured recently in this part of the world; the UK riots in August 2011.  I was astonished how readily much of the media and the public were willing to dismiss the riots as opportunism devoid of any political content.  As the results of a recent study involving 270 interviews with people involved in the riots suggested, while opportunism played a role a motivating factor for many involved was “anger and frustration with the way the police engage with communities”.  Without condoning the form of protest the rioters took, it is ludicrous to view these events as apolitical.  In a sense, the UK riots are akin to Ballardian dystopian projections, the logical and frightening endpoint of a society of burgeoning inequality drenched in consumer culture and idolatry of wealth.  I was therefore also surprised to read an interview with musician Billy Bragg (a supporter of the Occupy movement) in which he suggested that “there was no ideological framework behind these riots”.  I can sympathise with his point of view in that he clearly sees the need for organisation if any movement truly wants to see change going forward.  However, I think it is shortsighted not to see the politics implicitly embedded in such a spontaneous eruption of action.  Whether coherent or fragmented, intended or not, the mere fact that enough people felt enough discontent to riot for days on end makes this act political.  If the system we live in is broken, then we should be looking to all corners for the signs of its manifestation.  If we don’t at least pay attention to the uglier mobilisations of protest, learn from the cautionary tales they might teach us, we may find ourselves back in the mannered setting of the debate contest where discussion and dissent are on the table but real change is not.

I do not intend to be critical of Occupy here.  I have been heartened by the movement and found a lot to admire in the aspirations and determination of the protesters.  This piece is written in solidarity.  I hope the movement is here for the long-haul.  I hope they can both literally and metaphorically come in from the cold.  I hope they can retain their multiplicity of identity while moving an agenda forward that challenges the locked-in mode of neoliberal thinking.  I hope they do this in combination with the other voices that move broadly in this direction.  I hope…

Cian O’Callaghan