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'A lively and perceptive assessment of factors shaping our future as an economy and a people' T.K. Whitaker

Ireland's miracle is far from over. As anxiety mounts about the end of Ireland's boom, The Best is Yet to Come argues that Ireland is not experiencing the beginning of the end, but rather the end of the beginning.

Ireland is undergoing a demographic recovery with decades yet to run. Currently the only country in Europe whose population has not greatly increased since the nineteenth century, the Republic's population could reach nine million by 2050. By that time, the economic reunification of North and South could see twelve million flourish in an all-island economy.

Marc Coleman is Economics Editor of Newstalk 106-108 fm and a columnist with the Sunday Independent. A former economist with the European Central Bank (ECB) and former Economics Editor of the Irish Times, he holds an MBA from the Smurfit Graduate School of Business UCD, where he also currently lectures.

The Best is Yet to Come

PROLOGUE
Depending how you looked at it, 1984 was either a great or lousy year to be Irish. In Washington the grandson of a south Tipperary peasant was celebrating his landslide re-election as United States President. In Ottawa Canada's Prime Minister Brian Mulroney - of vintage Irish stock - was doing the same. On the other side of the world Australian Finance Minister and future Prime Minister Paul Keating and New Zealand Prime Minister Robert Muldoon needed to be more cautious about their Irish ancestry: With some of their voters it didn't go down too well. Somewhere between North America and Australasia on the globe lie two small countries - Ireland and Israel - whose similar histories the twentieth century had brought into focus. In the 1930s and 1940s, Ireland's war of independence was an inspiration to many parts of the British Empire and Israel was no different. Israel's Prime Minister in 1984 was Polish-born Yitzhak Shamir. As a resistance fighter during Israel's war of independence, Shamir had chosen the nickname Michael after Michael Collins.

There was something else distinctly and unusually Irish about the Israeli state that year: former Irish bantam weight boxing champion and student of Wesley College Irish-born Chaim Herzog was its president. The heights the Diaspora was reaching were matched by the lows to which the old sod was sinking. One of Western Europe's poorest and most corrupt states, the Republic of Ireland had nothing to offer its young but emigration. Unemployment in 1984 was over 15 per cent and - continuing a century-and-a-half-old tradition - tens of thousands of young people were emigrating.

Some thirteen years later, Ireland has become an economic success story, with one of the lowest unemployment rates in Europe and one of the highest rates of inward migration. But was economic success the same as historical success? Like a thin layer of paint on a thick rotten wall, Ireland's recent success is only the beginning. The last fifteen years have an economic dimension. But economics is a side effect rather than a cause. The true story of Ireland's rapid growth is that - finally - over a century after it should have started Ireland is recovering from a unique and dramatic fall in population, a fall that, whatever its initial causes and consequences, should have begun to reverse itself by the 1870s. Ireland is a stunted nation, but not only because of its chronic under-population. The congested nature of its recent growth reveals deep structural flaws in its policy-making infrastructure. But that is where the bad news ends. The good news is that if we can overcome these flaws, then the best is yet to come.

Click here for an outline of Marc Coleman's forthcoming book, The Best is Yet to Come

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