F E AT U R E
COULD THE BIBLE PREVENT ANOTHER CELTIC TIGER?
IT CAN BE HARD TO MAKE SENSE OF ALL THE TALK WE HEAR ABOUT THE ECONOMY, BUT OUR SCRIPTURES AND OUR CHRISTIAN TRADITION ARE A GOOD PLACE TO START.
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BY KEVIN HARGADEN
The
defining moment of contemporary Irish society was surely the few chaotic days in September 2008 when we all slowly came to realise that the Celtic Tiger had died. For years there had been hushed conversations about property bubbles and soft landings, but when the end finally did come, it was sudden and confusing. The tidal wave of credit collapses in America landed on our shores and the eight years since then, as we have sought to recover, have been marked by brutal austerity, widespread unemployment, and a return to the emigration rates that we thought we had left behind in the 1980s. LIVING ON THE EDGE OF RECOVERY We are commonly assured by those in the know that the recovery is almost complete. Even if all around us there are people struggling and barely coping, all the statistics seem positive.
Our politicians have a spring in their step and we can sometimes dare to look forward to a future where we spend more on health and education and where our young people do not have to go to London or Berlin or Sydney to find work. Yet one of the most striking absurdities in Irish life today is that less than ten years after our entire economy collapsed because of a property bubble, we are currently caught in a vicious housing crisis. Renting the smallest of properties in our cities is almost out of reach of ordinary young people, and the number of homeless seems to grow with every passing month. If you are anything like me, you have read these headlines and pondered why it is that in 2008 the whole country could be thrown into turmoil because we had built way too many houses and in 2016 we find ourselves with way too few?
MAKING SENSE OF THE ECONOMY Questions like this abound whenever we think about the economy. We are assaulted on news broadcasts and newspaper frontpages with percentages and fractions that are very hard to interpret. Last summer, the Central Statistics Office announced that Ireland’s Gross Domestic Profit (GDP) had grown by 26 per cent in the previous year. We heard that news and wondered, “It doesn’t feel like there is 26 per cent more of anything around here!” It turns out that that figure is a statistical fact, and a meaningful one too, but only really for those few people whose work relies on such measurements. When our general discourse around the economy is dominated by these numerical narratives, most of us are left out of the conversation. There must be some way to understand and engage these big economic questions, without