THE economist Colm McCarthy is fond of saying that ‘anger is not a policy.’
This is the man behind the An Bord Snip Nua report that recommended the cutting of some 17,000 public service jobs and a five per cent cut in social welfare as a way of responding to the economic collapse.
There are a couple of things about this that are worth noting. Firstly, it can never be stressed enough just how many economists occupy a central part in Irish public life.
Colm McCarthy, David McWilliams, Jim Power, Marc Coleman, Constantin Gurdgiev, Brendan Halligan, George Lee and Morgan Kelly are the names I can immediately bring to mind.
Now that is not because I have an unhealthy interest in Irish economists but because these economists are constant voices in Irish life.
When you combine this with the fact that we have for a good few decades now been an economy before we have been a nation, a country or a state then it is easy to see how powerful these people have been.
So when Colm McCarthy states that ‘anger is not a policy’ he is not only airily dismissing a whole response to what happened in our country he is also making a claim for the role of economics.
Do you remember the power of the priests? Do you recall that Ireland where what the man in priestly robes said was considered, if you’ll pardon the pun, as Gospel? Do you recall, too, how that ended up? Where that power led?
Well, in many ways these economists are the new priests and Colm McCarthy’s assertion that ‘anger is not a policy’ underlies the position they have forged for themselves.
Underpinning the sayings and analysis of these people has been the assertion that economics is a science.
David McWilliams is one of Ireland's best known economnistsMuch like when a priest spoke and was thought to be uttering the words of God an economist is now a scientist and when he speaks he is therefore speaking an unchallengeable truth.
Colm McCarthy’s ‘anger is not a policy’ is very much part of this, suggesting that he, as a leading economist, speaks not from something as ill-judged and irrational as emotion but speaks as a scientist, who has examined things and discovered the truth.
In this way we move very quickly into a world whereby cuts to welfare and cuts to public service jobs and excessive wages for bankers and bowing down to financiers are seen not as choices but as rational truths, as the only things that make sense, as things to which there are, in fact, no alternative.
But an economic science is no more of a value free science than political science. In fact, if any discipline is discredited after what went on here in Ireland it is economics.
Far from being dispassionate scientists, economists are simply gamblers. They are, like so many of us, chancers.
Like many men, my father studies the racing pages. He follows form and weight and distance and jockey and meeting and conditions.
He might then make an educated guess and take a gamble. But like most gamblers it is usually a gamble with some relation to reality. He does not back the 100-1 runners because, as the odds suggest, they very, very rarely come in.
Yet how many of these dispassionate economists of ours look now as if they were all backing 100-1 shots during the Celtic Tiger?
How many of them advised the Irish Government that this growth and this boom could and would just go on and on? How many of these ‘scientists’ weren’t in fact studying form and weight and distance but were in fact just sticking a pin in the paper or choosing nicely coloured silks?
At a time when the Irish Government has just announced that it will begin demolishing some of the ‘ghost estates’ because there will never be a possibility these houses in remote fields will ever be lived in, does it not sound as if, on the back of the advice from economic scientists, that some people were backing 500-1 shots?
You know, you can put a bet on just about anything at the bookies. You can make up your own bets even and they’ll give you odds.
But if you go into one today and put everything you have on yourself landing on the moon don’t expect those around you not to react with anger when everything is lost. And don’t tell them you’re a scientist and ‘anger is not a policy.’
