Abstract:
In Ireland, July 2008, the common image behind TV newsreaders showed a graph running downwards over a photo of a tiger, a red line cutting through the brave beast. This montage would accompany stories featuring Brian Cowen, then Taoiseach, talking things up even as the sweat was breaking on his forehead. The ‘Celtic Tiger’, which had been the very image of the practical triumph of neo-liberalism, was dead. Global economic integration through foreign direct investment – enticed by low company tax rates and light regulation of business – coupled with a domestic celebration of wealth, spurred by a property-price bubble and a loophole ridden personal tax system, added up to an apparent vindication of market fundamentalism. As late as 2009, Bertie Ahearn – whose period as Taoiseach, 1997-2008, was more serendipitously timed than Cowen’s – was still able to get international speaking engagements proffering the ‘Irish economic model’ as one which was modular and portable: it would succeed outside the circumstances of history or geography, potentially working as well in Korea or Honduras. Despite a corporate self-image of hard-headed empiricism, it seems neo-liberalism possesses its own mythic order and its legends take some time to die.
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