The indiscreet complacency of the bourgeoisie: A review of Stephen Kinsella’s Ireland in 2050: How we will be living.

By D.J.P. O’Kane

A former Taoiseach of this state was fond of remarking that we did not live in an economy, that what we lived in was a society. What we live in is – of course – both an economy and a society, and this presents certain problems for anyone who wants to predict the future of the 26 counties. The social, cultural and economic structures in the Republic of Ireland interact with each other in a variety of complex ways; and these structures are in turn inextricably linked with a vast array of global networks of social, cultural and economic exchange. These networks are all, in turn, part of a human ecological relationship with the planet, and all these factors combine to make predictions about the future difficult, to put it mildly.

Stephen Kinsella’s Ireland in 2050 is an attempt at predicting Ireland’s future. Despite the evidence that the wheels have well and truly come off the Irish economy, Kinsella believes that ‘Ireland is in forward motion’, and that his book will convince us of the ways in which he thinks ‘we’re headed as a country’. I think Ireland’s future may well resemble the picture he paints of ‘how we will be living’ in 2050, but I am not persuaded that this will be a good thing.
After an opening chapter where he evokes the anxieties of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, Kinsella goes on to discuss Ireland’s place in the global economy. He counsels a continued orientation to the outside world, and especially to the United States, which he believes will continue to be a major trading partner and source of investment (he considers a successful Chinese bid for world hegemony unlikely). This is followed by chapters that try to trace the future evolution of the Irish family, Irish patterns of work and leisure, education, the likely consequences of environmental change, energy policy, health care, government and the probable persistence of social inequality. Each of these topics would be deserving of a volume, or several volumes, in their own right – but as they all strongly influence each other it’s not a bad idea to consider them within the boundaries of one work.

By 2050, Kinsella is convinced, a ‘divorce bomb’ will have gone off in Irish society (his source for this appears to be the questionable conservatives at the Iona Institute). An aging population will be putting severe stress on a highly unequal health care system and the pensions system. Dublin in 2050 will be the same size as Los Angeles, and the social integration of youth born and raised in alienating suburban sprawl will be a high priority. Transport will be car-based, and electronic surveillance will make toll roads far more prevalent than they are now (incredibly, public transport gets one derisive line; ‘If you don’t want to pay, stay at home and do something more fun than sitting in traffic, or get to where you want to go by bike, train, magic carpet, or whatever’). We will work in creative industries, and the education system will have to change to accommodate this – with the Leaving Certificate in its present form being the first candidate for the chop (though I have to say I didn’t see much discussion of the innovative industries a creative Ireland might produce). The Irish model of low taxes will persist, as will its consequences – poor public services and structural social exclusion. Agriculture will forced to change radically, as a warming world makes things very different in the Irish countryside. Water charges will be inevitable from 2015 onwards, as pressure from an expanding Dublin makes the present system of water supply untenable (Ireland’s water supply is experiencing problems already, but there are good reasons for thinking that privatisation and water charges are not the tools for dealing with this problem: but that’s a whole other post).

Between now and 2050, Irish society is likely to be stressed by new challenges from within and without, and the consequences of those challenges will be unpredictable. What we can predict, however, is that an effective response to those challenges will require more than just toll-roads and water charges. In his chapter on social inequality, Kinsella acknowledges the superior outcomes (economic and social) enjoyed by relatively more equal societies, but rules them out for Ireland. Not only is he adamant that he is not a socialist, but he is also of the opinion that ‘Ireland will not choose to reduce inequality by increasing taxes on the wealthy and increasing public service provision, because we have never done so in the past’. We do a lot of things now that we did not do in our parents’ or our grandparents’ time: we’ll be doing a lot of things in 2050 that previous generations could never have dreamed of (it’s revealing that Kinsella barely mentions the new immigrant communities that have helped transform Irish society over the past decade). A reversal of present social and political priorities is by no means inevitable, but it can’t be ruled out either.

Even though I found Kinsella’s book consistently wrong-headed, naïve, question-begging and tendentious, I think he does deserve some credit for at least trying to think beyond the present crisis. I disagreed with almost all of his book, but I think it deserves greater consideration than I can give it in the space of this review. I’ll close this review with a quote from Ireland in 2050 which sums up the central problem of Kinsella’s viewpoint:

Ireland’s development over the last forty years, though striking (both in how we failed to develop in 1970 – 1987, and how quickly we developed thereafter), hasn’t changed us all that much. The influence of the Catholic church is much diminished. We drink more Cappucinos and owe more money per person, and we travel more. But fundamentally, today we are the same. We’ll be fundamentally the same in forty years.

Will we? Have we really not changed fundamentally since 1970? And if we don’t change fundamentally between now and 2050, can we avoid disasters of all kinds, economic, environmental, and social?

STEPHEN KINSELLA’S IRELAND IN 2050: HOW WE WILL BE LIVING, DUBLIN, LIBERTIES PRESS, 2009.