Fintan O'Toole fast-forwards two decades and observes a much-changed, poorly-planned Ireland - struggling in a more hostile world
As they waited to get on to the huge flood barrier that doubled as a motorway, Oisín and Niamh thought back to the time when this had been Sandymount Strand. Before the vast new port had been built at Loughshinney, before panic at rising sea levels had finally routed the last of the environmentalists, this had been a place where wading birds and migratory geese could be seen by passing commuters. Now, those who had booked their travel slots on the motorway queued for access, turned on their automatic navigation systems and drifted through the conurbation of three-and-a-half million people that now stretched from Larne to Carlow. As they moved along, some of the middle-aged drivers bored their children with rambling reminiscences of the time when Balbriggan, Drogheda, Dundalk, Newry and Portadown still seemed like separate places.
The kids tuned out of their parents' nostalgic maundering and switched on their personal download systems. They tuned in to the latest, hottest sounds of 2025. The Streets. Franz Ferdinand. Robbie Williams. Beyoncé. Radiohead. There were now twice as many Irish people over the age of 65 than there were Irish teenagers. At the start of the 21st century, the young population (827,500) had been almost double the old population (430,000). Now, the situation was more less reversed. So almost all commercial music was marketed to appeal to tastes formed in the early years of the century. There were some niche markets, of course. U2 had reformed and played a great gig the week before the soccer international in a Croke Park packed with 60-somethings. The Rolling Stones were still on the go, and their recent tour, sponsored by Lucky Strike Marijuana, had been a big hit with the doped-up over-80s.
It had taken weeks to organise this trip to Troubles World in Belfast. Oisíand Niamh both remembered the peace deal of 1998 and, rather more clearly, the final settlement of 2006, when it had been agreed that a computer-generated image based on a secret photograph of an act of decommissioning - the DUP claimed it was a photograph and Sinn Féin that it wasn't - would be produced by Pixar Studios. Both shared an interest in history and a nostalgia for a time when people got worked up about politics. They were looking forward to the virtual dirty protest and the exhibition showing the changing styles of Gerry Adams's clothing from the early 1970s to 2015, when he won the presidency.
To do the trip, they had taken a day from their fortnight's annual holidays. In principle, they could have had more time off, but in practice they couldn't afford it. As the major earner (a majority of the high-skilled workers in Ireland were now female), Niamh had to be especially careful about taking time off. The government had loosened the legal entitlement to holidays in a desperate attempt to attract more foreign investment. With the rise of China and India as centres for high-tech production, the Irish economy had stagnated. People looked back now on the early years of the century and complained bitterly about its smugness and short-sightedness. They wondered how so many opportunities had been lost, how so little thought had been given to the future.
Back then, the long term had barely existed. There had been a decision in the 1990s that the 12.5 per cent corporation tax rate would be guaranteed until 2025. The National Pensions Reserve Fund had been given one per cent of GNP a year, to pay some of the State's pension commitments from 2030 onwards. But even this unusual exercise in foresight had turned out to be problematic. The big US economic crash of 2012, triggered by the refusal of the Jeb Bush administration to heed warnings about the out-of-control trade and fiscal deficits and by the rising spending on the American wars in Syria and Iran, had caused the stock markets to collapse, wiping out much of the value of the fund.
The recession had forced the Government, led by Mary Lou McDonald of the Irish Republican Party, formed in 2010 when Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin merged, to suspend payments into the fund. And since many commentators were already suggesting that the money would have been better invested in the provision of physical and social infrastructure in the early years of the century, it took three years for the payments to be resumed.
Ireland had suffered from the way the aggressive stance of the US had gradually pushed back the development of a global economy. The big trade blocs that had originally been formed to facilitate the global market - the US, the EU, the Pacific Rim, India, Latin America and Russia - had, under the pressure of US insistence on global domination, gradually taken on a more defensive character. By 2025, trade wars were erupting between the blocs. Non-tariff barriers, protection of intellectual properties and restrictive immigration policies were coming back into vogue. The multilateral free-trade principles that were developed in the decades after the second World War, had become less effective. The US and the EU had closed their markets to the newly-industrialising tiger nations.
For Ireland, which had invested all its hopes in being the standard bearer of market globalisation, this process had been especially painful. It had made its living from being essentially a little bit of America in Europe. And even though study after study in the early years of the century had suggested that it had to turn itself into a creative, innovative society if it was to continue to attract world-class companies, and begin to develop some of its own, not enough had been done to make this hope a reality.
Governments had invested far too little in education, so that the claim to have an especially skilled and capable workforce had become ever more hollow. The deterioration in the quality of life, with increased congestion, a more polluted environment, poor public transport and rising crime rates, had discouraged optimism and investment. The privatised infrastructure companies which now ran the transport system, the road network, the airports, the electricity grid and the telecommunications structures, had concentrated on short-term profits for their owners in New York, Shanghai and Moscow, and had failed to invest in long-term provision.
Crime had been driven by an ever-wider gap between rich and poor and the adoption of harder policies of punishment and imprisonment had created little long-term improvement. The media, now controlled by Newspeak International, had avoided the subject and still produced annual surveys showing that Ireland was the happiest place in the world.
Things had not been helped by the failure to invest in social and public services. Public expenditure was now under pressure from the cost of the massive flood defences that had to be built to ward off rising sea levels. The health system was struggling to cope with the prevalence of liver disease, diabetes and obesity, as a result of the binge-drinking and over-eating that had been so common in the early years of the century. And as global oil production reached its peak in 2020 and began to decline, the State faced the twin problems of declining revenue from petrol and motor taxes on the one hand and the massive cost of shifting to hydrogen-based fuels on the other.
By 2025 a wide variety of renewable sources, including photosynthesis, wind and solar power, was supplying upwards of 20 per cent of electricity in many OECD countries and nearly 10 per cent of global primary energy. But their growth had now stalled as rural communities which were willing to put up with a few wind turbines revolted against the building of thousands more. The deal of 2021, when the State had agreed a huge programme of subsidies for the cartels of former sheep farmers on marginal lands who now controlled the best sites for wind turbines, was proving to be ruinously expensive.
It had been obvious even from the start of the century that the shape of the Irish population in 2025 would be radically different from what it had been in the 1990s when the great economic boom had got under way. It was entirely predictable that, by the 2020s, there would be a bulge in the proportion of the population in their 40s and early 50s, and a very much higher proportion of the population aged over 65. The young people born in the 1960s and 1970s had not had the grace to emigrate in the same numbers as the previous generation, and now, after the radical improvements in cancer and heart treatments came on stream from 2010 onwards, most of them were still around.
Looking back, it was obvious that the 1990s and early 2000s had been a demographic wonderland. In the 1980s, the huge number of young people had given Ireland a high dependency ratio (the number of workers compared to the number of non-workers). This had dropped rapidly in the 1990s, creating the conditions for the boom. But it had begun to rise again as the century progressed and more people reached retirement age. Whereas in 2000 there had been five workers for every retiree, now, in 2025, there were just three. This put huge pressure on public services, and made people wonder why more had not been done when the chance had been there.
It didn't help that there had been no real attempt at balanced regional development. Back in 2002, there had been an attempt to create a National Spatial Strategy, with an elaborate system of "hubs and gateways", and it had even been announced by the Government that all future decisions would be made within this framework. But within a year, when the Government had announced its strategy to decentralise the civil and public service, it had ignored the Spatial Strategy. Now, with the population at 5.3 million and projected to rise to around eight million by 2050, 60 per cent of Irish people were living in the multi-centred metropolis that spanned the eastern seaboard of Ireland.
The population density on the island as a whole, however, was still relatively low. In 2000, there had been 68 people per square kilometre in Ireland. Now there were 82. This was still relatively low by European standards, and, in principle, much of the rest of the country should have been green and pleasant. But after An Taisce was outlawed in 2010 and tax relief on second homes was extended, attempts at sustainable rural development were largely abandoned. The countryside was now dotted with one-off holiday homes, and people remarked on the irony that as the number of holiday homes had increased, the tourist industry had gradually declined.
There was still some demand for "Get Away to the Rain" package breaks for rich tourists from warmer regions. But the market was limited by the unfortunate fact that the areas most affected by rising temperatures and shortages of water were also the poorest places, where people could not afford holidays. If Oisín and Niamh saw people from these countries, it was usually on a news report, of more desperate illegal immigrants arrested as they tried to stow away on the giant trucks entering the 60-kilometre Tuskar tunnel connecting Wexford to north Pembrokeshire, across St George's Channel.
When they saw such images, Oisín and Niamh usually gave a little cheer and said a quick prayer of thanks. They both belonged to the CCC, the Celtic Christian Coalition, that was one of the rising forces in Irish life in 2025. The anxieties of the times, with mounting global tensions and a rising population interacting with economic stagnation, had generated a wave of nostalgia for an imagined past, when Ireland was white and Catholic, the countryside was beautiful, society was governed by certainties and people knew who they were. Now, they dreamed that this golden age might come again.