Same `region', different planet

There are no poor places, only poor people. Even in the most backward, underdeveloped parts of the world there is always an elite with access to Armani suits and Apple computers. Even in the world's most high-tech, developed parts, there is always a downtrodden class without access to adequate food, clothing and shelter.

And this is the great problem of regional policy. New York is a fabulously wealthy region, but its opulence makes the condition of many of its people still more miserable. Mayo is a relatively poor region, but it has lots of people who are doing very well indeed.

Seldom has this problem been more graphically illustrated than by the county output figures released by the CSO this week and fed into the already confused debate about regional policy. What the figures really revealed was the stupidity of any kind of crude regional policy. Trying to judge the wealth of an Irish county by the worth of the commodities created in it is - as the CSO itself pointed out - largely meaningless.

Anyone who has watched the heartbreaking television news reports on the recent disaster in Nigeria, where hundreds of miserably poor people were incinerated while trying to siphon off a few drops of "their" oil from rusty pipelines, knows this. Presumably, the GDP figures for the oil-rich regions of Nigeria look great.

But what does that mean to the malnourished children who live there or to the victims of the disaster lying on dirty beds, untreated and in torment, because they have no claim on the wealth produced in their locality? About as much, I suppose, as the profits of Coca-Cola mean to Co Louth. For the whole point of the new global economy is that it plays havoc with geography.

It has, in the most brutal ways imaginable, broken the link between production and place.

One of the most obvious features of contemporary Ireland is that economic development has been largely driven from the outside. The economy doesn't spring from our own backyards, it lands on top of them. The people of Co Kildare didn't invent the Pentium microchips made in the Intel plant. Coca-Cola wasn't concocted by Boyne Valley druids. There is nothing necessarily local or regional about the products that are measured in Irish GDP figures.

And it's not even the case that the jobs in these multinational companies go to local residents. On the contrary, one of the characteristic sights of contemporary Ireland is the run-down housing estate cheek-by-jowl with an industrial or financial zone full of successful high-tech firms.

"Somehow," as Charles Sabel noted in his OECD report on Ireland in 1996, "the same policies that brought prosperity to the very doorsteps of the poor could bring it no further, and . . . even encouraged the beneficiaries of the new economic possibilities to look away from the apparently menacing portals just beyond their workplaces."

In the heart of Dublin, for example, the gleaming International Financial Services Centre sits next to areas of great poverty. With a bit of clever cartography, drawing the boundaries in the right places, you could easily conclude such areas are buzzing with billion-dollar currency transactions and that the burned-out cars are BMWs abandoned by bored young bankers who have moved on to Porsches. In essence, this is the fallacy of regional policy.

Crude measures of economic output also create a massively misleading impression of who is or is not getting connected to the new Ireland. Arguably the most critical measure of whether or not a place is plugged in to the new high-tech, high-skill economy is the extent to which its young people are finding their way into universities and institutes of technology. So which counties have the highest rates of admission to third-level?

According to Prof Patrick Clancy's authoritative study, "Access to College: Patterns of Continuity and Change", all of the best-performing counties are in the west. The counties with the highest participation rates (all over 40 per cent) are, in descending order, Galway, Kerry, Clare, Mayo, Leitrim, Sligo and Roscommon. The worst-performing counties, from the bottom up, are Laois, Offaly, Kilkenny, Monaghan, Waterford and Dublin.

But within Dublin itself there are gross inequalities. Well over half the relevant age group in Rathfarnham and Clonskeagh, Rathmines and Terenure, enters higher education. In Darndale, Ballyfermot, or the north inner city, about one in 20 does so. Young people in these areas may not live on the same planet as each other, but they are in the same "rich" region.

And if higher education is a mark of being well integrated into the modern economy, prison is the ultimate mark of disintegration. Dr Paul O'Mahoney's 1997 study of prisoners in Mountjoy, the committal prison for 20 counties, presents a negative image of the same picture Prof Clancy draws.

Eighty-five per cent of the prisoners were from Dublin. Of the rest, with the exception of one prisoner from Ballymote, Co Sligo, and one from Kilcock, Co Kildare, all were from other major urban centres. If Mountjoy is a barometer of well-being, Dublin looks much sicker, and more urgently in need of help, than anywhere else.

The point is not to argue that the west is doing fine and the east is in the gutter. It is that all of these regional measurements tell, at best, a partial story. And if you base your policies for creating a just society on them, they will fail. We, of all people, should know this.

We have just been through a long period during which the whole State has been an Objective 1 region within the EU. Unprecedented resources have been poured in by European taxpayers. If regional investment created equality, we should be the most equal society in the developed world.

But we're not. We are one of the least equal. One recent OECD study identifies the Republic as the state where the ratio between the earnings of the top 10 per cent and the bottom 10 per cent is furthest out of proportion. In Sweden, at one end of the scale, the highest earners get a little over twice what the lowest earners do. In the Republic they earn 4.5 times as much, a greater disparity even than that in the United States. Another recent Eurostat study tells a similar story, with the top 10 per cent of earners taking home a higher proportion of total income than in any other EU country except Portugal.

In the short term, we may or may not get a few more euros by carving up the State into unreal regions. But in the long term, we are buying into a way of understanding the nature of our society that, instead of illuminating the problems we have to confront, serves only to obscure them.

We are reverting, ironically, to a habit of mind that the Belfast agreement was meant to overcome in a different context. The intellectual breakthrough that made peace possible in Northern Ireland was that we stopped pretending that territory is more important than people. Not for the first time, we find that the principles we apply to the North tend to be forgotten in the South.