It is, by now, a common lament of tourists visiting Ireland that the once quaint and impoverished island, isolated from many of the modern world's changes, is gone forever. Maura Stephens's openDemocracy article "Prosperity shock" (9 March 2006) mourns the passing of this world without flush lavatories and is aghast at new Ireland's affluence-generated woes. Prosperity, she tells us, has brought with it crime, corruption, inequality and injustice, and a caring, cohesive society is being globalised to death. Such claims fly in the face of mountains of evidence.
What is modern Ireland really like for the people who live there? This writer respectfully, if immodestly, suggests that his organisation offers the best insight. Building on the academic growth-industry of "happiness studies", the Economist Intelligence Unit has developed a model that attempts to gauge quality of life in countries across the world by measuring the nine non-personal factors that have a proven, statistically-significant influence on life satisfaction.
Dan O'Brien is a senior editor at the Economist Intelligence Unit in London
He is replying to the article by Maura Stephens, "Prosperity shock" (9 March 2006):
"I have no doubt the Irish will come up with good ways of addressing most of the ills they recognise, including the rise in crime and drug use. It's the hidden ills, or the disguised ills, that I fear will give them the biggest problems."
More on the Economist Intelligence Unit's Quality of Life index can be found here
Of 110 countries surveyed, Ireland comes out on top for quality of life because it enjoys the economic and political gifts of modernity (wealth, liberty, stability and security) while managing better than other countries to maintain the best of tradition (the civic virtues that glue communities together and the personal ones that make for strong, supportive families).
Although Maura Stephens appears to think it a tragedy, Ireland is now one of the richest countries in the world by any measure. To be sure, money does not guarantee happiness, but it helps, easing life's hardships, lessening insecurity and widening choices. The past was very different. Before exploding into life in the 1990s, the Irish economy spent most of the previous century underperforming the rest of Europe. The result was endemic joblessness and enforced emigration. Newfound prosperity has, happily, exorcised these twin spectres.
On politics and related matters, Ireland also scores highly. It is the fifth-oldest continuously functioning democracy in Europe and enjoys civil and political liberties which, surveys show, are not bettered anywhere in the world. Other than spillover from the conflict in Northern Ireland, civil unrest has been almost non-existent and the constitutional order respected. Political and social calm are reflected in impressively high levels of trust in most public institutions and unique electoral stability (the pecking order of the three largest political parties has not changed in seventy years despite a voting system which amplifies even small electoral swings).
In all wealth, security and freedom categories Ireland scores highly, but it is not these factors alone that make it the most content of nations. The key to life-satisfaction, it seems, is to have the best of both worlds: the good of the modern and the best of tradition a trick that is notoriously difficult to pull off.
Moral obligation, sense of duty and self-denial the practice of which helps to hold families together all appear to wane as countries develop. Virtues that are society's cement (reciprocity, trust and altruism) also become less fashionable. Freedom can loosen the ties that bind and an abundance of choice makes it harder to put up with inevitably imperfect human arrangements. There is more family breakdown and social atomisation swells the ranks of angsty, live-alone Bridget Joneses. It is true also that horrors such as status anxiety and loutishness tend to become more prevalent in developed societies (and we notice them more because we don't have old evils, like famine and poverty, to worry about any more).
Also by Dan O'Brien in openDemocracy:
"European referenda: imperfect but indispensable"
(May 2005)
These woes certainly afflict Ireland, but they do so less than in other developed countries. Divorce is on the rise, but is still below the rich-world average. Civic engagement (as measured by trade-union membership and participative religiosity) has declined, but not as precipitously as elsewhere, and social solidarity remains unusually strong, as evidenced by generous charitable giving.
None of which means that utopia has come to Ireland. On three (of a total of nine) factors health, climate and gender inequality that determine contentment, Ireland falls below the developed world average. The Irish are less healthy, dying younger than the rich-world average; Irish women are still paid far less than their male colleagues, and the weather remains depressingly grey and damp. Nor has Ireland's progress been costless. Stratospheric property prices, urban sprawl and congested cities are common complaints.
But the pros have far outweighed the cons, as the number of foreigners who have chosen to live in Ireland attest. In less than a decade the proportion of non-nationals has soared from almost nothing to one in ten, greater than in some European countries that have seen a half-century of immigration. These immigrants, and thousands of returning emigrants, appear to believe that there are few better places in the world to live.
