The Celtic Tiger (Made In the USA)

Jay Z "Fuck talking bout the recession, its just depressing"

Recession has now become a colloquial term (as shown by the above lyric), this annoys me no end. It has become a buzzword that people seem to spout out at any opportunity or in any discussion. Now, in some respects I think this is a good thing, due to media nowadays the average person in the street is a lot more aware of what is going on then in previous recessions. But I dislike the way people use the term so flippantly as if they have any idea what their talking about. The true definition of a recession is a decline in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for two or more consecutive quarters. (I would love to conduct a survey to see how many people give this as the answer). I have heard a lot of talk about "what this country needs", and "what they should do is", and again this is not a bad thing as people are engaging with the topic. But there seems to be a disproportionate focus on consumer spending and its effect on the economy. What this country REALLY needs to increase GDP is an increase in exports. In particular there needs to be more focus on Indigenous firms exports so that we can increase GNP. It has often been documented in the media over the last few years about how ireland is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, this is misleading though, as often this is done using GDP figures. GDP/population is generally seen as a good indicator of a country's wealth. However due to Ireland's reliance on foreign companies that *expatriate profits, GNP/population is a better indicator of our Ireland's real wealth (Just found an old article that describes in greater detail). *In 2005, U.S. firms accounted for 61% of Ireland's total exports.

I did a college project just over a year ago with (2007 data). In this I was shocked to find that our exports had been falling since 2002, and that what was fueling our growth in the following years was a construction and consumer spending boom (which is simply unsustainable). This is now blatantly apparent to everyone so I will not get in to we should of seen this comming argument (we really should have). Why I recall this is that i recently heard government officials say that our trade surplus increased in 2008. I found this hard to believe due to what I'd discovered about our recent export performance in my project. So I just did some research there and our trade surplus did indeed increase last year. But while the government were celebrating the fact I discovered that the reason it increased is not because they managed to stimulate any kind of growth, but simply because we imported less, which is natural seen as we are in recession. In addition our exports have been pretty much static for the last four years. This can be seen in the diagram below

My final point on peoples perception of the recession is that many people seem to have developed a perverse enjoyment from the recession, taking the attitude that we had lost the run of ourselves (possibly true) and we need to get back to "the way we was" (no thanks). I'm sorry, but to me this is bollocks. Yes ireland was once a majority of catholic people and poor and apparently very friendly (it was easier to do someone a favour, when you didn't have a job to go to!). From all I've heard about these "good aul times", they were actually miserable and people had to work extremely hard to make any sort of a living. President Mary McAleese suggests we try "to find our way back to a more rooted and possibly more modest time." Our economic boom of the 1990's was based heavily on foreign companies (much of which is now leaving the country), I think a better approach than Mary's would be to try and make our next boom based on the growth of Irish companies. The government is trying in vain to get foreign companies to stay with more and more R+D tax breaks, when I think it would be more cost effective and beneficial in the long run to focus on supporting indigenous firms growth.