S.Healy & B. Reynolds (eds.), Social Policy in Ireland, Oak Tree Press, Dublin, 1998.

The myth of the Celtic Tiger is deconstructed in an important new book, entitled Social Policy in Ireland. The Celtic Tiger is essentially about the projection of national image. It is as real to the bottom third of the population, that lives in varying degrees of poverty, as the plastic tiger on the roof of the local filling-station.

Of all the development models available to us, we have chosen popularly to identify with the authoritarian East Asian Tiger model, currently in deep crisis. Yet, it is the European Union social market model, which is responsible for our prosperity, largely delivered through the lavish redistribution of resources within the community to Ireland's great advantage.

Social Policy in Ireland is quintessentially about the redistribution of wealth. It is edited by the two most courageous Irish poverty warriors of our times, Father Sean Healy and Sister Brigid Reynolds of the Conference of Religious in Ireland (CORI). Their book is a celebration of 10 years of providing official Ireland with an alternative analysis that it is reluctant to hear let alone heed. The book consists of 20 chapters, written by 29 of the most prominent scholars in Ireland, that critically appraises our social and economic development in a stimulating and lucid manner.

Despite the book's scholarly qualities, which embraces both statist and communitarian perspectives, it is not likely to find official favour either. Healy and Reynolds advocate a paradigm shift in our core values and beliefs in the direction of a more egalitarian society. They argue for the principles of social justice and human rights as an alternative to the pragmatism of the enterprise culture, morality as opposed to materialism and decency instead of desert. These aren't ideas that fit easily with the acquisitive individualism of the Celtic Tiger economy.

But this book is not simply strong on the principles of liberation theology, or liberal left ideology, which we might expect from CORI. It is empirically a solid piece of work demonstrating that the booming economy spends less on social protection than virtually any other EU member-state, with the relatively impoverished exceptions of Greece and Portugal. In this regard, at least, Ireland certainly resembles the east Asian tiger economies. More wealth has not made the Irish more generous.

The reader might ask: "So what?" or indeed "Why should I help my neighbour or for that matter a stranger in need?" In, what some regard as post-socialist society, the pursuit of equality and social justice has lost the compelling force that these values exercised over the body politic throughout the 20th century, when organised labour set the political agenda. As we move into the new millennium the unrestrained pursuit of self-interest and wealth creation, that was the hallmark of the 19th century, has once again, unashamedly, come into vogue. There remain, however, persuasive reasons to take the authors and their humanistic ideas, seriously.

First, the subtext of Social Policy in Ireland is the pursuit of a virtuous society. Machiavelli, a political philosopher much revered by the practitioners of pragmatism, observed that a society that ignores virtue leaves itself at the mercy of fortune that most unpredictable of fates. Should the Celtic Tiger catch the Asian Flu, we may rue the day we abandoned ourselves to the vagaries of fortune.

Second, this book is about the promotion of trust. The connection between trust and prosperity has been impressively made by several recent commentators, notably Fufuyama and Putnam, who have demonstrated that low-trust societies lack the basis for economic development. Trust rests upon social solidarity epitomised by the welfare state, a vibrant civil society based upon an active community and a partnership philosophy that defines the European social market model.

We tend to blame our traditionalist value system for Ireland's lack of civic morality. CORI has gone a long way to modernise our ideas by teaching us that the language of development must be social, as well as economic.

Prof Fred Powell is Head of the Department of Applied Social Studies at UCC and co-author of Civil Society & Social Policy, A.A. Farmar, Dublin, 1997, which has been nominated for the ARNOVA 1998 Distinguished Book of the Year Award in the US.