Analysis: Ireland Inc deserves credit for its performance, writes Paul Cullen
There can be no gainsaying the astonishing performance of the Celtic Tiger economy, which has propelled this State up the United Nations premier global ranking of desirable places to live.
Our income, the report tells us, is the highest in the world, bar that of little Luxembourg and the highest-ranked country, Norway. Our economy is growing faster than anyone else's outside China. We now rank 10th in the world in the UN's human development index, up from 18th just two years ago.
Yet the darker side of this success story is instantly apparent. Once again, we emerge as one of the most unequal societies in the West. Once again, our figures for adult illiteracy and concentrations of poverty are appalling and our figures for life expectancy and health and education spending little better.
Regrettably, the Government has chosen once again to blame the messenger rather than addressing itself to the root of the problem. Not for the first time, it tells us that the statistics used in compiling the poverty index are out of date - when it was responsible for providing the figures to the international researchers who compiled the index. The rest of the world is out of step in the way it measures poverty, not Ireland, it claims.
Several clear messages emerge from the report in relation to Ireland. We are closer to Boston than Berlin when it comes to wealth-creation, equality and public spending. We spend less on health and education and should therefore have no reason to be surprised that our results in these areas are poor. We are also heav- ily dependent on continued trade to maintain our position globally.
While the Irish economy motors ahead, however, much of the rest of the world is stalled or has even gone into reverse. Forty- six countries are poorer today than they were a decade ago and, unsurprisingly, many of these are in Africa.
The report isn't the first to point to the HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa but it does so in more detail than most. The epidemic explains why so much of the continent is going backwards and why African countries occupy the bottom 19 slots in the report's human development index.
But just as Africa has been forgotten in the welter of attention paid to the Middle East since September 11th, so this report concentrates on the chall- enges raised by those attacks.
Since the al-Qaeda attacks, many in the West are inclined to see the future of their traditions of democracy and tolerance threatened by more authoritarian values. An American theorist, Samuel P. Huntington, formulated this view of the "clash of civilisations" in the 1990s. His prescience in predicting some of the fault lines between Islam and Western/Christian civilisation has won new adherents for this view of the world.
This year's UNDP report, with its stirring promotion of the values of multiculturalism, is intended as a detailed and direct rebuttal of Huntington's views.
The authors, aided by guest contributors such as John Hume and Nelson Mandela, seek to debunk the "myths" which under- pin the "clash of civilisations" theory. The report argues, for example, that cultural diversity does not slow development, that cultural differences and clashes over values are rarely the root cause of violent conflict and that people's ethnic identities do not have to compete with their attachment to the state.
It rejects the commonly voiced view that Islam is incompatible with democracy, pointing out that most of the world's Muslims live in societies now under democratic rule.
"Cultural freedom means expanding individual choices, not preserving values and practices as an end in itself with blind allegiance to tradition," it states. "Culture is not a frozen set of values and practices and cannot be a pretext to deny human rights and equality of opportunity, such as the equal rights of women to education."
These are not arcane arguments for intellectuals, but real-life challenges in many parts of the world where diverse cultures exist side by side. Cultural issues lie at the core of arguments over the application of Sharia law in Nigeria, for example, or the wearing of headscarves in schools in France.
Northern Ireland is quoted several times in the report as an example of how ethnic tensions can by reduced by dealing with the economic and political roots of inequality.
Ultimately, the authors say, economic globalisation cannot succeed unless cultural freedoms are also respected and protected and xenophobic resistance to cultural diversity is overcome.