Micheál Martin, in his Dáil speech accepting nomination as Taoiseach, said: “we must protect and renew an economic model which delivers high employment and resources for public services. Central to this we must strengthen our three essential relationships with Europe, with the US and with the UK.”
He went on: “Internationally, we will be an active voice for the values of peace, co-operation and development.” The ceasefire in Gaza, humanitarian aid and reconstruction were his referents.
Europe, the US and the UK are indeed the core axes of Ireland’s international positioning and they underpin its economic model. But compared to the time when Irish State elites forged the distinctive tax, investment and trading model that proved such a winning formula in the 1990s these relationships are now troubled. The Trump shock matches the Brexit one while the EU, which bailed Ireland out with onerous austerity in the financial crash of 2008-2012, faces existential choices about its capacity and direction in the same transatlantic setting.
And the emergence of a more multipolar world of confident large and middle powers such as India, Indonesia, Brazil, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, with assertive leaders, is transforming the international landscape in quite new ways. That is highlighted by a remarkable world survey by the European Council of Foreign Relations. It shows public opinion in the Global South is far more positive towards Trump than it is in Europe. There, he is seen as a catalyst of a more transactional world less subject to Western moralising and more ready to respect mutual interests. They will not easily be bullied into choosing between Washington and Beijing.
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A fruitful way to think about Ireland’s relations with the EU, US and UK, and its related economic model, is with the “multiple interface periphery” account of Ireland’s positioning. Proposed by sociologist Joe Ruane, it analyses not just the singular peripheral relationship with imperial Britain but how first Irish-US relations, and then EEC/EU membership, were played by Irish political elites to escape that dependency and create a more genuinely independent state. They balanced each against the other and used each to extract resources from the other – the US against the UK on Northern Ireland, Berlin against Boston, and Ireland’s Atlanticism against EU peripherality.
This model draws on the Norwegian comparative political scientist Stein Rokkan’s work on autonomous states or national minorities in Europe, such as Finland or Alsace, which related to two or more core powers. They remained peripheral but were able to exploit their multiple relationships constructively for economic and political development.
Ruane’s article, published in 2010, put great emphasis on the political elite’s capacity and competence to deliver the potential benefits of its positioning. The model is geopolitical and social as well as economic; it is also conjunctural, in that a crisis in one relationship (like Brexit, Trump or EU political security) can affect all the others.
It depends on two crucial skills: to balance the external and domestic forces at play; and to protect the small state’s capacity and autonomy. Ruane wondered whether Ireland’s model could survive the ignominious financial collapse at that time. He blamed it on state capture by property and banking interests plus a pronounced tilt towards Boston rather than Berlin, breaching both skill sets.
The current issue of Studies examines the vulnerabilities, risks and uncertainties of Ireland’s development model from a similar social science perspective and asks if it has run its course. Analysts examine how the economic model did survive austerity and prospered further under leaders who balanced the State against Brexit, Trump 1 and the Biden years’ revival of US dominated transatlanticism through the Ukraine war.
[ Denis Staunton on Trump’s return, China’s rise and the shifting global orderOpens in new window ]
Martin is determined that will not be so, but sees the need to protect and renew it. He and some other Ministers have the navigational skills with near and distant powers to steer through the current risky conjuncture of change. The Studies issue says they should also pay close attention to Ireland’s domestic weaknesses compared with other European small open economies. They include: a dualist economic structure in which foreign investment has not created a virtuous circle of domestic productivity and social investment; a large infrastructure gap in housing, energy and transport compared with a growing population; low taxes on employers for social protection and at local level (a third and a 10th of the EU average); and comparatively low taxes on wealth.
Such weaknesses make Ireland’s model vulnerable to tax shocks, competitive pressure and geopolitical shift. Time will tell whether the political skills are sufficient to protect and renew it.
One thing more would help enormously: making relations with the new Global South a fourth essential relationship for Ireland – and the EU – in a somewhat more equal and transactional world that is a rational, interest-based response to America First.
