A chara, - In his column "Fruit of the boom years squandered" (Opinion, November 20th), Fintan O'Toole made the common mistake of ignoring services when assessing the export performance of the Irish economy.
Irish service exports grew in real terms by 60 per cent between 2002 and 2006, more than offsetting the fall in merchandise exports in the same period. The figures given by Mr O'Toole refer only to merchandise exports, which fell by 18 per cent in this period.
Total exports in 2006 were only marginally higher, in real terms, than in 2002, so the basic thrust of Mr O'Toole's argument - that Ireland's continuing relatively high growth rate has been driven mainly by a consumption and construction boom - remains valid. But things would have been much worse were it not for the very impressive but largely unheralded expansion in Irish service exports.
For some reason the Central Statistics Office does not include service exports in the external trade section of its website, placing them instead in the balance of payments section. This undoubtedly helps explain why this major sector (which now accounts for almost 40 per cent of total exports) tends to get overlooked by commentators writing on this topic.
I don't know how Mr O'Toole adjusted his historic export figures for price changes, but his calculations are clearly wrong. Ireland's 1990 merchandise exports of €18.2 billion (not €16 billion as given by O'Toole) equate to about €30 billion at today's prices (not €100 billion) and 2006 merchandise exports were worth €92 billion (not €102 billion). If one were to believe Mr O'Toole's figures, Irish merchandise exports would hardly have increased at all, in real terms, between 1990 and 2006, when in fact they more than three times greater in 2006 than they were in 1990. - Is mise,
Dr PROINNSÍAS BREATHNACH,
Department of Geography
and National Institute for
Regional & Spatial Analysis,
National University of Ireland,
Maynooth,
Co Kildare.