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About the projects you were involved in?

My first book was based on my doctorate and is entitled ‘Policy Failures and the Irish Economic Crisis’.  It examines why most observers of the Irish economy were so unprepared for the economic crash.  I paid a lot of attention to official organisations, research institutes, academics, newspapers and politicians.

There is already a lot of myth around that period, but it’s clear that only a handful of people issued meaningful warnings about the property market, and essentially nobody was worried enough about the banks.  I don’t really buy the accusation that people knew what was coming and deliberately hid it.  Senior managers and staff in the most exposed banks were heavily personally exposed in terms of shares and there has been no evidence that any pre-emptively sold because they saw what was on the horizon.

The book shed a lot of light for me on the intellectual ecosystem in which policy is formed and market participants operate.  The newspapers were enormously reliant on third-party research and especially citations from industry spokespeople, which inevitably skewed their coverage.  The overwhelming bulk of the political debate was based on minimal expert opinion or research.  It wasn’t just that TDs didn’t correctly anticipate what would happen, but the debate was so superficial that it is almost inconceivable that they ever could have. You see this throughout the debates on planning and the establishment of the financial regulator.  There was minimal public concern and that was closely reflected in the Dáil.

For my second book I was selected by the Department of Finance to do its official history from 1959 to 1999, which were really the most important decades in Irish economic history since independence.  Right up to 1990, Ireland was only about two-thirds as rich as neighbouring countries like the UK or Germany.  It had totally failed to catch up for the first seventy years of independence. Then, over the next decade, real GNP per head rose by almost half, and employment increased by the same.  It was an historic, once-off convergence on Western European living standards, which is totally unrepeatable.

The origins of this go back to the 1956, when Ireland first introduced corporate tax reliefs for manufacturing exports.  On its own that really wouldn’t have mattered- with a few notable exceptions domestic firms took very little advantage.  The key was joining the European Economic Community back in 1973, which opened the potential for US firms to use Ireland as an export base to the massive European market, which really only took off fully twenty years later. 

The fascinating thing is this was a policy mix which nobody wanted: The Department of Finance wanted to join the EEC but opposed the tax breaks, while the Department for Industry and Commerce introduced the tax breaks but fought to retain tariffs and quotas.  We easily could have missed the boat on foreign investment, which would have just gone somewhere else.  In many ways we’re living in a very unlikely future.

Core focus area at the moment?

I’m just starting my next book on material wellbeing over the past century.  Across many metrics Ireland is a vastly better place to live than it was fifty years ago, particularly in terms of things like longevity, infant mortality, educational attainment and discretionary income.  The problem is the same across many developed countries: housing has become vastly more expensive relative to incomes and here at least it is very unclear why.  In other countries the finger is often pointed at land prices, but they’re still only 15% of the total in Ireland. 

In the 1960s, many women were precluded from working because of the marriage bar, which was obviously awful.  The economist and philosopher Amartya Sen has written a lot about capabilities and economic development offering people freedom of choice.  The irony is that peoples’ choices are so curtailed today, for different reasons, in terms of whether to work or where to live.  These are obviously big questions, but I’m hoping that robust archival research should throw some light into what changed.

Does your research influence your teaching?

Massively! I teach both undergraduates and postgraduate students.  What underpins all my teaching is that the vast majority of humanity has lived on the equivalent of a few hundred euro a year, in conditions that all of us would consider intolerable.  This only really started to change in the last two hundred years or so.  That change is the single most important thing in human history, and in all of our lives.  About a billion people still haven’t seen the benefit.  If you use that as the starting point you really see the world, society and your own life very differently.

At its core, this is about technological change and economic policy.  As my research highlights, good economic policies can transform lives for the better.  Bad policies, as we insist on repeatedly learning, are hugely destructive. We are facing massive challenges in the twenty-first century, particularly around climate change and artificial intelligence.  Achieving optimal solutions is entirely within our collective gift, but it does take a historical perspective to see the real purpose of growth and technological innovation.  And it’s definitely not to send pop stars to space.

Last observations?

There has been a real resurgence of interest in economic history since the crash in 2008, which is great.  There’s nothing sacrosanct about the past, and if we’re given the right information there is obviously plenty to learn about the present. The problem is that present is changing so fast, and our access to information is so partial.  At its best, history should teach us about the world and how it works.  Plenty of that has changed and will continue to change, but almost all of the key debates and challenges today have historical precedents that are often eerily resonant.