David McWilliams told us what would happen back in 2003. FACT! Our former Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, said that people like DMW “would be better off going away and commiting suicide” back in 2004. FACT! If the economy had been “cooled down” as was suggested back then we wouldn’t have ended up facing the “hard landing” we’ve had. FACT! The people who were at fault were the Fianna Fail led governments and their “good buddies” the bankers, the property developers along with the so-called “big businessmen”! Nothing more and nothing less! And instead of going away and chasing the people responsible for getting us into this mess, what do they go and do? That’s right, they expect “Joe and Jane Citizen” to “cough up” for their crass stupidity!
Why oh why do the Irish Electorate keep on behaving like Lemmings is beyond me. A VOTE FOR FIANNA FAIL IS A VOTE FOR MORE OF THE SAME! If that’s not simple enough for you to understand then there’s no hope for this country or its citizens!

Point (1) is evidently true and there are many great battles in the history of the land commissioners that reflect this. In 1963 why was there a reduction in the numbers of commissioners from 6 to 4? Patrick Sammon in his book clearly sees this as a political act of will.

You will note in pages 11 and 12 of that book that he paints the picture of Eamon Mansfield as an absolutely determined OUTSIDER (just so we keep the posts relevant to this strand!) who was regularly voted 5 to 1 against by the other commissioners. The fact is he was highly meticulous in his work, going through each case in its minutiae and knew the country like the back of his hand.

You or any other historians (do they read this blog?) can scour the country looking for evidence of the work of Eamon Mansfield and I can virtually guarantee you that you will find that he ranks up there among our most able and important civil servants such as T. J. Whittaker, including the fact that he was operating during our most turbulent period and dealing with the most difficult issue - land ownership.

On point (ii), I am not an expert and will have to reread Patrick Sammon to find the answer to that!

Two quick observations:

1) FF’s Tammany Hall culture is not a recent phenomenon.

Rezoning and other aspects of Irish land policy have been Ireland’s crack cocaine for decades.

2) I don’t understand the economic rationale of moving farming families like the Harneys from the West in the early 1950s and later, when that region was suffering the worst depopulation.

I think that I am the the greatest and most intelligent economist since the sliced pan was invented. Now that was after Keynes who was the greatest. I dont live in Dalkey where they think they have the greatest but then I am a “Culchie” from Turnipstan…………..

YAWN !!!!!

Well Michael, given that you can’t even give a prediction as to whether a residence association would be an insider, and given there is no clear definition of ‘the public interest’, this notion has zero predictive power at the macro level.

Its not a theory for economics, its a theory for understanding history.

Any reply to my above posts?

What has happened since the department of lands was abolished?

As you have pointed out at Finfacts was there not a major bubble in farm land prices in the late 70’s leading to major financial difficulties for farmers and the whole recent rezoning/property/road-building bonanza since the mid 90’s where some farmers became greedy and other genuine farmers were priced out of the market by speculators. How do these events tie in to the absence of an effective department of lands?

As I see it, Fianna Fail went through a gradual metamorphosis from the early years to the Haughey years to the Dynastic years and has completely lost touch with its roots by this stage.

Maybe!

@ Rory o’Farrell

And I suppose if people in poor housing organise into a residents association they will suddenly become a ‘vested interest’.

Maybe!

Maybe if such an association became as powerful as the IFA; prompting a minister in a country that would be Albania without trade, to ask the European Commission to ban all beef trade with a key emerging economy; prompting the Irish government to give primacy to agriculture over industrial exports and services in Doha trade round talks and ensuring that countries like India maintain average industrial tariffs at 34%; making even discussion of a change in the rezoning bonanza as a taboo subject, more than a decade after a tribunal began inquiring into planning corruption; forcing the Government to raise the cost of land for roadbuilding to 23% of project costs - -double the average in the EU - - it would be a powerful vested interest — using its influence to have a narrow interest given precedence over the public interest (all these terms of course give great latitude to a troll).

@ Jules

Alan Dukes is likely afflicted with Stockholm syndrome.

He has a big pension to keep himself tuned up for the rest of his life and I guess his position in Anglo Irish gives him a sense of relevance.

A Fianna Fáil minister once called publicly for his department to be abolished  - - a rare event in the Irish political system where the modern Age of the Spoilsmen has eclipsed the notion of public service first and self-interest second.

At the Fianna Fáil Ard-Fheis in 1970, the Minister for Lands Seán Flanagan (1922 – 1993), who was captain of the Mayo All-Ireland football winning teams in 1950 and 1951 and was honoured in 2000 by the GAA as a member of their Gaelic Football Team of the Millennium, was accorded a standing ovation when he proposed that his own department should be abolished.

Last year two Fianna Fáil ministers joined a legion of vested interests in opposition to the Bord Snip/McCarthy report proposals on reducing public spending.

Pace this excellent blog, what makes economics so unattractive to the public is a po faced insistence on arcane language and methods. Contrary to the neoclassical myth of academe, all economics is political economy. That is not to devalue economic skills and techniques, but rather to set them in their proper and comprehensible relations with neighbouring sciences. It seems to me that DMcW is contributing to that.

It’s easy enough to see where his core audience will come from. There is a tribe of well educated young folk whose economic prospects have been dashed in the most brutal fashion. Older stakeholders are keeping their opportunities for family members, (clanonomics), so you are out of luck if you don’t have connections. Last in first out.

Our new outsiders are faced with emigration and negative equity. The shock is only beginning to sink in. Lifestlyes and aspirations torpedoed, and a loss of economic innocence. Downward adjustment probably feels like a violation, and can leave a deep scar of bereavement and resentment. It wasn’t supposed to happen to this generation.

@ Michael H rightly focusses on reform of the state, which goes deeper than the usual notion of ‘public sector reform’. I submit that the problem is constitutional as well as institutional. Now that we have settled the problem of the north, we ought to be able to look at sovereignty issues calmly and without bigotry. It is in the interests of our neighbours too that we should clean our stables.

The new outsiders are hurting, but the old outsiders (rural and urban poor, travellers, disabled etc etc) still need to be heard. Setting the new outsiders against the old outsiders will suit the capital markets, and our corrupt elite, very well. The downside for us will be a nasty social atmosphere, with loss of basic amentities like the right to walk the street in safety. If we are even thinking about something as radical as default, we must consider risks to the social order.

And I suppose if people in poor housing organise into a residents association they will suddenly become a ‘vested interest’.

Ireland is estimated to be 4% urbanised compared with 28% in France.

The UK RICS reported in 2009 that Ireland still had the worst housing conditions than other countries with similar living standards, with floor areas per person of around a fifth less than the western European average, even though a large number of dwellings (45%) are detached houses.

The An Bord Pleanála head said last Oct., that we have 88 planning authorities for a country with a total population of 4.4 million.

Up to half the political membership of some authorities during the boom, had a commercial property interest and they participated in rezoning decisions.

This is a typically ignorant reaction in a country where the concept of conflict of interest hardly exists.

Is it fair for example to tar all hq bankers as drug pushers when beyond those who set policy and approved risky loans, the money and career motivation of the rest was likely to have been no different to their critics?

Of course by demonising a few select groups, it obscures the responsibility for political and economic failures and explains why apart from the Central Bank, there is no serious appetite for significant change in governance and administrative structures. Besides, the Victorian culture of secrecy on public spending remains untouched apart from a hodge-podge FOI system.

DMcW in his last book referred to Pat Kenny’s “land grab” in Dalkey; so is it unreasonable to ask when there is a categorical claim to prescience on the bust, why then set up a company property development partnership at the height of the bubble?

As for savings estimates, this evokes the rationalisations of Haughey and Ahern.

Pundits on TV save the nation while in this age of celebrity, you have undoubtedly never heard of most of the creators of the wealth of the nation.

The story goes that his father drank the farm and that they were evicted in his early teens making him a rank outsider.

He then works in a forge, becomes a school teacher, and around the time of the Lockout goes on a two year unpaid strike and is one of the founders of the INTO. In the meantime he becomes an expert on Irish Land Law - not an easy task - and helps with drafting up various Land Acts and becomes an honest broker across a range of sectors in the early free state. Elected as a land commissioner in 1933 he was passionate about the rights of small farmers given his background and would have required the wisdom of Solomon on a daily basis in the process of undoing the effects of 800yrs of British Rule and a hugely divisive civil war.

In one sense with considerable executive powers he would have been an insider but he was highly apolitical in his role as top civil servants should be and a teetotaller so he would also have been an outsider and the fact he seems to be largely written out of history is testament to this.

Many other great characters in Ireland have lifted themselves up by their bootstraps and the important point is what do people who have been outsiders do when they become insiders?

We have decided to have emigration as a core policy in times of economic difficulty. Population determines growth rates as demographic based surveys will show. Japan, Germany, Russia all are losing population due to birth rates. The Irish birth rate was the least negative in Europe. Once emigration makes a mockery of that, a lot of the educated will take their expensive educations abroad.

This is the result of a policy of exclusion, lasting centuries!

I mean, its 220 years since the American Revolution, and 150 since their civil war, but they seem to do alright for themselves despite a huge number of lobby groups.

I think Olsen’s theory is useful for how groups form, but not for society as a whole. I thinks its use is microeconomic and not macroeconomic. Suppose you have two groups, unions and employers, with conflicting aims. Who will win? What predictions about the future does the theory have? It seems that ‘insiders’ are defined after the event. In contrast to poverty/breadline/wealth there is no metric of ‘insiderness’.

“The Insiders – found in every village, town and city – are those with a stake in our country who believe that today’s status quo must be preserved at all costs.”

I think it is a very poor classification of society. The definition of insider seems to me to be the definition of Conservative.

(Also, passport office workers are very far from the élite of the civil service)

Thanks for a fascinating post on FF and small farmers. An unexamined and very interesting facet of Irish life.

Where I come from, the local protestant farmers were convinced that the motive of the Land Commission was sectarian - to reverse the plantations - as no prods (even landless 2nd sons) ever seemed to get land from it. The context of FF supporters explains this better.

I wonder how large the impact was in real terms? Agriculture has continued to contract and small farmers have continued to disappear and have very small incomes. I remember (I was in Alan Matthews course at TCD long long ago) that something like 80% of CAP subsidies went to the top 20% of farmers in the 1970s. You also see huge disparities in things like third level participation rates for small vs large farmers. My point being that agriculture is not at all monolithic.

A sound analysis.

The explanation as to why the Dublin working class were, and remain, at the bottom of the pile, is not solely economic. They did not fit in easily to our inward looking, paternalistic and theocratic post-colonial regime, and were seen as ’suspect sub-citizens’, with ‘foreign’ (ie English habits). As nationalist and sectarian politics trumped class issues, they were placed in the role of the ultimate outsiders. The same process happened to the Belfast workers, but the political/religious divide introduced a different and bloody dynamic.

The failure to develop an industrial base in Dublin deprived the Dublin working class of its rightful industrial and craft inheritance. The role played by international capital, and by our banks, was negative in the extreme. Without industrial investment, trade union activity naturally tended to centre in public employment. State jobs were often the only jobs going.

Working people face a hard struggle to move upwards into our lower middle class, given the prejudice and stereotyping that greets anyone with the ‘wrong’ accent. Our professions are riddled with snobbery, to the detriment of productivity and service quality. It is notable that the term ‘middle class’ refers, in Germany and the US, to ordinary workers. The focus is mostly on productivity, and not social rank.

The social ladder is enormously harder to climb when you, your family and your neighbourhood facilities are under siege from dysfunctional, disorderly and criminal elements at the bottom of the pile. Young fellets will be young fellets, and sometimes it’s not one bit funny.

As a culchie, I have come to respect the talents, the decency and the wit of the ordinary Dubs. Long may yiz flourish folks. Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas about various forms of capital (financial capital is just one) are very useful is analysing ‘insider/outsider issues.

QED Brian Cowen and Brian Lenihan, the two most powerful men in the state.

I wonder if there is an economic (as opposed to cultural) explanation as to why Irish politics is so dominated by interlocking generations??

Re. overlap, of course members of groups will overlap. Interestingly, Mary Daly shows in the 19th century that native Dubliners were very under-represented among elite working class and lower middle class jobs and skewed heavily towards being casual unskilled labourers. For example, the DUT tramdrivers were dominated by men from Westmeath. For example, there were almost no native Dublin shop assistants or police officers. Consistently, the lower prestige the occupation or the more deprived the area - the more native Dubliners it had.

Now obviously given Dublins well-developed union tradition, some members have secured “insider” positions in, say, CIE or ESB.

@all
There is a well -developed theory of how groups acquire and exercise political power to extract rents. Mancur Olson and Gordon Tulloch led the way and there’s a very rich literature with both falsifiable predictions and empirical tests.

The theory doesn’t say that insiders always win or won’t change. The case of small farmers under Fianna Fail being a point. You could say that they assembled a new coalition of insiders to displace the old.

Among the predictors of insider influence are:

1. Size (e.g. its easier to organise/police a smaller group because lobbying is a public good) Empirical research in the US, for example, has shown that the more concentrated an agricultural crop is in geography or growers the larger the subsidies it recieves.

2. Longevity - the longer its being around, the more political capital in terms of knowledge/relationships/”stock” of favours that it recieves. Olson argued that WW2 cleaned the slate in Germany by destroying a lot of these embedded culture.

Given this, from the current crisis, I would have predicted that:

a. The concentrated group of developers will be treated better by the political system than the larger group of indebted homeowners - TRUE

b. That the smaller group of elite civil servants would have recieved better treatment than their larger more disparate group further down the scale (e.g. passport counter clerks) - TRUE

c. That long-established and highly concentrated retail group of car dealers would receieve more favourable treatment/subsidy than more disparate groups of retailers hit hard (e.g. jewellry shops, convenience stores) - TRUE

d. That due to our high level/access to immigation, that outsiders will leave rather than cause a revolution (protest itself being a public good - TRUE

In terms of longevity, I think its no surprise that our oldest professions (barristers and doctors) are by far the most protected and earn the highest rents.

You wrote:

When Fianna Fáil won power in the early 1930’s, it began an extensive programme of land acquisition and confiscation from its political enemies, via the Land Commission.

Terence Dooley in Land for the People; The land Question in Independent Ireland, 2004, UCD Dublin, wrote:“In October 1933, the new Fianna Fáil government introduced its own extensive and complicated act, which provided the catalyst for record acquisition division statistics 1934-5 and 1935-6 and was very much as Patrick Hogan contended, a ‘political act’ that pandered to the small farmer and labouring classes in an attempt to secure votes. After the terms of the act became known, there was a rather dramatic growth in the number of Fianna Fail cumainn from 1,265 in 1932 to 1,679 in 1933. This growth was partly the result of more organized and sustained efforts by Fianna Fáil organizers in the rural constituencies but it also owed much to the stimulus provided by the 1933 Act and the widely held belief that one would have to be a member of a cumann in order to benefit from division.”

There wasn’t even a Mugabe-style pretence of restricting the patronage to “landless peasants” or labourers as they would have been known as in Ireland.

As evidenced by this Seanad debate in 1934 the appointment of Eamon Mansfield as one of the land commissioners was a major catalyst in the process at this time.

http://historical-debates.oireachtas.ie/S/0018/S.0018.193402070004.html

If Terence Dooley and other commentators on the role of the Land Commission haven’t discussed in detail the role of Eamon Mansfield then their analysis is incomplete. He was a household name in Ireland at the time across all parties for his fairness and social conscience and worked across many sectors of Irish society in the nitty gritty details of promoting fairness. His ghost might come knocking on your door if you simply refer to this period as a Fianna Fail land confiscation exercise because this would have been anathema to him and he was quite a formidable character by all accounts.

Another debate on the wind-up of the Land Commission in the early 90’s recognised certain flaws but generally conceded the overall positive benefits and fairness in the process.

http://historical-debates.oireachtas.ie/S/0134/S.0134.199210210004.html

Nevertheless many find people like David McWilliams, Nassim Taleb or Hugh Hendry much more convincing and engaging.

This is not anti-academic bias. It is because some market people (the intellectual ones) seem more likely to see clearly what is on front of their faces. Daily experience of making decisions under uncertainty has sharpened that particular skill.

Sorry guys, but this shows, and the public are sensitive to it.

“You try and work out what an insider is and come back if you have anything of substance to say.”

Thats my whole point. The notion is so vague that I can’t define what an insider is.

Surely its the responsibility of those who support the theory to give the basic, consistent, definitions of who is inside and who is not. If you can’t even do that the whole theory is totally useless for economics (but it could still be entertaining). It has nothing of substance to say.

But I suppose I’m ‘outside’ the group of insider/outsider proponents, and so I must fend for myself.

(Regarding the Nicean Creed, as the original language was Greek, I go with the Orthodox church on that one).

What’s rich? poor? the breadline?

From the blurb above: “In contrast, the Outsiders are excluded and left to fend for themselves.”

You try and work out what an insider is and come back if you have anything of substance to say.

You would apparently have been happy debating where the comma should go in the Nicene Creed!

So basically the ‘insiders’, who were large farmers were displaced by the small farmers when FF came to power. How is this evidence in favour of the insider/outsider idea.

From the OP “The Insiders … believe that today’s status quo must be preserved at all costs.”

The small farmers of 1933 did not want the status quo maintained. Yet when FF came to power did the small farmers become the ‘insiders’.