Preventing the Future: Why was Ireland so poor for so long?

Tom Garvin
Gill & Macmillan
2004

(Review originally published in the Irish World)

This new study by UCD politics professor Tom Garvin addresses a question that will surely be of interest to many Irish people in Britain.

After all, the continuation of mass emigration was one of the most obvious signs of Ireland’s failure to develop economically in the period between independence and the dawn of the Celtic Tiger in the 1990s. That failure is the subject of this book.

The picture that Garvin presents is conventional enough in its broad outlines.

Ireland pursued inward-looking economic policies in the 1930s and 1940s which were inevitable in the context of the Great Depression and the Second World War, but failed to adapt to the new opportunities of the post-war boom.

Export-oriented economic policies did not emerge until the late 1950s, under the guidance of Sean Lemass and the Secretary of the Department of Finance, TK Whitaker, and did not fully bear fruit until the 1990s.

The key question is why this process took so long.