Dennis R. Redmond wrote:
> Did they invest a lot in basic education, or prestige
>projects for a cultivated elite, a la Britain? Or did the state just rent
>itself out for Intel, kind of like a low-rent Singapore?
and Max Sawicky wrote:
>You tell a nice social-democratic story, but
>weren't their investment incentives of some sort --
>tax preferences, subsidies, deregulation, etc. in
>the more recent period?
The investment was at all levels of education, including fairly heavy investment in science and engineering at the tertiary level. I don't have the impression that it was directed toward serving a "cultivated elite" so much as providing technical and/or managerial training . The development of education was uneven, however, with large parts of the population being underserved, a high drop-out rate and a high functional illiteracy rate -- similar to the U.S. or the U.K. in that respect.
The state did, in the earlier period as well as more recently, offer a range of incentives to encourage inward investment, including favourable tax policies, etc. (I wasn't claiming, in my earlier post, that the educational policy was the only part of the policy package.)
I'm not sure what is meant by being a "low-rent Singapore" -- if it means providing a relatively low-waged workforce to MNCs along with other incentives, it fits although I don't think it would be cheaper than Singapore. As Doug mentioned earlier, Ireland does have the geographical advantage of being European. And it is also worth mentioning that the Irish have a long tradition of emmigration and that Irish workers have always had the ability to easily enter the U.K. labour market and, even after the changes in the U.S. immigration laws in the 1960s, comparatively easy entry into the North American labour market, which has tended to limit the ability of employers to lower wages as far as they might have been able to do in other circumstances.
K.M.