Sugerimos a leitura de uma crónica/editorial de Fintan O’Toole colunista dos The Irish Times que escreveu a prosa “Ireland’s Rebound Is European Blarney” para o The New York Times versando sobre as várias dimensões da atual situações económica e social irlandesa naquilo que retrata como um fenómeno dual, entre o sucesso, associado à retoma nos serviços e alguma indústria de multinacionais que aproveitam o regime fiscal Irlandês, e o insucesso, associado à maioria da população residente que tem registado taxas de emigração muito elevadas e continua a batalhar por encontrar emprego.
A imagem da Irlanda “bom aluno” contrasta com a dúvida sobre a real responsabilidade e eficácia da política de austeridade num cenário presente que não apresenta como particularmente propenso a suportar as proclamações quase eufóricas que enumera vindas de fora e de alguns sectores políticos internos do país.
Um excerto:
“(…) But Ireland has two economies: a global one dominated by American high-tech companies, and a domestic one in which most Irish workers have to make their living. The first is indeed booming. Not least because of those low corporate taxes, large global corporations find Dublin convivial for reasons other than its pubs and night life. The sheer scale of Ireland’s dependence on this kind of investment for its exports can be judged by the fact that Irish gross domestic product took a serious hit in 2013 when Viagra (which is made by Pfizer in County Cork) went off patent in Europe. Broadly speaking, however, the global side of the Irish economy has remained robust.
But home is where the heartache is: in the domestic economy outside the gated community of high-tech multinationals. Outside Dublin, property prices are still falling. Wages for most workers have dropped sharply. Unemployment remains very high at 12.8 percent — and that figure would be higher if not for emigration. There’s always been a simple way to measure how well Ireland is doing: Go to the ports and airports after the Christmas vacation and count the young people waving goodbye to their parents as they head off to the United States, Canada, Australia or Britain, where they have gone to find work and opportunity.
Other people protest in bad times; the Irish leave. And they’ve been doing so in numbers that haven’t been recorded since the 1980s. Nearly 90,000 people emigrated between April 2012 and April 2013 and close to 400,000 have left since the 2008 crisis. For a country with a population about the size of Kentucky’s (about 4.5 million), that’s a lot of people.
There’s no great mystery about why they’re going: They don’t believe in the success story. A major study by University College Cork found that most of the emigrants are graduates and that almost half of them left full-time jobs in Ireland to go abroad. These are not desperate refugees; they’re bright young people who have lost faith in the idea that Ireland can give them the opportunities they want. They just don’t buy into the narrative of a triumphant rebound. (…)”
