Naked emperors

So this is deregulation. Workers screwed under common law contracts with no provision for redundancy pay and no guarantee they'll get sick leave and annual leave paid out or even that One.Tel paid its compulsory superannuation contributions.

Managing directors enriched to the tune of $7 million each, calculated by reference to market capitalisation not profitability. Privileged mates and their networks in Sydney's eastern suburbs buying in low and getting out high. The Chairman and Rodney Adler resigning from the board shortly before the collapse.

And then?

Uniquely, the big two - Lachlan and James - are left holding the bag after the mates have cleaned it out of cash. And that's the key to the political frenzy driving this story.

Put it this way. The Packer and Murdoch dynasties are famous for paying little or no tax. So now, they walk away from a company and ask us - the taxpayers - to pay stump up for the little people they helped squash?

Then there's the Packer/Murdoch announcement to the stock exchange on May 17 that they'd underwrite a $132 million capital raising for One.Tel. On the strength of that, some little shareholders bought in, only to find that within days the boys pull the plug.

The stakes are way too high for the big two. They need to be protected. If the workers aren't paid the untouchable status of the two dynasties would crumble. It would also open a pandora's box for the business elites of our deregulated world which could render transparent the dirty and amoral games they play to make their fortunes on the back of those outside their club.

So how would big politics and big business protect our heroes in an election year where the people are as mad as hell and aren't going to take it anymore? And what collateral damage would the big end of town be prepared to suffer to keep their gravy train on the rails?

Lots.

Yesterday morning, industrial relations minister Tony Abbott ruled out government support for the union application to the industrial relations commission for a retrospective redundancy entitlement. Of course he did, because these common law contracts the little people were put under are what the government and big business is all about. They call it flexibility. In fact, it's diminishing worker's share of a pie the bosses want more of, and making it quick and easy to shed staff without a care for their welfare. One.Tel has refused to negotiate with the union for an award. They were shining stars of labour market deregulation.

Howard changed tack after a Cabinet meeting yesterday. The government would intervene, and it would support the workers claim for a redundancy entitlement. Wow!!! How big a hit is that to the labour market 'reform' agenda? It's an extraordinary reversal of government policy, and it's the latest fillip to what I believe will be a resurgent labour movement, as workers realise collective bargaining is vital for survival in a deregulated world.

Why did Howard do it? Clearly the polling made it mandatory. Labor politicians had rushed in to back the workers and Bob Carr's performance at a meeting of the workers made even him look like a fiery Labor leader pursuing the class war that was supposed to be long dead and buried.

For the Coalition, it was simply not enough to publicly beg Jodee Rich and Brad Keeling to return their obscene bonuses - $7 million apiece - to cover worker entitlements. The public was angry. If the fairness of the system depended on the morality of people like Rich and Keeling, then it stunk.

Enter Keeling and Rich, suddenly promising to meet workers entitlements. They haven't promised to meet the new redundancy entitlement, but I'll bet you anything they'll do that too. Whether they're doing it off their own bat or under pressure from Packer and Murdoch is a matter for speculation. Whether they'll pay the bills themselves or are mere conduits is also a matter for speculation. But their promises lower the immediate heat on Packer and Murdoch. If they hadn't kindly come to the party, then James and Lachlan would have had to, and that would effectively admit they'd stuffed it up and that would be impossible because then they might be treated as mere human beings for the first time in their lives.

Even this wasn't enough to save Howard's bacon, so he promised that big bonuses to directors in a loss-making company which went bust would be stopped by legislation. Who knows what this promise means, but bet your bottom dollar that if we see his legislation before the election - which I strongly doubt - it will be confined to the precise circumstances of the Rich/Keeling bonuses. Otherwise, God forbid, business might actually have to be accountable for its self-interested, immoral divisions of the spoils of business.

So are James and Lachlan out of the woods? Have they escaped the fallout from this explosive return to class politics? There's still creditors to think of, and small shareholders. My bet is they'll have to find a way of accommodating these interests too, without seeming to do so.

For how can Howard and whoever replaces him as Prime Minister continue to bow and scrape to our business royalty if the heirs to the thrones sat on a board which ripped off creditors and shareholders? With power in a democracy comes responsibility. Fail that test, and they'll put their journalists in an untenable position and make their readers and viewers routinely wary of trusting their outlets.

That, of course, is another deeply disturbing aspect of the Packer/Murdoch troubles. Why are they in this together? They're supposed to be competitors! The Murdoch papers line is that Lachlan felt obliged to come in to keep good relations with Packer after the Superleague trials.

But if our two big media competitors shake hands and bed down together, what competition is left? When James married Jodie, the Daily Telegraph got a story about a much quieter wedding in Jodie's low income family on the same day. Lachlan canned the story, reportedly on the basis that otherwise James would not have forgiven him.

Imagine if Packer had taken over Fairfax courtesy of John Howard, as planned? Where on earth would citizens go for independent reporting of the One.Tel collapse, let alone genuine investigative work rather than excuses for the failures of the favoured sons? The ABC perhaps? Kerry has sued the pants off Four Corners for an investigative program, resources have been slashed, and J. Shier is running around looking for the right wing Phillip Adams. How close are we to a media dictatorship here?

Or could the intimate involvement of Lachlan and James in One.Tel pull us back from the brink of dictatorship just in time?

*****

Sorry about the gap in diary coverage. I no sooner got over the flu when I got dreadful news from my dentist. Forget a sponsor for this page, I need a sponsor to save my teeth.

So pollies super is finally up and running. Could Winning by Sacrifice (Webdiary April 17) be more than a joke? No way. The pollies are just filibustering, although Howard will try to make himself just that smidgen more popular by deferring the age to get super to 55, like everyone else. Only the public and the journalists can stop it ending there. Both have done a great job so far - there have been more than 2,500 public submissions to the Senate committee looking at Peter Andren's private members bill and the journos are beginning to ask the question as a matter of course. Journos now need to target members and candidates on the ground in every seat and ask why taxpayers should contribute 69 percent to pollies super when the employees of other salaried Australians put in only 9 percent. And they need to ask the right questions:

(1) Do you want the right to opt out of the compulsory scheme and join one with the rules that apply to all other salaried Australians?

(2) If so, if elected will you support Peter Andren's bill which would give you the right to exercise that choice?

And while we're on the direct action kick, Green groups suggest "a rolling blackout on the first day of summer, June 21 at 7pm - 10pm in any time zone" to protest The US stance on the Kyoto protocol. "It's a simple protest and a symbolic act. Turn out your lights from 7pm-10pm on June 21. Unplug whatever you can unplug in your house. Light a candle to the sungod, kiss and tell, make love, tell ghost stories, do something instead of watching television, have fun in the dark. We want global education, participation and funding in conservation, efficiency and alternative fuel efforts - and an end to over exploitation and misuse of the earth's resources."

Today, Jack Robertson goes to town on One.Tel in Meeja Watch, David Davis wonders at the stupidity of it all and Michael Peck tells us to understand finance or we'll all be rooned. My friend Mary Zournazi, a philosopher, debuts with a piece on Sunday's Free the Refugees rally. Peter Gellatly, Otto Ruiter and Lee Borkman comment on online advertising and to end, Robert Lawton discovers the dark side of Ireland's economic miracle.

MEEJA WATCH

I have seen the future, and it is One.Tel

By Jack Robertson

Look, let's not mess about.

Let's not waste time with theorising, explanation, excuse and analysis. There's nothing much to analyse - this is business in the modern Free (sic) Market.

Hype a company so people buy shares. It's easier to hype if it's commercially sound, but it's not crucial. These days, in business as everywhere else, the medium is what counts, not the message. And if you (or your mates) control enough of the Meejum, you can work miracles.

You can turn a tuneless warbler into a Popstar, a nobody into a Celebrity, a vacuous blonde into a politician, a crap book into an Oprah bestseller and most of all, any old bit of commercial junk into a temporary ASX rocket.

All you need is Meeja space, noise, and more space. You can create your own reality - if, that is, you happen to be a major media proprietor. Or the son of one. Or old school mates of the son of one.

The time has arrived for serious journalists to ask themselves - regardless of their own individual professionalism and integrity - if they can really afford to keep working for any corporation with significant commercial interests beyond journalism.

The One.Tel farce represents the future for the Australian Meeja. It has the lot - the blurring of news and opinion, the gross conflicts of interest, the further narrowing of Meeja coverage (via the James and Lachlan joint involvement), the exploitation of journalists for commercial ends, the few lone cries of genuine reportage drowned out by the sound of Serious Money crunching into Damage Control Mode.

The creepy Cranbrook incestuousness and the Shane Warne/street-creddy cartoon 'dude' marketing schtick is probably a good indicator of how James and Lachlan intend shaping their empires style-wise, too. Perhaps their rarified worlds will gradually evolve into Meeja versions of those of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas - wall-to-wall celebs, VIPs, sports stars, jobs-for-cronies, and endless adolescent arsing about, just for late-night, post-party kicks. (In their case, arsing about on the ASX, of course.)

One thing is certain - unless challenged now by senior reporters at PBL and News, James Packer and Lachlan Murdoch will become accustomed to using their inherited Meeja assets even more haphazardly than their fathers have done - as blatant PR vehicles, to do little more than spruik their friends' dud companies, say, or transform their wives into movie stars (I wonder if Sarah O'Hare has seen Citizen Kane?).

For all their arrogance, Rupert and Kerry have arguably deployed their power to at least promote some social agenda (however obnoxious you might consider it). I doubt that their sons (and certainly not their sons' more dodgy friends) have any strategic view of the world, much less a coherent value system, beyond their own money, privilege and power. I suspect that like so many late-generation multi-millionaires, they are Darwinian individualists, who, a la Thatcher, simply don't believe in any model of society at all.

It's a critical juncture for Australian journalism. The generational transfer of power is a vulnerable time, and the dynastic duo have taken big hits to their credibility over the One.Tel fiasco.

If ever there was a time for Australian journalists to stop whinging about the eternal Murdoch/Packer hegemony and actually do something about it, it is now. There's never been a better opportunity for News and PBL journos to re-assert some professional autonomy and independence.

The best way to start is by being honest both with us (the public), and themselves (as a profession) about One.Tel, rather than softening it (in relation to James and Lachlan) by pushing the 'deception' angle, or presenting it indulgently as a 'timely lesson for two inexperienced moguls'.

The One.Tel story was pretty simple, and it goes like this: A trio of rich spoiled brats used their rich friends' daddies' Meeja assets (and some of their money, and a LOT of their reputations) to make themselves an absolute stock market killing, spruiking a dud company artificially to great heights, paying themselves big salaries and massive bonuses based on that artificial share price (not real profit or product) along the way, then walking away when their rich friends got sprung by their daddies.

The real question is: where were the grown-ups of Australia's 'Free Press' (especially the Financial Press) while the kids were doing it?

DAVID DAVIS

I have mates in Sydney who are now bagging the hell out of me because of my more left leaning contributions to Web Diary. Left or right wing there seems to be some underlying resentment against me expressing views publicly. These are otherwise intelligent people, but they seem intent on dumbing me down. Make any sense?

I am hardly pretending to be an intellectual giant but it really annoys me when any comment based on less than superficial observation is derided or greeted with overwhelming cynicism. Perhaps it is a Sydney thing. Is hedonistic Sydney the ultimate venue for dumbing down?

When I read of the saga of One.Tel, the dumb people involved and the eastern suburbs glitterati it is hard to believe that Sydney is ever anything more than the land of real estate, the fast buck and the big party. The Sydney party "A Lists" must include some of the dumbest people on the planet!

The contradictions are everywhere though. A dumb society doesn't produce the most technically perfect Olympic Games ever. What other society likes to be dumb on the surface but if you scratch below a bit, you see great technical competence? Usually the reverse is the case. A superior intellectual exterior masking an average reality.

I am tired, getting older, LESS conservative and MORE open minded. After years of avoidance, I am now ready to listen to Barry Jones.

We need more people in the public eye who make us think. I think the dumbing down culture can imprison us. It certainly stifles creativity.

MICHAEL PECK

I heard you speak at the "Relaxed, Comfortable and Stupid" seminar on Saturday, and duly checked out your on-line column. I am from NZ, and I love the ABC and SBS. I know they're a shadow of their former selves but NZ now has no public service TV (although the new government is trying to turn that around). The SMH, for all its faults and bias, is infinitely superior to any of NZ's screaming right wing newspapers.

I wasn't surprised to hear you say "I don't understand finance/economics" - I suspect that most people find money as mysterious as the Trinity. But this failure or refusal to be interested or to understand, which seems to be endemic of the left, is critical.

The financial factor in history is hardly recognised. Had the French not vented their spleen by spending up large on the American revolution to spite the British, they may have averted their own revolution which essentially sprang from a financial crisis.

If British bankers, the gentlemanly financiers, had a willingless to dirty their hands in industry instead of a passion for large and short term gains from off shore speculative adventures, not only would the industrial revolution have developed more quickly, but British industry would not have declined, and workers would have avoided the starvation wages needed for the captains of industry to finance their own expansion from retained earnings.

Had France and Britain not been so determined to crush Germany with massive reparations after WW I, Hitler and WW II almost certainly wouldn't have occurred. Had the US not had the huge cost of the Vietnam war, and the subsequent threat to its gold reserves, it would not have unilaterally pulled out of Bretton Woods - unleashing all manner of financial possibilities and turmoil, not least the great game of currency speculation which has enriched the George Soros of this world.

J K Galbraith said: "The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled. Where something so important is involved a deeper mystery seems only decent."

I was initially a fan of NZ's David Lange - like many New Zealander's I was pleased that at last we had Prime Minister of considerable wit and intelligence. But he was little more than a wind bag - he knew nothing about economics and finance and left all that boring stuff to Roger Douglas and look at the resulting mess.

Sixteen years later NZ's debt is larger than it ever was, all but one tiny provincial bank is overseas owned and major public assets have been sold at firesale prices. Last year, the seventeen registered banks in New Zealand made a combined operating profit of $1,470 million, and took $1,300 million of their profits out of New Zealand. The country is exporting itself to death, but almost all the money goes to pay interest on debt to foreign banks.

Australia's larger and far more complex government has slowed the pace of 'reforms' that have almost wrecked NZ - but financial reforms have had an effect. People may not fondly remember the bad old days when you used to have to have 30% deposit to get a mortgage - but they don't consider the house price boom. Nor the days when you actually had to have money before you could spend it - but they don't consider the credit-card funded consumer boom, and the inevitable collapse of both - the end result of financial deregulation.

I digress. My point is that unless the left gets to grips with finance, finance will maintain its death grip over government. There is always the possiblity that the financial system may collapse, as it nearly did in 1997, but I'd rather not bank on that!

MARY ZOURNAZI

We drove to Villawood to support the "Free the Refugees" rally.

We read the placards, "Lock up the Liberals not refugees", in the most Australian of landscapes - tall, white, gum trees and a certain barrenness the backdrop to Villawood Detention Centre.

There is a huge police presence: police on horseback, police cycling around the parameters of the detention centre, police barricading the entrance, police helicopters.

I take serious note of the placard "ACM makes profits from Refugees". (Australian Correctional Management, a private US company, runs the centres on contract from the government.) For me, this becomes a larger question about the privatisation of basic human rights. Why are we building more detention centres - when, as one placard states, "We need money for resettlement not detention centres"?

For years, I've been working on issues around multiculturalism, exile and migration. In some regards, I see the mandatory detention of refugees as a rerun of the White Australia policy. We must realise that a refugee's passage to Australia is one of desperation and need - when does public policy stop and historical memory kick-in? We are the only country in the world to maintain this form of mandatory detention. In this context, I am indeed ashamed to be an Australian citizen.

It is the responsibility of the media, of public intellectuals, writers and critics to 'let the Australian public know' what's going on behind the detention fences,otherwise we are complicit in the violation of human rights.

This became clear to me when a speaker at the rally discussed the recent pre-dawn raid at Port Hedland. The event was reported as a violent protest by refugees - but the people were in

'prayer' - exercising the rites of their religion, when the police moved in. We must respect the religious practices and lives of people who are living in these centres. And we must stop reverting to vigilante forms of ethnic scapegoating.

As I stood outside the detention centre I realised we had a lot to learn. The space between the protesters and refugees was marked by police barricades, fences and barbed wire. From the other side, the refugees were standing, waving, joining the chants: 'We want freedom' - and at that moment, I knew what separated us was the 'freedom' I take for granted.

My parents were Greek-Egyptian political refugees in the 1960s. At that time there was an entry path that allowed them access to this country. Is it by some historical mistake that my life is free and those behind the fences are not?

For me, the protest raises the most fundamental questions for any society - the basic issue of human value. Do we continue to see these people as "other" to us - as not deserving of basic human rights? Are people always expendable; are we condemned to view all of our human relations as some economic imperative?

When will we become a nation that can exercise human compassion and political will: the compassion, responsibility and care necessary to all forms of human existence and social life?

At the end of the protest, there was an invitation for people to speak about their experiences, their issues, their traumas. I was struck by the lack of refugee voices. A friend advised that an Immigration Enforcement officer was in the crowd and the temporary protection visas for refugees can be revoked on the basis of 'political involvement'. What does that say about Australia's right to know and the democratic rights we so vigorously want to uphold?

The sea of hands and rallying cries marked the space of freedom and confinement - a site of hope and potential justice.

ADVERTISING ONLINE

PETER GELLATLY

My previous incarnation as a computer geek must still be itching me, for I find this business of how to make SMH Online run in the black intriguing.

For Webdiary, once you have the raw visitor numbers, you'll need our demographics. Anecdotal evidence from your column indicates a core breed of malcontents (?) as primary contributors, while your growing "second career" as an invited speaker indicates perhaps a wider non-contributary readership comprising members of service clubs like Rotary and common-interest groups like the Independent Scholars Association. Who else might be out there?

My guess is the composite Webdiary constituency, once elucidated, shall prove quite appealing to "oddball" advertisers - ie ones who offer specialty products but who historically, because of Australia's very small "alternative magazine" market, have found it difficult to reach their target customer bases in a cost-effective way.

Perhaps SMH could try to sign up Web Diary "sponsors", after the fashion of US public television, with a rotating "featured sponsor" entitled to additional display billing.

Certainly, I would look favourably upon a company prepared to spend its advertising dollars in the promotion of public discourse. If its products fit my requirements, it would be my preferred supplier.

Just a thought. There will be no charge (this time!).

OTTO RUITER in Springwood NSW

How long until we see ads for pharmaceuticals in medical stories? I fear for the independance and credibility of this medium if there's no seperation between genuine content and paid advertising. Will we read halfway through an article before realising it's an "advertorial"?

MARGO: The separation of editorial and advertising is a matter of commitment for us, and requires your trust. I am utterly confident that smh.com.au will not betray the principle or the trust we ask of you.

LEE BORKMAN in Menangle

How interesting are the responses to the question of subscriptions for SMH Online! The common thread seems to be that the reading of quality journalism is an inalienable human right, and certainly nobody should ever be asked to pay for it.

Now, I have a certain sympathy for this view. Why should my participation in our democracy - in, dare I say, the Knowledge Nation - be dependent on my ability to pay? Yet there are several obvious questions:

* Can quality journalism be sustained without fair payment to the journalist?

* Is journalism just a service, a "utility" like sewerage or roads, that can simply be funded by the community as a whole?

* Do we value journalism less than, say, cinema (for which we all gladly pay)?

* Can the role of the professional journalist be replaced by that of the gifted amateur? In other words, what would this WebDiary be with many contributors but no Margo?

So, yes, I'll pay, and pay gladly, to read the Herald, on paper or otherwise. I'll pay a whole lot more than eight (or five, or three) cents per day for a healthy ABC. On the other hand, I'll probably draw the line at paying for the privilege of contributing to an online forum, but that's probably just a measure of my frail ego.

ROBERT LAWTON

Elen Seymour's recent series of hymns to low tax, high brainpower nations usually involve glowing references to Ireland. Last year I read some fascinating stuff in The Guardian (UK) about the other side of the Irish "tiger" economy. (See below)

It seems to me that it IS possible to be a little bit pregnant when it comes to jumping into the global economy. Interesting analogy when discussing Ireland! Slashing corporate tax might widen the door to prospective investors. That door will be just as wide when they decide to leave. Meanwhile the rest of the social fabric remains the same. Perhaps Australia's position is pretty well right?

As with the dairy deregulation issue, chasing the international dollar is a bit like "chasing the dragon". What thrills you can also destroy you, can hollow you out so that you are left without the strength to ride out the inevitable slumps that come in the economic cycle just as in everyday existence.

A tiger by the tail

After a decade abroad, John O'Mahony goes home to Dublin and finds that the fabled Celtic success story conceals a harsh reality of corruption, poverty and racism.

Guardian, Saturday August 19, 2000

Back in 1992, long before Ireland began its dizzying economic upward curve, a group of theatregoers huddled into Dublin's cramped Project theatre to witness The Emergency Session, an evening of hardcore Celtic gangsta-rap, presented by the country's most celebrated young company, Rough Magic. As the lights came down over thumping breakbeats, our MC, a hip-hop reincarnation of Ireland's first president and guiding spiritual father, Eamon de Valera, pimp-rolled onstage to the rhythm, spitting out the verses in that priestly county Limerick twang so familiar to the home audience.

Numbers included Cead Mile Failte [100,000 welcomes], Bitch, an indictment of the Republic's treatment of women, and Neutral, More or Less, about Ireland's famed nudge-and-wink neutrality. However, the most memorable moment came with a tongue-in-cheek vision called Eire 2016AD, which conjured up a rosy picture of the state a century on from the uprising against British rule that led to its foundation: "This country's really moving, the economy's improving," rapped MC Dev to incredulous guffaws, before following up with the queasy prediction:

"We all know how it's going to be, don't we?

One big theme park, a quaint holiday,

Unless you're female or homeless or gay.

But we won't let reality get in the way,

Here in theme park Ireland, Slainte, have a nice day..."

Returning to live in Ireland after almost 10 years away, I have often been struck by the eerie prescience of that show, a cassette of which I carried with me on my odyssey first to London and then to St Petersburg. What was then so preposterous that it barely made sense in the realm of satire has now miraculously become a reality. From a basket-case economy that ran up such debilitating international debt in the late 70s and 80s that the IMF seriously considered foreclosure in 1986, Ireland has been transformed into the mythical Celtic Tiger, a technological overachiever with double digit growth rates approaching three times the European average.

Unemployment, which approached 20% in the 80s, is now down to 4%, and the debilitating, centuries-old emigration trend has been shunted into reverse. In the most startling development, Ireland is now the world's biggest exporter of computer software, nudging ahead of America for the first time last year.

Entirely new stereotypes have displaced the downtrodden models of the past: "Striding through the streets of Dublin these days," gushed Fortune magazine late last year, "is an entirely new species of Irishman and Irishwoman: educated, optimistic and affluent - unaffected by the twin demons of poverty and despair that hounded their ancestors for the last several hundred years."

And the Irish Times recently claimed: "There is now a real surge of power in the Celtic psyche, where the Irish in the world are seen as models for business acumen, drive, ambition, political and social progress and achievements in the arenas of music, sport and literature."

Yet despite the frothy rhetoric - which appears to have intoxicated most politicians - it is difficult to escape the sense that the Irish were still refusing to let "reality get in the way". Certainly the Dublin that greeted me was not the vibrant model capital of these congratulatory profiles, but largely the same scattered, grubby and vaguely planned provincial city I'd left 10 years ago, though now far more polluted and congested. House prices had gone up 300-500% and, as was obvious from the blankets and bundles in shop doorways across the city, homelessness had reached conspicuous, Thatcherite proportions, rising by 150% in the past year. Though there were considerably more jobs around, few people in my immediate circle were materially better off, and many felt the opposite.

And the general mood among many commentators was far from celebratory: "The economic boom has not really reflected itself on the basics of what people expect of living in a decent society," says author and columnist Fintan O'Toole, "A lot of the impact has been negative, in that it is much more difficult to buy a house, to travel around the capital, and to access a lot of basic services." Far from being a nation finally at peace with itself and comfortable with its new-found affluence, Celtic Tiger Ireland seems increasingly fraught with contradictions.

Few economists or politicians predicted this and, consequently, even fewer have any idea of what course it will take in the future. It is also an economic recovery that happened almost entirely independently of the Irish business elite, who had conspicuously failed for decades to lift the country out of terminal depression.

The Celtic Tiger was essentially created not by the Irish but by American hi-tech multinationals, eager to find a convenient launch-pad into Europe and attracted to Ireland by its educated and moderately rewarded workforce, Euro-friendly orientation, and crucially, by its rock-bottom 10% rate of corporate tax (compared to 40% in Germany and over 30% in Britain). Put bluntly: "It was based on criminally low taxation rates to attract foreign industry," says writer and journalist John Waters. " In effect, Ireland became a laundering operation for multinational industry in order to avoid tax."

By the mid-90s, this was beginning to bear fruit: $7bn direct investment in 1997 alone. The impact has been most beneficially felt in the employment market. Jobs have become so freely available that Ireland, once Europe's greatest exporter of humanity, has now begun to run out of people - every shop or restaurant window in Dublin now displays "help wanted" notices, computer programmers are recruited en masse from Russia and navvies shipped in from London. Meanwhile, wages for the majority of the Irish inhabitants have been kept artificially low by a "social partnership" agreement and still weigh in at just 80% of the European average.

Corruption is now ancient history

There were no convictions (obviously)

Well, different standards applied at the time,

We didn't know taking a bribe was a crime,

It used to be called a consultancy fee

Way back in 2015AD.

No other single factor has done quite so much to undermine the inflated rhetoric of the boom than the constant revelations flowing from tribunals set up to investigate massive wrongdoing by the political and business elite in the 70s, 80s and early 90s. Irish politics is now not merely tainted by corruption, but characterised by it. The definitive Irish sleaze bible is an engrossing little tome entitled This Great Little Nation: the A-Z of Irish Scandals and Controversies. It was written by Gene Kerrigan and Pat Brennan, and runs to over 300 pages of epic wrongdoing in the beef industry, a little priestly paedophilia, land re-zoning scams, bribe-taking, party political cronyism and a massive banking tax evasion scheme.

At the centre of the vast web of political scandal is Charles Haughey, the country's taoiseach - prime minister - throughout much of the 80s and early 90s. It transpires that Haughey supported a lavish lifestyle by soliciting "donations" from businessmen totalling some IR8m, and misdirected party funds, including some for his own use. Facilitated by his financial adviser, he also operated a secret offshore financial haven, and in the latest, grubby instalment, played out some weeks ago before the Moriarty tribunal, ran up a IR1.1m unauthorised bank overdraft in the 70s, some of which was never paid off. Beneath Haughey, there appears to have been a legion of dishonest politicians and business leaders, many operating the same Cayman Island scheme to evade tax.

Exactly how and why Ireland became the land of crooks and shirkers may puzzle us for decades. Much of it happened simply because, amid weak democratic structures and lazy press reporting, it could. But some of it must be put down to a peculiarly Irish distrust of structures of power, rules and regulations, always considered alien and Anglo-Saxon.

The essential "truth" of Irish social interaction - ad hoc, unstructured, public house relations - was always liable to degrade into cronyism and graft: "It was part of that kind of macho world where one could also tell your friends how you had drunk seven pints, driven home and evaded Garda checkpoints," says novelist Dermot Bolger. "In the same way that drunken driving was publicly acceptable, tax evasion wasn't regarded as criminal."

By far the most disturbing aspect of this corruption is the country's reluctance to punish any of the culprits. To date, none of the major protagonists has been imprisoned or even fined. After an abortive attempt to bring Haughey to trial, he still enjoys a luxurious lifestyle in his north Dublin mansion and on his own private island. Instead of being penalised, these disgraced figures of the past have simply crept back into the system and many have been the greatest beneficiaries of the boom. It is likely that we are now generating plenty of fresh material for the tribunals of the future.

Now we're no longer down on our knees,

Our children don't have to seek work overseas

And so we can counsel these new refugees

Flooding into the country in twos and threes

Get back in line, can't you read the sign

No dogs or Bosnians please.

On a social level, the boastfulness and bluster of the new Celtic Tiger ethos has not translated into an inclusive and open-minded national outlook, a real confidence that would reflect a people sure of their own abilities and able to respect the contributions of others. In fact, it appears to have triggered long-dormant prejudices, actively encouraging a nasty strain of unselfconscious xenophobia.

The persistent railing against "blacks" that many of us have heard from friends and relatives, and the often naked aggression against foreigners on the streets of the capital, couldn't be more profoundly disappointing. Most of the hostility is directed against asylum-seekers, who have begun to arrive in significant but relatively small numbers - rising from 362 to 8,000 over the past six years: nine in 10 have experienced verbal abuse on the streets, according to one survey, and seven out of 10 had been refused services.

The government this year launched a policy of dispersal, which basically dumps refugees in rural areas where they are isolated from support and aid groups, barred from working, given meals in B&B or hostel conditions that they often cannot tolerate on religious grounds, and given just IR15 a week to live on. John McDermott of the Refugee Information Service, says: "Opposition politicians are fond of saying that it is a shambles. But it's not a shambles if you are a racist. If you are a racist it all makes perfect sense."

...

A frantic Riverdancing nation,

Faint with self congratulation,

Where the only debate we'll ever condone, is

Will there be life after Boyzone?

One of the more striking ironies of the Irish resurgence is that, as the new mythology rises up to displace the defunct rural, mud-hut primitive imagery of the past, Ireland has become far more efficient, in the cultural arena, at manufacturing and marketing the old stereotypes. The success of this strategy is reflected most spectacularly in the onward march of the Riverdance extravaganza, which has now moved ahead of U2 as Ireland's most lucrative cultural export. But the same dynamic is also evident in some more upmarket recent international successes, such as Martin McDonagh's Tony award-winning play The Beauty Queen of Leenane, and, to a lesser extent, Conor McPherson's The Weir, both of which peddle nostalgic and distorted aspects of Ireland and now appear even more hollow and untruthful.

McDonagh's melodramatic oeuvre seems particularly symptomatic of a culture being driven by an outmoded and objectified self-image, its plots crammed with stage-Oirish creatures of mind-boggling artifice, and dialogue laced with sub-Synge idioms that could creditably pass for parody.

For the audiences in London or New York who made successes of these plays, the west of Ireland shack settings and their logorrhaic muck-savage inhabitants appear impossibly exotic and elemental. When the works eventually return to Ireland, they are protected from any kind of vigorous criticism by a phalanx of awards and accolades. Overall, the dynamic is not unlike the one that has colonised downtown Dublin with fake Oirish pubs, whose emeraldy, signposty, plastic ambience proved such a huge hit in Helsinki and Manhattan that it was then re-imported back into Ireland, widely supplanting the authentic item that inspired them.

Irish culture has been transformed into little more than a brand name, specifically and somewhat cynically engineered to appeal to foreign or expatriate perceptions, and then mistaken for the real thing when it arrives home. Product that doesn't match the ingredients listed on the label, such as Marina Carr's play, On Raftery's Hill, which brilliantly captured the spirit of a xenophobic, inward-looking nation, is simply discarded, playing to half-full houses at home and receiving cool reviews abroad.

Ireland cannot really be like this.

One big theme Pub, the Pogue Mahone,

Where the rackrent landlords are all home grown,

There's a new pornography: property prices,

And the sexiest words are 'housing crisis.'

It's our own asylum, and so it will be,

In Eire 2016AD

Despite the economic and material advances made over the past decade, and the revolution in employment opportunities, Ireland is failing to live up to the expectations generated by its own propaganda and its new status as one of Europe's more affluent nations. If the new wealth is viewed as a test of national character, it is one that we have failed quite abjectly, in our treatment of refugees and other races, in our ability to build and maintain adequate public and social services, in our ability to share the dividends with the poorer sectors of society.

This adoptive self-image of a brash modern nation also fails to take account of the deeply conflicted nature of Irish society and alienates the majority who appear to be reaping meagre benefits. Truth for truth, and folly for folly, the idea of a technologically advanced, highly affluent Tiger nation striding boldly into the 21st century seems to be no more nor less accurate than any of the previous fictions that exerted such a grip on Irish identity, from the misty Celtic Twilight of Yeats to Dev's rosy rustic picture, each of which eventually led into a cultural and spiritual dead end.

Ireland is given to illusory, indulgent images of itself. With the latest Celtic Tiger variant, all it has managed to do is modernise its self-delusion. What Eire really looks like in 2016AD depends on decisions taken right now. With extra cash surging through the system, there is for the first time a chance to cut through these prevailing fictions and build a society on well-funded social principles.

However, we seem more intent on using further tax cuts to prolong the party, letting us bask a little longer in the glow of the superheated economy. All the indications suggest that we will be gazing back from MC Dev's watershed centennial year, fondly recalling the frenzy of the Celtic Tiger boom years and perhaps lamenting the missed opportunity to transform Ireland into a modern, egalitarian, inclusive as well as affluent country.

* Verses by Arthur Riordan