The Celtic Tiger's lost generation

The Celtic Tiger is famous for its millionaires; but as Saturday’s riots revealed, not everyone has been swept up in the slipstream of success. DAVID McWILLIAMS on the rise and rise of the new hopeless.
THE blame for Saturday's riot seems now to rest with local football hooligans drawn from what has been described as a feral, aggrieved underclass which has, in the economic effervescence of the past few years, been ignored.

If this is the case, we had better get used to them because this track-suited, white Irish underclass will grow significantly.

And this growing-suburban underclass - mirroring developments in the US and the UK - is likely to remain firmly beyond mainstream politics.

You may have caught a glimpse of these looters in Celtic shirts, stoking the riot on their pre-paid mobiles; if not, just watch any Eminem video.

In the US, this class is referred to as "white trailer-trash" - people living in trailer parks at the wrong end of US cities, defined by a weakness for tracksuits, sovereign rings and lotto scratch cards.

Eminem is their Elvis, rapping about alienation, anger, destitution, alcoholism, family break-ups, teenage pregnancies and welfare dependency.

If they are working, it is for the minimum wage at KFC, McDonald's or Wal Mart.

They feature strongly in the Army casualties in Iraq.

Despite having little or no stake in US society, they, like the rioters on Saturday, display warped patriotism for flag, country and tribe, defined more by what they are against than what they are for.

The US has a long history of well-paid blue collar workers, so how did these people slip down the social pecking order in the past 20 years? And will it happen here? Three major global factors have created the "trailer-trash underclass" in the US and, arguably, they are at work here. More worryingly, the pace of change here is faster.

First, with the opening of China, India and Russia over the past 15 years, the world's labour force has doubled.

This is a once-in-a-century development and has enormous repercussions for politics and society.

This means that low-skilled jobs have migrated to China and India in particular - and we have only seen the beginning.

A good example of what happens when the world is hit with an economic shock of this magnitude is the impact of the American prairies on global food markets of the 1860s.

The push of the American settlers to the West opened up enormous tracts of land that were immediately mechanised.

In no time, American farms, unencumbered by small peasant holdings and petty European familial jealousies, became considerably more efficient than the farms of Europe.

This huge increase in supply from the American mid-West pushed down world prices for crops.

The peasantry, which had been the backbone of European society for years, suddenly found itself facing considerably lower prices at market.

Their already meagre incomes fell further.

From 1870 to 1900, world agricultural prices fell progressively.

This decimated Europe's small farmers and thousands left the land, choosing to emigrate to the US and Argentina or migrate into Europe's rapidly expanding industrial cities.

Lower food prices also helped industrialisation as it was now cheaper to feed the urbanised masses.

So the first victims of globalisation were Europe's peasant farmers.

However, back then, millions availed of the safety valve of emigration.

Ireland's post-famine emigration trends also reflect this.

Indeed, the political ramifications of the US-inspired, agricultural recessions of the 1870s included the Land League, the Home Rule movement and continued agrarian unrest.

Fast-forward to today and similar global rebalancing is occurring.

Low-skilled industrial/service workers today are the 21st-century equivalent of the 19th century's peasant labourers.

These jobs have no future in high-cost, high-income countries like Ireland.

To make matters worse, unlike our ancestors, today's displaced low-skilled workers have nowhere to migrate to - even if they wanted to.

Equally, there is not much incentive to emigrate - the welfare state sees to that.

However, the Chinese and others will continue to come here and so demographic competition will sharpen.

Thus, the second squeeze on the underclass comes from immigration.

The history of immigration is the history of social fluidity and of winners and losers.

Again the history of the Irish in America is instructive.

Whenever there is net immigration, competition for jobs increases dramatically as the immigrants do whatever it takes to get by.

The experience of black manual workers in the US faced with thousands of Irish workers coming into the major cities of the US in the 1840s and 1850s gives us a fascinating glimpse of what is likely to happen to our unskilled workers over the next five years.

Initially, the Catholic Irish were seen as untermensch by the Wasp (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) establishment, but that changed in the late 19th century.

Going back to the Famine, it has been pointed out waves of immigrants from Ireland displaced the American black labourers with alarming speed, by undercutting them in a classic example of 19th-century outsourcing.

As is the case today, displacement and outsourcing created much discussion in the editorial pages.

Here is an extract from a letter published in the 'Philadelphia Daily Sun' in 1849: "There is direct competition between the blacks and the Irish, as we all know. The wharfs and new building attest to this fact; when a few years ago we saw none but blacks, we now see nothing but Irish."

Not only did the Irish replace the blacks but, having replaced them, we set up a powerful trade union movement based on race to make sure that we kept them out.

Economic history is replete with other examples of the dislocating nature of immigration.

Let's get back to our own looters, whom we saw on Saturday.

What is likely to happen to them as our economy changes with globalisation?

History and recent UK and US experience suggest that the growth of an indigenous white Irish underclass is not in doubt but two other factors will determine the pace of events.

The first is the scale of immigration and the second is the skill level of the Irish workers.

If immigration remains at its present rate, we will see another 60,000 workers enter the country in the next 12 months.

This rate is likely to taper off but it still puts us top of the European league for immigration.

Just to put the figure in context, we are now accepting eight times more immigrants per head than France.

Perhaps the more striking issue is not the influx of foreigners, but the educational underachievement of our own people.

For all our talk about our great education system, new figures reveal that the indigenous Irish are the least skilled people in the workforce.

According to the ESRI, 32.9pc of Irish workers in the labour force are unskilled and uneducated. (This figure measures the amount of our workers who have left school at or before Junior Cert.)

This compares to only 3pc of our new immigrants from the EU.

As a group, these largely eastern Europeans are 10 times better educated than we are.

According to the ESRI, 87pc of other (non-EU) immigrants - mainly Chinese and Africans - are skilled, as opposed to only 67pc of us.

These are truly shocking comparisons, implying that, when the going gets tough, the greater skill level of the foreigners will ensure that they will be the ones who will weather the storm.

We have already seen the first signs of trouble as new figures reveal an alarming rise in unemployment among Irish school leavers in the past year or two.

Think about the following choice.

You are faced with two candidates for a basic manual job. One is an enthusiastic, well-turned out, numerate, multi-lingual Polish graduate; the other is a snarling, barely-literate local in full-tracksuit mufti, who left school before the Junior Cert.

Unskilled

Which one would you pick?

The fact that so many of our workers are unskilled and so many are leaving school early means that what the Americans would describe as the "trailer-trash" underclass is likely to grow rapidly in the years ahead.

There will be fewer jobs for the unskilled and more competition for these jobs.

If house prices continue to rise and local authority houses continues to fail to keep up with demand, trailer parks will become a reality.

There, cut off from the rest of us, wrapped in their Celtic scarves, an underclass will fester.

Is that the future we want for our society?

It's time to answer a few hard questions.

Saturday's riot should force us to wake up.