.... editorial page. The link is
http://www.jsonline.com/news/editorials/aug05/349598.asp, but for those who don't want to register, here's the text.
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Editorial: Learning from the Irish
By RICHARD FOSTER
rfoster@journalsentinel.com
Posted: Aug. 19, 2005
Those of our readers who have had the good fortune to visit Ireland know that, even on its most beautiful days, Milwaukee is not as green or lush as Ireland at its best. But Milwaukee offers something else, which is the kind of warm welcome that should be bestowed on Mary McAleese, president of Ireland, who is visiting our city this weekend to represent her country at Milwaukee's 25th annual Irish Fest, which runs through Sunday.
Milwaukee and Wisconsin should do more than welcome McAleese, however. Along with members of the Legislature and others, the city should learn how Ireland has managed to transform itself from a low-growth European backwater into one of the world's most envied economies. Some features of this transformation were reported Friday by the Journal Sentinel's John Schmid.
No one in recent years, perhaps, has described Irish poverty more poignantly than Frank McCourt did in "Angela's Ashes," his 1996 memoir of growing up as a member of an impoverished family in Ireland in the 1930s and '40s.
Even as late as the mid-1980s, Ireland was in the economic doldrums. Employment was falling, and many of its best and brightest college graduates were leaving Ireland in a phenomenon recalling the brain drain that has afflicted Milwaukee and Wisconsin in recent years. Among other gloomy statistics is one noting that Ireland in the mid-'80s ranked in the lowest third among the world's top 26 industrialized nations in educational performance.
That has changed dramatically in large part because, like many governments in similar predicaments, Ireland took drastic deficit-reduction measures. But, as Schmid noted, these cutbacks never interfered with huge investments in education and in government-sponsored university research grants. In fact, the Irish university system lies at the heart of Ireland's economic transformation. The payoff has been huge. Ireland has tripled the size of its economy since 1987, and its jobless rate has dropped to just over 4% from 17.5%, which was among the highest in Western Europe at the time.
Northern Ireland has enjoyed a similar economic boom, reports Nigel Hamilton, head of the civil service in Northern Ireland. About 140 U.S. companies now operate there, providing jobs for some 50,000 people. This economic boom was made possible in large measure by a ceasefire that the Irish Republican Army agreed to in 1996. In late July, the foundations for peace were extended when the IRA formally declared an end to its armed struggle and promised instead to pursue its goals through "exclusively peaceful means."
Recognizing the possibility that some of Ireland's educational innovations can be exported to Milwaukee and transplanted here, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Chancellor Carlos Santiago proposes to build ties to the Irish university system and learn how the universities are structured and how they connect to the private sector.
In spite of scandals surrounding backup jobs given to people who shouldn't have been given them, the UW System deserves the continuing public support it seeks. The relationship between investments in higher education and economic performance is undeniable, as the Irish experience shows. Thus, even as our city bestows a warm welcome on Ireland's president, it should be learning a thing or two from her.
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