ABSTRACT
The 12 months that followed the restoration of the Northern Ireland Executive in May 2007 was a period of optimism in both parts of Ireland. The economy of the Republic of Ireland was in its sixteenth year of continuous growth with a level of GDP per head that was now among the highest in the EU. In Northern Ireland all the major political parties had declared their support for the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), the IRA had decommissioned the vast bulk of its weaponry, and Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness were displaying an unexpected public camaraderie as joint first ministers. Irish government ministers took pride in declaring internationally that the island of Ireland was now prosperous and at peace, basked in the praise for Irish economic achievements, and were promoting the Northern Ireland peace process as a blueprint for conflict-ridden regions elsewhere in the world (Wilson 2010). The optimism did not last. Between September 2008 and November 2010 the Republic’s property market, banking system and a large part of the government’s tax revenue collapsed. There were severe cutbacks in government expenditure, a sharp rise in taxation, a surge in unemployment and emigration, and a forced entry into an European Commission (EC)/European Central Bank (ECB)/ International Monetary Fund (IMF ) bailout that cost the state its economic sovereignty (Donovan and Murphy 2013). Northern optimism had been on a lesser scale, so there was less far to fall. Also Ian Paisley’s replacement by Peter Robinson in May 2008 had a cooling effect, as did the slow pace of political progress. Even so the duration and intensity of the loyalist flag protests that began in December 2012 startled most observers (Nolan et al. 2014). The past three years have seen an economic recovery in the Republic and a return to relative calm in Northern Ireland, but the optimism of 2007 is long gone. The failure of economists to predict the global financial crash of 2008 was much criticised at the time (Mirowski 2010, 28-41); the failure of Irish economists to spot a ‘plain vanilla’ property bubble and its consequences for the banking system has also been criticised (Regling and Watson 2010, 6). Political and social scientists are slower to make predictions but typically their analyses imply a range of possible futures which may prove to be close to or wide of the mark. The latter includes failure to anticipate a crisis. From an analytical view, it points to models paying insufficient attention to crisis tendencies.
