Ireland's Prime Minister Liam Cosgrave, with his wisp of mustache, starched collar, bowler hat and understated manner, often looks like a Downstairs character asking a small favor of the man Upstairs. And indeed, until recently, the Irish were among the profligates of Europe, living it up as if someone else were responsible for their bills. Wages wildly outstripped productivity. Unemployment was the highest in Western Europe; inflation raged at an 18% rate. Public debt zoomed moonward at a catastrophic speed, while the idea of restricting consumption to narrow an enormous deficit elicited a knowing snigger. By calling a snap election for this week, Cosgrave has replaced romance with realism. The country, he says, must stop "this rake's progress."
Cosgrave's coalition government and the Fianna Fail opposition led by former Prime Minister Jack Lynch realize that the troubles of the economy must be faced, and the government is bluntly telling voters so. And an unusually alarmed electorate concurs. In the first public opinion poll of its kind, some 70% of voters voiced most concern about jobs, inflation and prices; only 2.3% think the country's position about the civil war in neighboring Northern Ireland is the paramount issue.
Nobody would agree with that assessment more than Minister for Industry and Commerce Justin Keating, 47, who was trained as a veterinarian, lectured in anatomy at a Dublin college, was a star television performer and joined the Cosgrave Cabinet in 1973. Although Keating is a member of the left-leaning Labor Party, his youthful radical ideology has been replaced by a pragmatic view: only heavy foreign private investment can ameliorate the country's unemployment. The jobless rate is now about 13%, and some 30,000 youths leaving school this summer will join the ranks, plus farm-laboring families that are being displaced by more efficient agriculture. No wonder the electorate is seething with dissatisfaction.
Because native capital and technical know-how are scarce, Keating has been traveling from Tokyo to Houston persuading industrialists to invest in the thinly peopled (pop. 3 million) republic. On just one swing in April and May to Japan, Australia, Canada and the U.S., Keating brought back $150 million in new contracts from the U.S. alone. Through the offices of the Industrial Development Authority, the government agency charged with stimulating industrial expansion, Keating sets up lunch and dinner dates with corporate chiefs and ends up with his cowlick flying, making speeches in a lyric tenor. Even bored businessmen come to life when they learn that money for projects can be borrowed in Ireland at rates ranging from 4% to 7%, that profits on exports are tax-free until 1990 and can be repatriated to any country in the world, and that Ireland offers a bagful of other incentives.