A Very Political Project Charles Haughey, Social Partnership, and Ireland’s 1990s Economic Transformation

A Very Political Project Charles Haughey, Social Partnership, and Ireland’s 1990s Economic Transformation: A History by Philip O’Connor

Publication date 1st September 2026.

Hardback. 395 pp. inc. source notes, bibliography, index etc.

€25. Plus shipping: Ireland (incl. NI): €5 (up to 3 copies).  UK/EU: €12 (for elsewhere, email howthfreepress@gmail.com)

Launch events – the book will be launched at two events, on 1st September 2026 by Mr Dermot McCarthy, former Sec. Gen. of the Department of the Taoiseach, in Doheny & Nesbitt’s Pub, Baggot St., and on 2nd September 2026 by Mr Bertie Ahern, former Taoiseach of Ireland, in The Abbey Tavern, Howth. Register to attend either event here

Charles Haughey is grudgingly credited today with some achievements, but his overall strategy to transform the Irish economy and how it succeeded remain little known. This deeply researched, compelling and lively book aims to rectify this.

By the 1990s, an almost entirely new economy had been created, populated by new industries and social institutions and based on high-tech exporting industries, a financial services framework, an industry/research/education nexus and a firm EU integration orientation. This “Irish Model” with its dual goal of a globally-integrated economy and a socially inclusive society, won international acclaim. Critical in achieving it was social partnership, a singular system of collaboration between the major socio-economic interests and the State in generating and maintaining consensus national strategies. The Irish Model proved so robust that even the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-12 that destroyed so much purely credit-based wealth failed to dent it, and it quickly revived.

Anything and everything is credited with having created the “Irish miracle” – from globalisation to the EU, the visionary foresight of agencies like the IDA, an explosion of artistic creativity, or even just good luck – anything, that is, apart from the policies pursued just prior to it aimed precisely to achieve it!

This book argues that it was these policies and their consistent implementation that were the source of the success. Based on interviews with key players and deep research in government and other files and records, many never examined before, the author reconstructs the extraordinary story of this “Very Political Project” and the conflicts and accommodations at the heart of it. It places it in the continuity of Irish political and economic development since the foundation of the State and up to today.