High agency, creative civil servants can change the face of a nation. T.K. Whitaker’s Programme for Economic Expansion (1958-63), a laborious independent study of Ireland’s economic potential, laid the foundation for a sustainable pivot from economic insularity toward becoming a more outward-looking nation. The Programme created an ambitious framework that charted a path toward stemming emigration, encouraging productive investment and opening to free trade.
Tactically, Whitaker identified young, ambitious civil servants that were willing to study the Irish economy from first principles. Inculcating such bureaucrats with ideas that had worked successfully abroad, particularly state planning, he planted the seeds that would grow into the Celtic Tiger. More strategically, Whitaker spent decades cultivating relationships with high-ranking politicians to ensure his suggested policies would be implemented without being diluted through amendments. Over time, Whitaker built an extreme degree of credibility so much so that the vast majority of successful Irish policymaking can be traced to his core ideas due to the way in which he inspired later civil servants and politicians.
As a rebuff toward colonialism, 1930s Ireland doggedly pursued protectionism. Legislation such as the Control of Manufactures Acts in both 1932 and 1934 ensured new industries would enjoy extensive tariff protection if they were controlled by Irish nationals. The unabashedly nationalistic Fianna Fáil government seeded skepticism of foreign direct investment (FDI), particularly from Britain. Fianna Fáil was so fierce in its commitment to Irish unity that it prioritised rescuing the Irish language over economic interests; after two decades of economically disastrous protectionism, Taoiseach (Prime Minister) and leader of Fianna Fáil Eamon de Valera still viewed the restoration of the language as his party’s most important objective.
Prior to Independence, Britain had granted Irish farmers loans to finance land purchases, to be repaid with interest through annuities. Upon their ascent to power in 1932, Fianna Fáil stopped paying the annuities and imposed tariffs on British goods, engulfing the countries in a six-year trade war. Fianna Fáil implemented a regime of import-substituting industrialization policies, assuming that agriculture could not sustain a growing economy and that free trade would stymie industrial employment. This was a failure, launching a small number of firms capable of producing a narrow range of products, far from the desired outcome of a large number of companies producing varied goods. Many of the firms produced foreign goods under license, underscoring the degree to which innovation took a backseat to self-sufficiency. When Whitaker was focused on his study of the economy throughout the mid-1950s, Irish delegations were desperately seeking foreign direct investment from the United States, Germany and elsewhere due to Whitaker’s urging.
Source: National Archives of Ireland, S.11987B
In the 1920s, the government had pursued a more conciliatory relationship with Great Britain: in 1924, the first year for which there is data, 79.1% of imports and 98.1% of exports were British. Of these exports, the vast majority was low-margin agricultural produce. At no point in the 1920s were there more than 24 manufacturing firms with more than 400 employees, the biggest, Henry Ford and Sons, laid off most of its workforce during the Great Depression. At this time, Irish manufacturing was particularly weak, displaying a lack of innovation and an inability to scale.
The most pressing issue in Ireland’s economic policy was its Balance of Payments position, a summary of all economic transactions between a country and the global market. Imports severely outstripped exports, putting the Balance of Payments into a disequilibrium that threatened to bankrupt the state, which was compounded by the weak Irish Pound. The deficit also put downward pressure on the Irish Pound, which was exchanged for foreign currency to buy imports. In the short run, successive governments resorted to deflationary budgets to lower consumption, triggering recessions in 1950-1 and 1955-56. The measures enacted included a 40% tariff on imports from the UK and a 60% tariff on imports from other countries, turning the 1950s into a lost decade and unwittingly creating the ideal environment for Whitaker to advance what were then revolutionary ideas.
Source: (Ó Gráda & Hjortshøj O'Rourke, 2021)
Economic Stagnation
Much of Whitaker’s early career in the Department of Finance in the 1940s was spent pioneering statistics to chart national income and expenditure, which was a novel approach at the time due to the use of forecasting. By 1951, the end of the post-war economic assistance through the Marshall Plan left Ireland vulnerable to currency devaluation, rising commodity prices and static agricultural export prices, resulting in a balance of payments deficit of almost 15% of GNP. From 1949 to 1955, Irish economic growth lagged the continent, with GNP growing at 10.5% compared to 36.5% across Europe. At this time, 40% of those employed were in agriculture, an industry whose output was 50% lower than its European counterparts due to a failure to embrace new technologies like fertiliser. Output was increasing at a mere 1% per year, creating an economy inadvertently focused on inefficiently producing low-value commodities primarily for export due to an unwillingness to embrace innovation.
Low wages and lack of demand for labour made opportunities abroad more attractive, leading to extreme depopulation: the country’s population plummeted from 6.5 million in 1851, the first census conducted after the Famine, to 3 million by the 1950s. In 1957 alone, almost 60,000 people emigrated, primarily bound for the USA, UK and Australia; other years saw emigration reach 75% of the birth rate. Depopulation reduced the labour force, decreasing the size of the domestic market, and demoralised the public. As revealed by the Commission on Emigration (1948-54) and the 1956 census, the most enterprising were the most likely to leave, and the resulting depletion of skill and initiative created a sense of hopelessness. The despair was only worsened by the fact this was the Golden Age of European Economic Growth across the rest of the continent. Considering Total Factor Productivity (TFP), the portion of output which cannot be explained by the amount of labour and capital used, and so generally represents technological or organisational improvement, at this time TFP in much of Europe rapidly increased.
Taking Ireland at this time, TFP was staggeringly low. Compared to its peer group, the lack of productivity appears to come from labour inefficiency rather than access to technology. In the Irish case, protectionism was the culprit as it protected indigenous businesses from addressing the causes of labour inefficiency. Protectionism bred an air of complacency within Irish businesses.
Source: (Jerzmanowski, 2007)
Despite the barriers to competition protectionism created and the resulting incentives that protected inefficient industries particularly from the perspective of labour, unemployment was among the highest in Europe. Given agriculture’s central place in the economy, the preponderance of resource underutilisation and antiquated practices in farming were partly responsible. There were other compounding factors. At the time, secondary education was not yet free, and so out of reach, resulting in a largely uneducated workforce. Capital was limited, stymying new enterprises. Whitaker was influenced by Keynesianism and saw unemployment as the greatest economic evil. For the three decades following independence, the Department of Finance had embraced balanced budgets; Whitaker used his growing influence in the department to push for implementing budget deficits as well as ‘some independent thinking’ which included: actively seeking out FDI and avoiding protectionist policies.
Key to Whitaker’s success at incorporating such thinking into the core of the Department of Finance was talent identification. Whitaker sought young up and coming civil servants in the department that could be recruited for discrete research. At Whitaker’s urging the government became more amenable to free trade leading to Ireland joining the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in 1958 so that restrictions on foreign investment in manufacturing were abolished. Success in this endeavour was partly due to Whitaker befriending Seán Lemass, de Valera’s second-in-command, the Minister for Industry and Commerce throughout the 1950s until his own appointment as Taoiseach in 1959.
In an Ireland desperately searching for direction, Whitaker stood as a critical source of ideas that enabled him to build coalitions across departments and with influential government ministers. His word carried weight that has not been matched in the Department of Finance since. Had de Valera prioritised the economy rather than the Irish language over the course of his career as Taoiseach, there would not have been so much low-hanging fruit for Whitaker to pick and gain such a foothold in the Department of Finance.
Philosophy
Until the 1950s, state planning was seen as a communist phenomenon, making it an anathema to European democracies such as Ireland. The tide turned with the success of France’s Monnet Plan (1946-50), a four-year plan to guide postwar reconstruction and industrialization by setting production goals, refining fiscal policy, and mobilising state investment. The case for state planning was further bolstered by Italy’s Vanoni Plan (1954-64), which increased industrial capacity, modernised agriculture, and reduced the reliance on foreign aid in southern Italy. The region achieved full employment, a balance of payments equilibrium and became a formidable economic rival to northern Italy.
Whitaker leveraged the econometrics he had implemented in the Department of Finance to help Ireland develop its own planning model. Inspired by widespread public support for the Monnet Plan, he sought to win over stakeholders across Ireland. Italy’s modernisation of agriculture in southern Italy through the Vanoni proved that such a feat could be accomplished. The Mezzogiorno also provided a case study in reversing emigration.
Whitaker believed that defining economic targets was psychologically useful, providing focus and direction to complement the dominant idealism promoted by de Valera. To make the case for the existential importance of state planning, Whitaker titled his first study ‘Has Ireland a Future?’ (1957). Whitaker accused the Department of Finance of ‘inverted Micawberism’, and identified blind adherence to precedent and an unwillingness to experiment as a cause of failure. To give himself intellectual freedom, he conducted the study in an unofficial capacity, quietly studying all aspects of the Irish economy. The objective was to assess whether Ireland could fare well in a world of increased globalisation and modernisation; the survey ultimately exposed the dire situation facing the country and the degree to which it had fallen behind its peers. Its effectiveness was due to Whitaker’s novel blending of quantitative and qualitative evidence. The survey opens with ‘The Irish people are falling into a mood of despondency’ and incorporates anecdotes that show both public doubt in the merits of independence and a growing sense that emigration was the only option for upward mobility. Whitaker’s creative use of personal experience, particularly compared to the typical policy document of the day, helped create a more compelling and urgent narrative of decline. Why such anecdotal evidence appears to have been ignored for so long by decision makers appears to be due to the idealism espoused by de Valera creating a wedge between the desired and the real in policymaking circles. As a prominent figure in the Easter Rising and the Irish War of Independence, de Valera was beyond reproach even though he was often wrong as typified by his continued commitment to protectionism even though it had clearly failed. It took Whitaker, and his tactfulness, to tread carefully along this aspect of Irish political life while bringing attention to the plight of ordinary Irish people.
‘Has Ireland a Future?’ launched a deeper analysis of the economy; Whitaker assembled a team of bureaucrats to help with the survey and explore implementation, producing ‘Economic Development’, a 250-page study detailing the minutiae of Irish fiscal and monetary policy, the organisation of state and semi-state bodies, and recommendations for state aid, culminating in an endorsement for economic planning. Many of these bureaucrats were new joiners he had identified as extremely talented, such an approach combined raw intelligence with fresh thinking. ‘Economic Development’ refrained from economic projections to avoid creating parts of the document that could create aimless debate in the context of the crisis facing Ireland. To his mind, focusing on the declining population and balance of payments issues was a more constructive approach.
Whitaker argued that the only viable solutions for Ireland’s issues were increasing agricultural productivity, industrial output and employment and finding new export markets which were not treated as contentious conclusions at the time. The study was akin to an operating manual for Irish economics and argued that Ireland could enable productive and self-sustaining employment and increase productivity by lowering tariffs and removing controls on FDI. A notable flaw in the plan is the absence of recommendations for the state’s education system, something it saw as the responsibility of the Catholic Church. The former would force Irish businesses to adapt or die when faced with more efficient business practices from foreign enterprise leading to more productive business practices overall and the latter would similarly enhance productivity. The study explicitly states creating a favourable tax environment would be critical to attracting FDI.
Starting Up
The paper was almost immediately lauded, and the government began to implement state planning through the First Programme for Economic Expansion (1959-63). The First Programme was a fundamental policy shift for a government that had engaged in protectionism for two decades. The proposal condensed ‘Economic Development’ into 50 pages of immediately actionable goals and policies: achieving a growth rate of 2% per year (albeit without a breakdown across sectors), the repeal of the Control of Manufactures Acts, the removal of price and profit controls, and tax relief to encourage exports. Whitaker was hesitant to forecast outcomes, so the First Programme restricted its projections to GNP, government capital expenditure and domestic savings.
The First Programme achieved widespread success. Considering the resulting Industrial Development Act (1958) wins include:
133 factories were opened by foreign investors by the programme’s end.
This translated into a capital investment of £40m.
350 new companies were established in the 1960s.
Foreign investment was critical – in 1965, 80% of investment came from foreign investors.
Beyond this act, traction was gained through the following achievements:
Cash grants for fixed assets covering up to 50% of cost and 66% of cost in areas of low development.
Local government tax relief on new buildings for the first seven years after construction was introduced
Income tax was reduced by 6% to boost consumption which was funded by a 5% increase in corporation tax to 15%.
Combined, these helped increase industrial output by 7.2% per annum.
The early success of industrialisation meant the decline in agricultural employment was offset by the increase in non-agricultural employment signalling a successful transition of the economy.
Regarding agriculture:
Cattle output was increased alongside a tuberculosis elimination programme to ensure a sustainable increase in the national herd.
Subsidies were provided for fertiliser as part of a dynamic grassland policy.
State aid for the sector doubled to £39m by 1963-4 compared to the start of the programme.
Bord Bia was established to find viable export markets for Irish produce.
Inspired by French stakeholder capitalism, the programme established the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and the National Farmer Association to advance the interests of their respective sectors. This set the stage for the Committee of Industrial Organisation (CIO) in 1961, a major review of Irish industry by a joint coalition of government, industry and trade unions. The CIO found most sectors had to modernise to be competitive internationally and suggested ways in which Irish industry could prepare for European common market membership by identifying its strengths and weaknesses. The findings themselves led to the establishment of the Irish Goods Council to market domestic products internally and deepened powers for the IDA. Whitaker’s audacity to quietly conduct his initial overview of the Irish economy therefore translated into many more much deeper investigations that revealed the problems to be righted to start the country up. Without his initiative, it is difficult to see how such stakeholders could have begun collaborating with each other in a more formal fashion.
Semi-state enterprises such as the Irish Sugar Company, Aer Lingus, and energy company Bord na Móna were reinvigorated through the appointment of entrepreneurs to their boards - an initiative Whitaker played a critical role in. By the programme’s end in 1963, by virtue of being the typical five-year plan pursued in continental Europe, exports grew by 50% which translated into higher employment and standards of living for the population. The First Programme was immensely impactful by introducing a focus on target-based metrics in Ireland. Up to then, the government did not have the institutional capacity or know-how to produce such metrics which led to a lack of direction and accountability in policy making. Whitaker’s commitment to quantitative measurement of the Irish economy enabled the collection of statistics that made the merits of state planning impossible to dispute.
Source: Second Program for Economic Expansion, Part II (Dublin, 1964)
Raising Ambition
Whitaker harboured a dream that Ireland would join the European Economic Community (EEC) and made this ambition widely known across government. Because accession typically occurs in groups of neighbouring countries, the breakdown of talks between Britain and the EEC had diminished Ireland’s prospects. The successor Second Programme of Economic Expansion assumed this dream would become a reality given that the block’s membership was ever expanding and the accession of countries such as the United Kingdom would naturally extend to Ireland.
Between the implementation of the First Programme in 1958 and 1963, GNP grew by 18.5%, underscoring the effectiveness of planning and state incentives. The Second Programme of Economic Expansion (1963-70) raised ambition further. Though Whitaker delegated much of the analysis to other civil servants, his name and ideas had become synonymous with the battle to modernise Ireland and to implement precision in quantitative targets. All major economic aggregates were forecasted: investment, industrial and agricultural output, consumption, imports, exports, government capital and current spending. More confident due to the First Programme’s success, Whitaker had the reputational capital to commit to targets and expectations at a more granular level. The primary goal of the plan was to ensure that GNP grew by 50% between 1960 and 1970 to keep Ireland in line with the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development’s target for its members, a grouping of markets-based economies that embrace free trade. Ireland’s ability to meet this target was contingent on membership of the EEC within the decade due to the small domestic market, economic growth relied on progressively increasing exports that were competitive on price and quality. Resistance to Irish membership was largely a function of the French President, Charles de Gaulle, opposing British accession and it was assumed Ireland would join at the same time as its nearest neighbour.
The Second Programme took up the issue of education, which the First treated as the remit of the Catholic Church. The Programme argued that returns on investment in education were likely to be as high, if not higher, than direct investment in industry, and committed greater investment in facilities, teachers and establishing final exams for students in technical schools, ensuring higher quality industrial labour. The proposal sidestepped the critical obstacle of secondary school fees, which would be abolished in 1966 by the Minister for Education, Donogh O’Malley. In a decisive, unilateral move, O’Malley announced the termination of school fees at a seminar, not having consulted the rest of the government or the Department of Finance.
To ensure the plan’s objectives were met, Whitaker launched the National Industrial Economic Council (NIEC) in 1963. The Council consisted of economists and bureaucrats nominated by the government, trade unions and enterprises to review the plan’s progress annually, with Whitaker serving as Chairman. The NIEC incubated close collaboration between private and official sectors through an annual review system based on consultations throughout the year. Such collaboration was necessary to ensure public and private sectors were striving for the same goals. The role of Chairman came naturally to Whitaker as it required the same skills he had so deftly used to quietly build support across government.
From a methodological perspective, though Whitaker was more hands-off in the plan’s preparation it was still very much driven by his thinking given the bulk of the research was conducted by the Department of Finance’s Economic Development Section and the Economic Research Institute (ERI), two groups he influenced heavily. The use of econometrics in Irish policymaking can solely be traced back to the precedent Whitaker set when devising the First Programme for Economic Expansion. The ERI became the Economic and Social Research Institute and is now housed in Whitaker Square.
Some Obstacles
The Second Plan set precise targets for agriculture and industry; in sharp contrast to modern Ireland, services were largely ignored as industry was seen as the primary way in which the economy could be transformed. Targeting an annual average increase of 2.7% in agricultural output required extensive state support and EEC membership, membership of the block provided more grants and subsidies for agriculture as self-sufficiency in this space was a priority. Industry was thought to face two challenges: development and adaptation.
The Committee on Industrial Organisation established by the First Plan determined that equipment and methods were out of date and that few Irish firms had modernised, correcting this would require upgrading machinery and an increasingly skilled and specialised workforce, which was dependent on education. Furthermore, the industrial sector was unprepared for an Ireland without extensive price support as provided by the Control of Manufactures Acts. To ready industry for free trade, the government decreased protective tariffs by 10% in 1963, then reduced them again to decrease tariffs by a third by 1965 as a measured interpretation of the plan’s recommendations for readying the economy for competition.
In 1969, the government established the Industrial Development Authority (IDA) to help consolidate technology transfer and corporate tax reform, all in service of attracting domestic investment. Early IDA wins include the Pfizer plant at Ringaskiddy, Co.Cork. In the spirit of the stakeholder capitalism espoused by the First Programme, the IDA invested heavily in partnerships with other organisations. Key among them were regional and county agencies such as the Shannon Development and the newly established Ireland-Japan Economic Association which eventually led to a Japanese resident ambassador in Dublin and Ireland’s participation in the World’s Fair in Osaka in 1970. Whitaker’s influence can be seen in the IDA’s focus on attracting foreign companies with growth potential in international markets due to the emphasis on quantitative research proving the merits and sustainability of trade with a particular market. It is therefore unsurprising that within this approach there was an obsession with meeting annual targets for new jobs though this did not translate to requirements for new entities to specifically create a certain number of jobs. Instead, there was a commitment to making Ireland easy and financially attractive to do business in.
The Second Plan moved away from price controls and toward grants and incentives to encourage risk taking, including grants and loans for finding new lines of production. The government also established retraining programs for workers facing the burden of unemployment due to the disruption caused by the change in the economy’s structure. Such an approach constructed a more attractive labour market than the decade previously with net emigration declining to 135,000 from 1960-9 from 409,000 from 1950-9.
Rapid rises in current and capital expenditure and increases in domestic credit and incomes led to inflation in 1964-5, which threw the Balance of Payments into disequilibrium. The restrictive action required to correct this, raising interest rates and reducing government spending, created a recession for much of 1965, leading many sectors to miss their targets and limiting the momentum of the Second Plan. In fact, employment in agriculture was lower in 1967 than in 1963. Labour shifted away from agriculture at twice the projected rate, with industrial employment increasing by 50% and services increasing by two-thirds of the projected employment figure. Trade agreements were essential to the success of the agricultural sector, particularly the Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement (1965). There were also large increases in productivity due to more widespread use of machinery and fertiliser, even in areas where small holdings dominated. For Whitaker, the transformation of agriculture was a key policy objective.
A further flaw in the Second Programme is the degree to which it ignored services: only two paragraphs are dedicated to the sector, which simply state the importance of banking and insurance to an economy as well as outlining a 43% increase in output in the sector by 1970. The plan anticipated that that growth would largely be a function of an increase in sector employment rather than innovation or improved investment policies. A key prerequisite for success, EEC membership, was not satisfied until 1973, after rejections in 1961 and 1967. Nonetheless, the Second Programme set in motion a chain of events that led to a more globalised Ireland — by 1972, all Department of Finance files dealing with trade with Britain were sent to the basement signalling the degree to which Ireland started to look beyond Britain. With broadened horizons, the Department of Finance realised global trade relations would be critical to the country’s success in a way which Anglo-Irish trade could not be.
Irish politics changed radically during Whitaker’s career: the typical politician went from being extremely principled, as demonstrated by Irish Prime Ministers such as de Valera and Lemass, to a more self-seeking and short-termist one á la Charles Haughey, who came to dominated Irish politics in the late 1970s and 1980s as Taoiseach, demonstrated through the increased frequency of fiscal giveaways to win popular support. This transformation weakened Whitaker’s position in the Department of Finance, leading to his departure in 1969 after Haughey was appointed Minister of Finance. Whitaker downplayed the link between Haughey’s ascent and the arrival of fiscal profligacy, with his decision to leave the Department of Finance and take up the governorship at the Central Bank of Ireland. Though, of Haughey, Whitaker did remark ‘you had to admire his tenacity and ruthlessness … but that did not mean you supported it’. Haughey’s predilection for expansionary budgets was not compatible with Whitaker’s emphasis on balanced, restrained fiscal policy.
The new breed of Irish politician was more likely to implement expensive, politically expedient schemes, such as O’Malley’s elimination of secondary school fees. This political manoeuvring put leaders at odds with methodical, long-termist civil servants like Whitaker. As a result, successive programmes for economic expansion were drawn up without Whitaker’s input, given his new role in the central bank, and were the worse for it, given his ambition was critical to the imagination of the First and Second Programme for Economic Expansion. Responsibility for the plans shifted from a well-known civil servant in the form of Whitaker to a coterie of faceless civil servants. This organisational shift in how the plans were drawn up appears to have created a move away from decisive and ambitious decision-making on targets toward a more consensus driven strategy that diluted goals and objectives.
Going Awry
Two decades after Whitaker recommended fiscal prudence, Ireland experienced deflation caused by rising oil prices. The debt to GDP ratio reached 110%, and the 1973-77 and 1977-81 governments responded with budget deficits. The increase in national debt was unsustainable, leading to increases in imports and a worsening Balance of Payments position, hitting 13% of GNP. Unemployment spiked, rising from 6.8% to 17.1% from 1979 to 1986. Emigration once again became the release valve, peaking in 1989. Joining the European Monetary System in 1979 ultimately failed to reduce, though increased stability eventually paid off in the 1990s.
After the 1987-89 fiscal adjustment and large-scale budget cuts, Whitaker’s programmes were shown to have enabled a growth machine, powered by an increasingly productive labour force and a young, primarily working-age population. This set the stage for the Celtic Tiger, a period of rapid growth from the 1990s to mid-2000s where GDP growth averaged 9.4% between 1995 and 2000 and 5.4% between 2001 and 2007. While the Structural Funds provided by the European Commission to finance infrastructure investment played a part, Celtic Tiger would have been improbable without Whitaker. Therefore, the degree to which Irish economic growth outstripped its neighbours from 1987 to 2003 would not have been possible without one man - Whitaker. Without ‘Economic Development’, it is unlikely the foundation for Ireland’s rapid growth four decades later would have been laid. As the first proponent of FDI in Ireland, Whitaker and his ideas are integral to the modern Irish economy. Most of all, his early advocacy for EEC accession primed Ireland for taking full advantage of the benefits offered by what became European Union membership.
Source: (Inklaar & Timmer, 2008)
Perhaps Whitaker’s greatest contribution to Ireland was shifting the nation’s mindset: the emphasis on free trade and FDI put forth by ‘Economic Development’ became a key ingredient of the growth-oriented economy of the 1990s and 2000s. ‘Economic Development’ imagined an Ireland that combined FDI with its comparative advantages in food processing, agriculture and pharmaceutical manufacturing to rapidly industrialise, which eventually came to pass. Of these ingredients, FDI has been a clear driver, with inward investment into Ireland far outstripping its counterparts. Reflecting on the results of both the First and the Second Programme, Whitaker noted ‘... the new programme put grass before grain and, on the industrial side, put export-orientated expansion, even under foreign ownership, before dependence on protected domestic industry, lacking adequate enterprise and skill’.
Source: US, Bureau of Economic Analysis
Whitaker’s historical importance is widely recognized, with the public voting him as the Irish person of the 20th century in 2001. Viewed as more influential than the leaders of the 1916 Rising and figureheads of the Irish War of Independence, he managed to capture the country’s imagination at a time when it was most needed. Through his ability to build alliances across government and his intellect, Whitaker had an uncanny ability to campaign for his point of view without creating enemies. Out of the misery of the 1950s, he almost single-handedly charted a path forward that enabled the growth trajectory of the Celtic Tiger. Whitaker is the central figure at the heart of the Irish economic growth story.