"Never underestimate the impact of success on a people's psyche."

It may seem banal, but it was perhaps the single most telling point made by Paul Haran on his visit to the island this week. A former senior civil servant involved in Ireland's successful social partnership, Mr Haran paid a visit to our island to discuss the Irish model. He was invited by the Caribbean Policy Research Institute (CaPRI), which is investigating whether a social partnership could be a feasible approach to lifting Jamaica out of its difficult times.

I must say, I was always one of the sceptics who wondered what we could learn from the Irish. "Give me all that European money," I used to say, "and I can develop any country."

But, it's not that simple. Development, we now know, is not a function of the amount of capital which gets ploughed into an economy. Besides, I was always willing to admit there was a curious resonance to the Irish story. Whenever I heard Jamaican defeatists who lamented that ours was a backward country because the people were lazy, indisciplined and culturally resistant to progress, I thought of what was said about the Irish in my childhood. Switch the names, but the narrative was from the same book.

Paul Haran impressed his audiences this week when he described the turning point. It came not with accession to the European Union, but when the Irish - as he put it - finally began to take responsibility for their lot. After generations of blaming the English for colonialism, oppression, exploitation and racism, the Irish came to accept that they were poor because they had resigned themselves to it. Three generations after their independence, they were still mismanaging their economy, then satisfying themselves that it was not their fault.

Destructive belief

Implicit in that argument, he says, was a destructive belief: By saying they could do no better, the Irish had swallowed the worst stereotypes of themselves that the English had invented. That remark brought back a wave of childhood memories for me: I recalled all the jokes my family in England used to circulate about Irish people when I was young - jokes I could never quite understand, but which I was sure were unkind.

Self-confidence

But, they were distant memories, and it then struck me: I never hear those jokes anymore in the pubs and streets of London, or anywhere else in England for that matter. When the Irish came to respect themselves - more important, when they gave themselves convincing reasons for that self-respect - the dismissal of others disappeared.

Driving that change, he maintains, was a growing self-confidence that emerged in the 1980s, when cultural exports made the Irish realise they could excel. In a telling remark, Mr Haran pointed out that the effect on the Irish psyche was similar to what Jamaican Olympians must have had on the psyche here.

What of my dismissal that the Irish had it easy because they got German money? It turns out European aid has added only three per cent to the country's gross domestic product. The real driver of change was not external largesse. What ended poverty and produced the 'Celtic tiger' of today was the internal Irish drive to tackle their problems - the public sector which rewarded inefficiency, the uncompetitive firms sheltered from competition, the tolerance of lawlessness.

For fatalists, who say Jamaica has been stagnating so long, and we don't know any different, Paul Haran has a simple word: The Irish were messing up for much longer before they got their act right. We're still spring chickens in this game.

It may not be our model, but the story sounds familiar.

John Rapley is president of Caribbean Policy Research Institute(CaPRI), an independent think-tank affiliated to the University of the West Indies, Mona. Feedback may be sent to columns@gleanerjm.com.