The ESRI said this morning that we are in recession and that the country will once again experience the multiple scourges of the 1980s and the early 1990s.  These, for those of you too young to remember them first-hand, are rising unemployment, emigration, stagflation (stagnant economy combined with inflation) and widespread loss-of-optimism.

On the day I got my first degree, unemployment was at 18.5%.  This meant that no graduates got jobs that year.  Those that had jobs were desperately trying to hold on to them and those that were looking for jobs had no hope of getting them. A few years later I emigrated to London.

The one release valve this country had at the time was emigration.  It was so common that it was almost taken as given that you would emigrate when you graduated.

This seems to have been forgotten in the past 15 years.

We had the ‘people in need’ telethon every year in order to try to generate some money for hardship cases.  We had Late Late Show specials on unemployment.

We got out of it because of three things: Education, taxation and a national agreement that we would try to move forward together.

Education is the only way out of all of this in the long run.  Our competitors in India, China and Eastern Europe all realise this.  The number of emails I get from China and India each day from young people that want to come and study with me is impressive. The desire for higher education in these countries is much stronger than in the more complacent European countries.  In the UK, attendance at University is decreasing each year and in particular the ‘difficult’ subjects like science and engineering are being abandoned in favour of degrees in arts.  This also reflects the relative ease with which people feel they can get jobs afterwards.

The problem with the expansion of arts and creative courses is that these are not the primary drivers of the economy and indeed if there is a recession, these are the qualifications that are least likely to result in a job (except for teaching these subject to students).

So, right now, more than ever before, the emphasis needs to be on education in the sciences, mathematics and engineering, particularly electronic engineering and computer engineering.

We have only a slight advantage over the more aggressive economies to the east at this stage. In the future, if we are to stay as a country with any advantage at all, the emphasis needs to be on trying to ensure that every person with the ability and interest in going to 4th level (higher degrees - Msc/PhD) can do so.

In my opinion, right now, the government needs to fund the 4th level like never before.  They need to pay specific attention to technologies that might lead to intellectual property and patent applications.  They need to make it easy for academics and R+D departments in industry to set up either start-up companies or new divisions of R+D.

They have been doing this very well - I blogged recently about IBMs compute cloud research centre coming to Ireland, etc.

But the time is now to really push on this and make it happen.