To plan properly for the next four decades, we should copy Finland

The Future Forty plan is a start, but it is based on incorrect assumptions

The modern neighborhood of Jatkasaari, Helsinki, in Finland — the country leads the way in future planning.

The future will not politely wait for Ireland to get its act together.

A country planning to 2065 must ask not only what is likely, but what is possible and what is desirable.

When the Department of Finance published Future Forty: An Economic and Fiscal Outlook to 2065, it felt like a rare moment of long-range thinking in a state that struggles to look beyond the next election cycle. It’s great to see that this type of thinking afoot.

However, the report’s “no policy change” rule freezes today’s assumptions in place.

It tells us where we might land if today’s trends continue, which is not how the future works.

Evidence matters, but it can only come from the past. Foresight also demands tools that reach beyond trend-lines.

A country planning to 2065 needs imagination as much as extrapolation: A willingness to ask not only what is likely, but what is possible and what is desirable.

Scenario planning, for example, imagines several alternative futures — each distinct, plausible, coherent, and compelling — to test the range of choices facing society. Backcasting starts with a desired future and works backwards: What shifts in policy, technology, behaviour, or institutions would be needed to get there?

Story-driven foresight and speculative design allows us to explore how the future might feel to live in, because emotion shapes politics and policy as much as economics.

Ireland helped pioneer the use of citizens’ assemblies to widen our democratic imagination. 

There’s no reason we couldn’t also become world-class at the tools that let countries stress-test tomorrow: Horizon scanning to spot shifts early, weak-signal detection to notice what others miss, scenario planning to test choices under radically different conditions, backcasting to work backwards from the future we want, and participatory futuring that invites the public to imagine what lies ahead. Not prediction, but preparation.

But Ireland has barely begun to develop the tools, expertise, and institutions that let governments think in decades rather than quarters. We have no centre for foresight education, no professional pathway, and only scatterings of future expertise inside the State.

To see what this looks like, you only need to look at Finland, widely regarded as a global pioneer in anticipatory governance.

Finland began building its futures infrastructure more than 40 years ago. The Finnish Society for Futures Studies now has 14 institutional and almost 700 individual members.

Founded in 1992, the Finland Futures Research Centre at the University of Turku has become a leading hub for foresight education and research.

With around 50 staff, it trains masters and doctoral students and co-ordinates futures teaching across nine universities through the Finland Futures Academy, strengthening foresight capacity across the public and private sectors. These are just the educational pillars.

What's your view on this issue?

You can tell us here

Finland has also embedded foresight into the heart of its politics and public administration. The parliament of Finland’s committee for the future, founded in 1993, was the world’s first standing parliamentary committee dealing with future policy. Every electoral term, the government publishes a formal Report on the Future, which the committee analyses and answers, sometimes with binding recommendations.

Some 14 other parliaments have since adopted similar structures.

Finland’s national foresight network, launched in 2005, brings long-term thinking into national, regional, and local policy.

A foresight steering group in the prime minister’s office followed in 2015, co-ordinating strategy across government. Outside the state, consultancies, practitioners, and civil society adds depth to a real ecosystem.

The country’s innovation fund, Sitra — with investment assets close to €1bn — places futures work at the heart of its mission. The result is a culture where the future has a seat at the table every day.

By contrast, Ireland has talent but no architecture.

Perhaps we fear that imagining radically different futures risks distracting from the State’s core economic policy reflex of attracting foreign direct investment; a strategy that has served Ireland well for six decades. But a world shaped by climate disruption, shifting geopolitics, automation and ageing populations demands flexibility. Ireland needs new strategic muscles.

We should not simply copy Finland. But we can build a system fit for Irish realities: First, establish a committee for the future as a standing joint committee of the Oireachtas, free from no policy change constraints.

Second, create a futures centre for research and training to develop the skills needed inside government, business, and civil society.

Third, launch a national conversation on Ireland’s long-term future, learning from the success of Wales’s The Wales We Want dialogue (2014-15), which reshaped what is possible.

Fourth, restore strategic capacity to the centre of government, with a new research and innovation council, filling the vacuum left since the abolition of Forfás, reporting to the Taoiseach, with a mandate wider than commercial technology. Social innovations matter too.

This is not abstract thinking. Housing takes decades. Transport systems take generations. Healthcare reform is a long march.

If we do not plan far ahead, we condemn ourselves to permanent catch-up: Homes always too late, transport always overloaded, healthcare always reforming.

Ireland became a modern nation because we once had the courage to think beyond crisis — Ardnacrusha, free education, EU membership, the Good Friday Agreement. Each required imagination that exceeded the moment.

We should not fear big futures. We should fear their absence.

Ray Griffin is senior lecturer in management andorganisation at SETU. Donncha Kavanagh is professor of information and organisation at the UCD School of Business. This piece is based on a longer paper published on publicpolicy.ie.