It's an ill wind that blows no good. The old proverb suggests there are such winds - events so unpleasant that no compensating factors can be found. But I'm not sure I've ever seen one.

The gale which broke upon us three years ago is, in WB Yeats's phrase, truly bitter and black. Yet it would be wrong to say it did no good at all.

It blew away destructive attitudes and practices, along with a few people - albeit perhaps not enough - who deserved to be scattered to the winds.

Pity it came a bit too late. Enormous damage had already been done. But things could have been even worse had the global credit bubble lasted a few more years. In the famous phrase from economics, some of the destruction was "creative".

As a result, one of the most depressing annual events has turned into something mildly cheering. This is the report produced by the National Competitiveness Council (NCC).

It is a bit of an old favourite of mine, although one has to approach it with caution. There are all sorts of arguments about how to measure competitiveness - even how to define it - and there are difficulties of interpretation with almost every one of the hundreds of statistics contained in the report, the latest edition of which appeared last week.

But its very regularity means it should offer a reasonable guide to trends. The mild cheer comes at the sight of so many coloured lines in the graphs turning upwards, instead of continuing downwards.

That was the reason it was depressing for so long. Economic growth might be booming, Government finances might be in surplus, there was full employment and immigration, but the NCC statistics showed everything that mattered was going in the wrong direction.

Costs were rising faster than elsewhere; productivity was declining; infrastructure was falling behind; educational standards were slipping. Meanwhile, the social partners, who were supposed to base their decisions on information like this, were shovelling fuel on the inflationary fire like demented stokers, while ignoring all the signals to reverse engines.

Arguments will rage forever about how much policymakers should have foreseen the credit bubble and the looming banking crash, but there is little or no excuse for the Bertie Ahern-led Governments' ignoring of clear evidence that much of the progress of the early 1990s was being eroded.

Once or twice, Mr Ahern and his ministers said as much themselves - on occasions with elaborate public launches of policies to restore competitiveness. But they did little or nothing and in the end had little or nothing to say either.

The ill wind presents an opportunity to begin to repair that damage, but only an opportunity.

A change of attitudes is required, although there is not much sign that such change is coming.

It will require more than changes of attitude in the other areas where damage must be repaired and improvements made.

The three big ones are education, productivity and infrastructure - probably in that order of importance.

All this may seem a bit irrelevant as the European crisis deepens, threatening to spread another pall of gloom.

There is not much we can do about that crisis, but we can determine that we will take those upward trends and work to keep them climbing.

At the very least, it would give us something else to think about.

A change of attitude is required although there is not much sign that change is coming