There are far worse places to live than Ireland. According to the UN Human Development Index, we are second in the world. They clearly didn’t pluck that out of thin air. There are lots of great things about Ireland. You will live longer than most people in the world, you’re unlikely to starve or die of a curable disease, you’ll have access to some form of public healthcare, even if it’s years from now and generally if you want a job, you’ll get one. We have made incredible progress in the last century, having gone from being a colonial backwater to a modern, outward looking country.
However, there’s no reason to set the bar low through self-congratulation by comparing ourselves to less developed countries. That just lets our government off the hook for their own failures and illustrates the lack of belief or aspiration we as a people have towards what Ireland could become. We are falling way short of our potential, and we could run rings around the countries that usually top quality of life tables like those in Scandinavia, Switzerland etc. if we wanted to.
Solving any problem first involves accepting that there is one to begin with. Accordingly, Irish people need to get real about what Ireland is and is not, and who it serves and who it doesn’t before we can fix its issues. The fact of the matter is that no country embodies the notion of "all fur coat and no knickers” better than Ireland. Successive governments have a talked a good game around Ireland’s “dynamic” and “innovative” economy, but the truth is somewhat different. In reality, we are a client state for tax-dodging multinationals who bribe us with corporation tax and financial services rentiers based in the IFSC who profit by speculating on and extracting fees from other people’s money or assets. That’s our economy in a nutshell.
Small businesses are treated with contempt while Google, Facebook, Big Pharma etc. are given the red carpet treatment because our own national insecurities delude us into thinking that if we ingratiate ourselves with them through tax trickery, they’ll pat us on the head and throw us a bone with a few jobs or say nice things about us, and the government will get a nice headline whenever a US company sets up or expands on RTE or the Irish Times, or if they’re really lucky, an international newspaper. It’s an appallingly low bar that we set for ourselves, when the country has so much more potential.
It’s a really strange, almost fatalistic way to run a country, maybe a form of learned helplessness that makes up part of our national post-colonial psyche. We have a very ambivalent attitude towards sovereignity and we behave as if we don’t deserve or have the ability to control our own destiny. We just have to play nice with those the government sees as our betters. Psychologists use a term known as “locus of control” to describe the extent to which someone believes they are in control of their lives as opposed to the influence external forces. As a nation, we behave as if our locus of control lies in Silicon Valley, France and Germany, not Ireland.
The starkest example of this is the way Irish politicians don’t seem to have faith in our abilities or our nation’s future, and as a result, they resort to short-termist, parochial politics and electoral bribery that they hope gets them reelected. Irish politicians constantly have one eye on the next election, and once elected, are very difficult to hold to account. This is anathema to proper governance, as it has and continues to lead to the neglect of education, defense, healthcare, housing and infrastructure so that we have a fair and egalitarian society, backed up by a robust, self-sustaining economy based on innovation and productivity.
Instead, we have a brittle, unproductive economy which puts all of its eggs in very few baskets and is subject to volatile and unpredictable forces like the whims of American boardrooms, something that is coming home to roost at the moment with the mass layoffs happening across the tech sector. Policy decisions are framed in terms of five-year electoral cycles, rather than longer term, more joined up thinking. Just take the Dublin Metro, public service reform or Slaintecare as examples of how much kicking the can down the road goes on.
This leaves us in a situation where our health service is perpetually in crisis. We have a calamitous yet completely avoidable housing crisis that successive governments have failed to address. We have an almost completely invisible police force unfit for purpose, who don’t answer emergency calls and circulate extremely humiliating videos of distressed and mentally unwell citizens with impunity. We have extremely weak regulatory oversight in many sectors due to corrupt, inept and/or toothless regulatory bodies leading to endless scandals such as An Bord Pleanala, unenforced rent-pressure zones, unenforced short-term letting regulations, houses and apartments crumbling from shoddy construction, and women needlessly dying from Cervical Cancer while nobody is held accountable. We mustn’t forget the economic and societal devastation caused by profligate and dysfunctional banks who gambled away all the family silver on property speculation and made everyday working Irish people pick up the tab, all under the nose of the Central Bank.
Basic public amenities like safe water treatment, broadband internet and reliable public transport are out of reach of huge swathes of the population, and we are an island on the edge of Europe unable to defend ourselves by land, sea or air, hoping that our geographic obscurity or our neighbours will help us in our hour of need. What’s worse is that nobody is ever, EVER held to account for these failings because ah sure they meant well and I play golf with his Dad. Go figure.
There is an ideological aspect to this too. The incumbent government, particularly Fine Gael, place unearned faith in and over-reliance on markets to deliver basic pillars of the social contract such as housing, healthcare or transportation. Successive Irish governments over the last two decades have eroded and diluted their participation in each of these areas, telling us that the State itself is the barrier to adequately providing these services.
Consequently, ordinary people are thrown to the wolves, hoping markets will fill the void. Because Fine Gael draw their electoral base from the wealthiest, most well-connected and well-represented groups in Irish society, nothing gets fixed, as they’re the ones with the best Laya policies, pensions and expensive cars, so they aren’t affected by the same sorts of problems. In other words, the less well off are shunted into second rate public services because they are electorally unimportant in the government’s eyes. It’s almost as if the government believe the poor deserve to be poor and shouldn’t be helped by the wealthy (who deserve to be wealthy). It’s Thatcherism, Irish style.
Cultural and societal attitudes shoulder a big part of the blame. We portray ourselves as the nation of a hundred thousand welcomes, but behind the façade is a type of hyper-individualistic, kill-or-be-killed indifference towards those less fortunate than ourselves in Ireland that influences government policy, and affirms that you deserve the circumstances you find yourself in, despite the fact that a huge amount of wealth in Ireland is generational, not earned, and is obtained through speculation rather than production. Meanwhile, something as simple as bad luck can alter your circumstances. I think we’re a lot meaner than we like to think and we have a tendency toward being a nation of "I’m alright Jacks" with no real concept of the common good or civic responsibility like that seen in Scandinavia or other former British colonies like Canada or New Zealand. Why else can the Government survive scandal after scandal, while failing to deliver the most basic services and amenities expected of a developed country?
Another uncomfortable truth is that we are a nation of opportunists who are at best ambivalent towards rules, regulations and the law, and in fact, many in Ireland treat these as obstacles or nuisances to be overcome or sidestepped - why else do we shamelessly gouge our own citizens and tourists when it comes to rent or hotels? Why is nobody ever held accountable when people in high places get away with corruption and cronyism? We call it "cute hoorism", while in Brazil they call it "Jeitinho" and in other parts of South America they call it "Viveza Criolla." Any problems that don’t affect us or are visible to us personally don’t matter and therefore don’t need solving.
The government gaslights us into believing our dependence on multinationals is a good thing as they say it's evidence of our uniquely talented and cosmopolitan workforce, nestled halfway between Europe and America. The reality is that we are facilitating tax evasion on an unprecedented scale, and in return we get data centres and call centres, along with statistical gimmicks like GDP and corporation tax receipts that allow us to grossly exaggerate the productivity of our economy and paper over the cracks in our country. We also get to boast about the fact that we are a European tech hub, despite the fact that very little innovation happens here.
The harsh reality is that current path we’re on is simply not sustainable. As a nation, we will eventually have to think long and hard about what kind of country we want. Do we want to maintain the present status quo of insiders and outsiders? Do we want existing social inequality and injustice to be further calcified and embedded into our society? Who does Ireland exist to serve - its citizenry, or foreign corporations and REITs? Will we be forever defined by GDP and employment rate?
