The expansion of the State is no longer a lefty position in Irish politics. It is pretty much everybody’s position
A half-built nation: Can any of our parties meet the demands of independent Ireland’s second century?
Again, as with the Brexit crisis, Ireland felt like a country that could manage its own destiny. There is much to criticise in the State’s handling of the pandemic . But Irish people could look west topresident suggesting that people could inject themselves with bleach or the flagrant corruption of the Tories’ “fast track” on which lucrative contracts for the supply of personal protective equipment were handed out to cronies and party donors.
The recovery from that crash was, in some respects, spectacular. In February 2020, the month of the last general election, Ireland exported €11.6 billion worth of goods. In February 2024, that figure was €17.6 billion. These statistics rise and fall, but the broad trend is clear enough: Ireland, as an economic entity, is booming. This export economy rains showers of largesse on to the State – foreign multinationals paid almost €20 billion in corporation tax in 2023 alone.
But also, who could have imagined a century ago that with all these resources available to a native government, child poverty andquip about being able to resist everything except temptation comes to mind – the State seems to have been able to imagine everything except success.
The most obvious symptom of this disjunction is the extraordinary 35 per cent rise in average house prices over the Government’s lifetime. That in turn is symptomatic of a disastrous failure of planning, compounded by an assumption that market forces would naturally match supply to demand. This is an astonishing decline in itself but it is even more so when you consider that, over the same period, the other middle-class marker, third-level education, has gone in the opposite direction. Two things that used to go together – the degree and the mortgage – are now wrenched apart: more and more graduates, fewer and fewer young homeowners.
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