Ireland ranks… usually, unless it relates to economic growth and profit generation, the phrase heralds disappointing or even alarming news.
Most unequal, most polluting, least healthy, worst planned… wherever there’s an international league of just about any metrics that matter, outside of purely economic indices, Ireland, with its famously roaring economy, seems more often than not to be in or close to the relegation zone.
Yes, we have left behind the awful days of mass unemployment and emigration. Yes, we have lots of surveys telling us that we’re the chirpiest people on the planet. But a continuing litany of hard evidence suggests that, outside of having jobs that help us make ends meet, most of us beyond the plutocracy have little to cheer about.
What’s going on? We used to have the excuse that we were an impoverished backwater, a brave people just doing our best with the rotten hand that history dealt us. But now, something, clearly, is not working. For all our brash new wealth and loadsamoney culture, there is a feeling that things are not getting better. Behind the smug, money-talks sound bites of bank economists and business bulletins trumpeting faster growth and ever-bigger profits, Ireland non-Inc. isn’t looking so clever.
This site has a modest and limited aim, and that is to log important indicators beyond the dominant diet of GDP growth, market news, and sanctimonious lectures about competitiveness. The perhaps uncomfortable debate as to whether our disastrous public services and related policies are an effect of that competitiveness and profit agenda, rather than simply coming about in spite of it, is left for others.
A few early posts take the liberty of referring to remembered highlights, in order to set the tone.
