When you look around Ireland and take in the fiasco of the Children’s Hospital, the saga that is the Dublin Metro or the inability to provide affordable homes, and then contrast these with the extraordinary rate of production and productivity stemming from the multinationals operating here, does it strike you that we are looking at two different worlds?

One is an Ireland where nothing can be done on time or within budget, with deleterious results for everyone. The other is an Ireland that deploys the same people and can achieve amazing outcomes, on time, within budget, resulting in more income and more jobs for hundreds of thousands of people.

Results are not only the preserve of multinationals. Take the success of Ryanair, the Irish rugby team, or indeed the prodigious output of Irish literature, theatre and film. In these completely diverse areas, Irish people are playing at the top of their game, innovating, experimenting and executing better than almost anywhere on the planet. In other areas, we can’t even get the basics right.

What is the difference between these various Irish ecosystems, one that works exceptionally well across a wide spectrum of challenges and one that fails lamentably? One ecosystem believes in the future and drives itself on; the other appears resigned to disappoint, fabricating excuses as it misses targets.

We look back to the 1920s and see a period of experimentation with the proliferation of electricity, urbanism, combustion engines, trucks, radios, gramophones and consumer credit. People in the West changed the way they lived and embraced progress, which continued after the second World War, with the arrival of washing machines, electric kettles, dishwashers, family cars, fridges, televisions, three-in-one stereos, microwaves, and 10-storey apartment blocks. Over the first 60 or 70 years of the last century, daily life in........

© The Irish Times