Ireland’s population is told it has never been richer, yet it has never felt poorer |
Every country that has become extraordinarily wealthy through external extraction has had to answer the same question: what is the windfall for?
Norway, when handed North Sea oil, ring-fenced the revenue in a sovereign wealth fund and used Statoil to build a domestic supplier industry that will outlast its oil reserves; Singapore channelled its tax advantages into directed industrial investment; and South Korea converted US aid and export concessions into Hyundai and Samsung, its national champions.
What these countries share is the simple recognition that external revenue is nothing more than a tool; the raw material to develop its local economy, not the achievement itself.
Ireland has failed to answer this question of what to use its wealth for, as it seems we did not know the question existed. For over a decade, as the corporate tax take rose relentlessly to reach €35 billion – not far off half of it accounted for by three big US companies – the country has behaved as though this bounty was a durable feature of the economy rather than short-term luck.
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The Irish surplus is the largest in the EU per capita, yet our infrastructure index is below Poland’s. Meaning that while corporation tax has quintupled in a decade, our rail network has halved in a century. The State takes in €126 billion a year and cannot create a civil protection agency, a gas storage facility or a train to Donegal.
Leo Varadkar’s recent comments on rural Ireland express this catastrophic failure with unusual clarity. Speaking about farmers and hauliers, the former taoiseach complained that “people in rural Ireland are very quick to tell people in urban Ireland that ‘we are the real workers, we’re the ones paying the bills, we’re the ones feeding the country’”. The subtext, which is the implicit position of Fine Gael for 20 years, is that Ireland’s future lies in deepening its relationship with multinational capital, and that the indigenous economy is a legacy cost the urban taxpayer can no longer afford.
In the narrowest fiscal framing he has a point – on paper, a single Apple subsidiary in Cork books more profit than the entire Irish agricultural sector produces in output. But while his comments feel measured, it is easily mistaken for a strategy. However, this is not a strategy; it is the absence of one.
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Instead, our political elite looks at the billions from Cupertino and elsewhere and sees a press release, because the tax revenue has become our whole story: that Ireland is now a wealthy country and a serious country, because it is a country the Americans have chosen. What is supposed to happen next – actually building the country the money was supposed to finance – strangely never appears in this story. And this is because it does not appear in the governing mind at all.
What is more unsettling is that none of this registers with the people who claim to run the country.
When the architecture gap between Ireland and our European peers was made visible recently online in a graph I posted on X and subsequently expanded on in a Substack post, the former taoiseach offered a defiant rebuttal: that Ireland had the seventh-highest life expectancy in Europe, ranked first for third-level attainment, and had wages that compensated for higher prices. These were true, but they were arguments about outcomes that occur in spite of the institutional machinery Ireland lacks, rather than because of it.
The enshittification of Ireland and the hollowing out of our institutions is the single largest threat to Irish civil society and prosperity. In this damning piece, I'm going into more detail about the graph I posted yesterday: why it's happening in Ireland, why the way we're… pic.twitter.com/f7EoIVj6f0— Sinéad O’Sullivan (@SineadOS1) April 13, 2026
The enshittification of Ireland and the hollowing out of our institutions is the single largest threat to Irish civil society and prosperity. In this damning piece, I'm going into more detail about the graph I posted yesterday: why it's happening in Ireland, why the way we're… pic.twitter.com/f7EoIVj6f0
Third-level attainment is the work of a generation of Irish parents who understood that a degree was the minimum ticket for the emigration the State would eventually require of their children, to Australia and beyond. The 35,000 graduates who left last year because they could not afford to live here are not evidence of the system working. They are proof of the opposite. (When I pointed this out to Varadkar, his response was: “You’d fail my class.” A former head of Government, faced with data indicating that the State he ran for seven years had not built the institutional architecture of a functioning country, did not dispute the data. He merely objected to the tone; the usual reflex of a political class not used to having something asked of it.)
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However, the deeper failure is one of binary thinking. Every question the Irish State touches gets framed as a false choice between multinationals or farmers; of Ireland’s heritage past or its future. But this is simply wrong. Supporting indigenous food production does not require taxing Pfizer out of Cork. And just because the value of a local economy tied to a country’s culture, landscape and history cannot be captured on a single line of a balance sheet, it does not mean it is not there.
Yet in Leinster House the question always contains an “or” where it should contain an “and”, because the political class has no institutional vocabulary for holding two objectives at once. Ireland creates policy with a blunt instrument while our peers govern with chisels.
Ironically, Varadkar’s position highlights this well. Grass-fed beef and dairy produced in a temperate Atlantic climate and on land that has supported pastoral farming for 4,000 years is the textbook case of comparative advantage. The structural edge that countries spend fortunes and decades trying to manufacture is what Ireland possesses for free. And the orthodox economic advice is to protect it, invest in it, and build around it relentlessly.
Instead, the former taoiseach sees the sector in which Ireland has a genuine global advantage as little more than a distraction from the tax jurisdiction any country can replicate with a signature on a piece of paper. This is not just strategically unwise, it is economically illiterate, as it inverts the most basic principle of how to compete globally.
Ireland has more money than it has ever had, which is sadly the problem, not the solution. Before members of the political class lecture the country on economics, they might consult the textbook – specifically the well-known chapter on how small states handed unearned windfalls squandered every one of them. Ireland has not built a society, it has built a tax jurisdiction. And until there is a broader understanding of the difference, every crisis will look like the last one: a State with money but no policy tools, tax revenue but no resilience, and a population told it has never been richer while it has never felt poorer.
Sinéad O’Sullivan is a business economist, formerly at Harvard Business School where she served as the head of strategy of the HBS Institute for Strategy