Where is all the money going?

Jesus Christ I hope they never see any type of power.

The country would be knackered.

It appears as though you’re just cherry picking examples and blowing them entirely out of proportion to try and support your grander claim that there is enormous amounts of public money being wasted while the Irish economy has not improved significantly in the last decade or two, which is why you’re hearing about how the Irish economy has improved over the last two decades.

Any idiot can point to examples of what are in their opinion a waste of public funds, while ignoring the obvious reality that the picture they’re trying to paint is not the same for everyone, and certainly it is not the same for the vast majority of people in Ireland who happen to own property which is their primary means of generating wealth, as opposed to being reliant on income from employment as an indicator of wealth.

I don’t expect that anyone who owns property is likely to vote for parties which have made it clear that they intend not only to reduce the value of wealth generating assets, but makes promises to increase public spending on social housing at enormous cost to the Exchequer. Homeowners don’t tend to look favourably on those sorts of initiatives. You claimed the current Government housing policy is a disaster, I’m simply pointing out the rationale behind it.

It’s as though you imagine only poor people vote or something, and they should vote Labour and Sinn Fein, ignoring the reality that the current parties in Government don’t just exist to serve poor people’s interests, they’re more interested in keeping the people who vote for them happy.

I suppose it depends on how you define living standards. The OECD chart I posted was the mean household disposable income also including social transfers, which I think gives a fair enough indication of how well off we are as a country. GDP per capita doesn't really work in Ireland due to the presence of multinationals running their profits through the country.

It is not the story we like to tell ourselves but there you are. If you were to stop people on the street and ask them if we have more or less disposable income than Brexit Britain, the overwhelming opinion would be that we have much more. How, after all, can a country that is not even in the EU have more household disposable income per capita than Ireland. But again, there you are. They have more than us.

Also I think most people would imagine that we have significantly more disposable income than Lithuania, Portugal, Spain, Slovenia etc. But we don't.

That is not to say that some people aren't doing very well here in Ireland. Some people are doing very well and fair play to them. But the same is true of these other countries.

At the same we are doing better than many countries just not as well as we like to tell ourselves.

Sorry I haven't had time to read the report in full. I think the difference might be the inclusion of things like housing costs in the disposable income figures that I posted. GNI probably doesn't take that into account.

How, after all, can a country that is not even in the EU have more household disposable income per capita than Ireland. But again, there you are. They have more than us.

Easily enough when they had a massive head start, and Ireland are only recently catching up. Then the UK went and shot themselves in the foot with Brexit, allowing everyone else to catch up!

It must be stressed that there are many different measures of an economy’s growth, and the Irish Central Statistics office has devised a measure called GNI* designed to strip out the effects of the activities of globalised companies in Ireland. Ireland has a GNI per capita, PPP adjusted, of $67k compared to the UK’s $45k or only about 50% higher than the UK. And if you look at disposable family income per capita, depending on the precise measure chosen, the two countries are broadly comparablewith Ireland only recently having caught up with the UK.

The other point to be borne in mind is that Ireland has only recently become a high income country and so the level of accumulated wealth is much lower than the UK. The UK has been a relatively wealthy country for a very long time and that position is only very gradually being eroded. The problem for many in the UK is that the income from wealth is very unequally distributed. Whereas Ireland’s GINI index (measure of inequality) is close to the European average, UK society is significantly more unequal.

https://sluggerotoole.com/2022/12/23/comparing-the-uk-and-irish-economies/#:~:text=Ireland%20has%20a%20GNI%20per,caught%20up%20with%20the%20UK.

I'm afraid, once again, the data on disposable household income does not support that. From the same source if we plot the number against year we get the chart below:

We can see that Ireland suffered during the financial crisis which is understandable but the gap has not significantly narrowed since Brexit. The gap is still greater than it was ten years ago.

Despite Brexit you are still better off in the UK in terms of disposable income than Ireland. I think this is contrary to what most people might like to believe.

I don’t think I am overestimating how concerned a lot of homeowners are with the market value of their property or properties. Their property is their greatest asset, and the means they have of generating wealth which they can pass on to their children, as opposed to your idea of your being ok with the value of your property decreasing if it meant your children would be able to afford property which would also decrease in value over time.

Not only is that not a sound economic investment, but economics isn’t so linear as that - the value of property falling wouldn’t necessarily mean that your children would then be able to afford it, certainly not without having the means to do so. Critical workers who can’t afford to live here aren’t much of an asset to the economy either, and there’s no fear of losing critical workers who can afford to live here, they’re the type of workers who Government are trying to encourage to stay and put down roots so that their children will continue to contribute to the economy.

It’s not any different if one is a landlord, or what some people like to call themselves - “accidental landlords”, after they inherited property which they imagined would make them a mint, only to see their plans hampered by increasing regulations in the private rental sector which is encouraging more of them to want to offload the property on some other sucker, to which Leo’s response is an attempt to suggest landlords ain’t the bad guys -

https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/varadkar-hits-out-at-demonisation-of-landlords-1444245.html

As for the amount of examples you could present to demonstrate wastage of public funds, I’m not disagreeing with you, I’m aware there’s plenty of wastage, and there’s no need to compound that wastage by suggesting that Government should introduce policies which would only increase the numbers of ghost estates around the country, devalue the property market, and still there would be no guarantee your children, or anyone else’s children for that matter, would be able to afford to buy their own home. Your grandchildren however, would be stuck with the bill for that kind of poor policy implementation.

I'm in the UK and it's worse here. Full employment used to mean wages went up. Now we're at or near full employment and we're being told by government not to ask for pay rises. Meanwhile corporate profits are through the roof and their shareholders are getting big pay rises through dividends.

In other words, the money is getting sucked up to the already wealthy. They get a pay rise while sitting on their arze and letting their wealth work for them, but those of us who actually work are less well off. Passive income from shares is taxed lower than income from labour. Like, WTF?

That's why you don't rely on anecdotal evidence but rather some sort of statistic such as household disposable income as I have tried to provide.

...so workers in lowered paid jobs are less productive?

...talk to folks on the dole in the uk, and you ll find, its a very depressing existence, this in turn forces some into criminality, in order to survive....

..the true causations of unemployment, particularly long term unemployment, are in fact highly complex, you ll find many, if not most struggling with all sorts of highly complex psychological disorders, from autism, mood disorders such as bi-polar, personality disorders, learning disabilities, and beyond(pull out the dsm....)

...you ll find many if not most of these individuals have severely struggled within our educational and training systems, particularly at the early stages, i.e. primary and secondary, many leaving prematurely, leaving them with all sorts of long term, complex psychological problems including complex traumas, anxieties and depressive disorders, which of course can include addiction problems and disorders....

...you ll also find other welfare traps include the affordability of child care, or more so, the lack of the ability to afford so, leading to long term welfare dependencies....

...completely agree about the distortions of the existence of the multi nationals here, but its extremely important to add the growing, non productive activities of these businesses and institutions, ie. financialised actives such as share buy backs etc etc

...these issues truly are highly complex in nature, to the point, we dont actually really understand them in full, and may never....

The money is being sucked out of the economy by BTR (Build-To-Rent) institutional investment companies. Billions paid by workers in the Irish economy to pay insane rents inflated by aforesaid investment companies goes direct to Florida to fund the pensions of the US elderly.

And it's all sponsored and tax enabled by the FF/FG state (and much of it fronted by ex-NAMA to make it looks Irish).