This is the first in a three-part series that looks at how the economy and society are changing in Europe, specifically in Ireland. This part focuses on what Ireland needs to do today to address its most devastating disaster of the century. Part two will focus on the crises that Ireland needs to solve for tomorrow. Part three will look at how our individual lives will need to change in response to a drastic reordering of society. 

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Lately, I have been filled with anxiety and dread. Regardless of where I go or what I do, I can’t seem to shake it; it just follows me around like a black dog.

This anxiety seems to get worse anytime I leave the house and interact with “the real world”, which thankfully has been at a minimum recently because I’ve been purposefully holed up working on a new project. But, nonetheless, when I do leave my desk, there it is. Dread.

Last week I went to a cafe to grab a quick breakfast with a couple of friends, and I had to, once again, confront The Dread. As I watched the only waitress in the cafe, a teenager who had precisely zero interest in making coffee, painstakingly attempt to make four coffees over the space of twenty-five minutes, I finally came to understand The Dread I was feeling.

The world that we’re living in, this one of globalization that I’ve grown up in and always known, has completely and irreversibly changed. And I feel really, really sad and even sometimes angry about it.

But more than sadness, it’s really confusing and so it feels really hard to break down the overwhelming and conflated reasons as to why, every time I leave my house, I feel existential terror. It’s everything. It’s nothing. It’s all connected. It’s too late. Why is nobody doing something? Anything?

There’s a fantastic movie called ‘The Midnight Express’, about an American man called Billy who is jailed in a Turkish prison for smuggling hashish. The story follows his eventual life sentence in prison. First, he is sent to the prison for criminals to see out his four year sentence. Then his sentence is mysteriously extended by thirty years. The more Billy tries to seek justice, the more he is deemed psychologically unstable. Eventually, he is sent to a prison for the criminally insane where he, like many others, becomes insane and is left to eventually die.

There’s a very powerful scene where Billy is walking around in circles with his asylum inmates. It’s what they are forced to do, all day, every day, to condition their psyche. Circle after circle, until death. Except one day, Billy realizes: I accept my fate, or I try one last time to change it. To break the asylum hypnosis, he starts walking in the opposite direction around the circle. 

He is adamant that he will not be brainwashed into accepting the same fate as the others. 

Chaos ensues as the other inmates become terrified of the behavioral change and cannot come to terms with being confronted with having to make that same decision: keep walking in the same direction forever, or change? One or two follow suit before realizing it’s a losing game, and return to their circle walking. Another begs him to change course, and to revert back to “normal”, but Billy won’t. He has realized that he can’t

Well, there’s a reason I feel like Billy every time I leave my house. While I wouldn’t necessarily describe my experience at the moment of asylum-like (although honestly, on a Friday night in my local pub I do have to wonder….), I certainly feel like I’m living through levels of gaslighting by the Irish government and people around me that I would never have thought possible in an advanced, European democracy.

Please Stop Gaslighting Me

Every time I leave my house, I realize that the world has changed in fundamental and seismic ways that are having, and will have, catastrophic future impacts on society. Yet when I look around, nobody seems to be doing anything about it. 

In fact, this changing world is never even talked about in the mainstream press at all. The political apparatus in Ireland continue to walk aimlessly in circles in their asylum.

Another great movie comes to mind, “Don’t Worry, Darling”. I never had a teenage crush on Harry Styles, but my god, he’s really come into his own as an adult. I highly suggest watching this (and thinking about Ireland as you do). 

If it wasn’t my own future on the line, I would probably laugh about the fact that I feel like I’m living on Craggy Island meets Midnight Express right now. 

The problem, in short, is that Ireland has no long-term vision for the type of country, society or economy we want to be. We still seem to be following TK Whitaker’s economic plan for the country which, while brilliant, was written before economic globalization came and went. They may call Whitaker a “public servant for all seasons”, but his vision cannot be a “public vision for all centuries”. Somebody, at some stage, is going to have to figure out what direction we want our country to move in. Or how we want to prioritize our society. Or if we even want any sort of a society at all.

It’s time for the government to stop gaslighting the Irish people and start doing the most fundamentally important part of its job: providing leadership. The political apparatus has been handed the most influential and important role that could be bestowed upon any member of Irish society during a period that will be one of Ireland’s most pivotal. 

Since the government fails to even acknowledge that the world is fundamentally changing around us, I’m going to help them out. 

In this article, I’m going to outline the three most urgent things that need to be done about today. Not tomorrow. Not during a debate with Mary-Lou. Today. Right now. This morning.

In my next column, I’m going to outline five things that need to be started immediately working on for the medium-term future. The stuff that’s going to cause tomorrow’s crises which might still be preventable if they’re addressed properly today.

Then in my final piece in this series, I’m going to do the really hard thing that politicians can’t: tell you how your future does not look brighter than your past. I’m going to explain what this radically changing world means for all of us; how different our lives are going to become, and what will be expected of us moving forward if we are to maintain any semblance of a society at all. 

Things that need to be done today

Ok so if I were the Taoiseach, I’d realise that Ireland is in a crisis of the most epic proportions. And so I would act accordingly. I would then create three Task Forces and begin my day, every single day, by understanding what these Task Forces need me to do to clear any and all obstacles in their way. Because during a crisis, acting with a sense of urgency is not only what people like to see but actually…. helps?

Task Force One: Housing

The housing crisis is the most devastating humanitarian and economic disaster of this century. So, my response would probably be to act like it was. Even if, let’s say, most of the people benefitting from the problem are currently in charge of resolving it. It probably seems like the right thing to do to at least publicly acknowledge it exists, let alone try to fix it. Call me crazy. 

Just as there was a Covid task force, there needs to be a similar set of urgent activities that pertain to fixing housing, in the immediate term and in the longer-term. 

People often say that “housing is just sooo complex”. It’s not. It’s only complex because we allow it to be; because we allow one group in society to take precedence over another. And yes, such a group happens to hold the highest number of votes.

In the United States, gun control is also sooooo complex. Well, according to some people. If you asked those who don’t have guns, or those whose family or children have been shot dead, they would probably say something like “Umm no, this is an easy solution – just ban them or control them. Not. That. Hard.”

Well, in Ireland, we’re not doing that. Instead, we’re doing the equivalent of asking Fox News to regulate our guns. And so, we keep wondering, year after year, why we still have a gun problem. #PoorLandlordsOfIreland.

Create a Task Force. Try to get one of the very few people in Ireland who don’t hoard houses as a hobby to sit on such a committee. Remove every single roadblock in their way, whether it’s deemed unconstitutional or not. Because Covid has shown us that we can do this, we need to use this superpower again.

Build houses. Ireland is full of builders. We built America. We built London. We built the Middle East. This is the one thing we can actually do really well. And actually, like controlling the guns in the United States, once you remove economic self-interest from the equation, this is not an “impossible” task. It’s a really bloody easy one. Just do it. Those who don’t like it, can be the ones who are forced to emigrate to Australia instead. 

Then we need to have the current Chairperson of An Bord Planeala, Oonagh Buckley, and her predecessor Dave Walsh, go through the equivalent of a Senate Hearing. Except one with consequences. Accountability. Why is there absolutely nothing coming out of that place? Honestly, has anybody even checked that the institution even still exists? What do they do all day every day? How has this Board not been fully staffed during the most critical conjecture of its existence? Oh, you can’t get anybody to sit on the Board? Oh, people are tiiiiired. I see. Indeed it must be exhausting looking for your friends’ names in a long line of permits to approve. Honestly, not even South Park could write this. 

More than that, this task force should want the authority to submit PWC-style timesheets of how it spends her days, weeks and months. Because if it is not willing to work 24/7 over the next 12 months to get the thousands of homeless children in Ireland back into long-term accommodation, we can get other people to do the tole.

The system is rotten from the core, and anything other than honestly admitting this is going to leave us in our current stalemate. 

There needs to be an update, every single day, from the Chairperson of this task force, to the public, some of whom are dying in need. “Here is what I did today to make sure that something, anything, is done to help you”. I really don’t want to watch another Leo vs. Mary-Lou sketch on Primetime. I want a five-minute daily update about what specific thing was done today, by anybody, to fix this mess. It was necessary during Covid, and it’s necessary now. I want numbers. I want charts. I want emergency legislation. I want modeling. I want progress.

Why this isn’t currently being done is so beyond my comprehension of what it means to be a leader in a state of emergency. But nonetheless, here we are.

Task Force Two: Demographics

People hardly ever think about this, but this is a crisis that started a decade ago that is in full motion right now, and it needs urgent leadership today to prevent its catastrophic consequences tomorrow. 

Ireland’s population is aging faster than anywhere else in Europe as births fall.

Ok, so what does this actually mean? Let me take you back to my “leaving-the-house-existential-dread” at the cafe a couple of weeks ago. Firstly, I walked into the place. For five minutes I stood around waiting for someone to take my order or to let me know where to sit. When that finally happened, I was told that the kitchen was understaffed, so cooked food wasn’t possible. Ugh. Ok. I’ll settle for coffee and pastries.

Fifteen minutes later, the waitress came back for our order; a group of four of us had three lattes, a tea, and four scones.

The waitress was probably 17 years old. I’m not sure who was in the kitchen, but she was totally alone out front. She had absolutely no idea what to do. It was painful to watch. I kind of wanted to help her. She laid out three cups, and then on her way to get three spoons (located on the other side of the cafe), she got distracted by someone asking for water. On her way to get water, she remembered the spoons. But then she had to deliver food from the kitchen to another table. My table of process engineers nearly died as we watched her half-complete about 18 different tasks in the space of nearly half an hour, completing none, and forgetting about the pastries that I could have just lifted from behind the counter myself. 

This shows two problems:

  • A lack of staff. Yup, there just aren’t enough people to do stuff anymore.
  • A lack of older staff. Even if you do manage to get younger people, there’s nobody to train them anymore.

A week later, I was in a super fancy restaurant in Dublin with someone who ordered a pretty regular cocktail. The barmaid made a funny face and came back more than ten minutes later with something that was… quite strange. Definitely not the cocktail that was ordered. “I’m so sorry- I’m new and I don’t know how to do this”. Sure, no problem. Fifteen minutes later she found the manager who was understaffed and overstressed to help her.

The manager told me about his complete nightmare trying to find staff for the high-scale venue. And by the time the staff were trained, they would leave again. Running a restaurant and bar, he felt, was now an impossibly complex job.

I had a similarly bad experience in a restaurant just before Christmas, which had half of its menu crossed out. A fine dining restaurant had been reduced to pub grub or anything that was microwaveable. I went for the burger which arrived with a cremated burger bun. I mean, when you’re paying $35 for a burger in an exclusive venue and the kitchen staff can’t time the toaster properly, you know you’re in trouble. When the “fixed” burger came back fifteen minutes later, the fries were cold.

The manager, who was just out of school, apologized and said they didn’t have a proper chef on staff at the moment. 

What a lot of people might be experiencing as “bad service” is actually a demographics crisis. We don’t have enough people today to do the jobs that are needed to be done today. Ok, this is a huge problem. But then think about what happens in ten years’ time when we have way less people to do the jobs that need to be done! 

Today’s service is as good as it’s going to get. This is the new gold standard.

What this means for consumers is that 1) prices are going to rise, because you gotta pay people more to convince them to work; and 2) you’re going to get worse services for higher prices and everybody is going to feel as depressed as I do every time they try to go to a restaurant or bar.

And it’s not just food and boozing that are going to become tricky. Dentists! Doctors! Bus drivers! The United States has a pilot shortage that has reduced the transport sector to crisis mode. It’s coming for Europe too, except in much bigger proportions.

There needs to be an urgent task force that deals with this crisis and the many, many ways in which this is going to change every facet of our lives (which I’ll discuss in Part Two).

This includes having a committee of people who can quickly create and assess new ways to:

  1. Convince Irish people, especially young ones that might have families in the future, to stay in Ireland, and
  2. Increase the Irish population through immigration.

Housing; transport; connectivity; new visa programmes, remote-first worker schemes to bring humans into our villages; global investment in business relocation to Ireland; foreign workers; service sector training visas; anything that will retain and bring human bodies onto the island of Ireland that can mitigate what will be the most definitive societal disruption for advanced economies since World War II.

Oh, and where exactly will all these people live? See: “Task Force One: Housing”. 

Task Force Three: Energy

I mean, come on. We live on an island with Europe’s best access to wind, waves, and sustainable power and it’s like we’ve just collectively decided “Fuck it! Let’s not do that!”

And while we’re on the topic, why is Ireland the only country in the EU to have not decreased its energy usage in the last 12 months? Is it because, just maybe, we keep talking about how “green” we’re going to become while the government subsidizes our energy bills?

The financial capital markets have been, without a shadow of a doubt, the greatest innovation to have ever been created within Western democracies. Its impact has been huge, and the most important driver of innovation and progress that the world has ever seen. Yet, the Irish government has for reasons totally unknown to me, decided to ignore the intricacies of the supply-demand-led pricing system that financial markets creates to say “oh, yeah, fossil fuel is expensive which is a great way for us to help you to think about not using it anymore; instead, however, we want to artificially bring down the price of that energy using one-off payments that are not linked to any strategic, long-term thinking, so that you will keep voting for us”.

Ooops, maybe I just said the quiet part out loud there.

We need an energy task force ASAP. One that is capable of being tasked with creating a short, medium, and long-term strategy that can ambitiously turn Ireland into the world’s leading generator and user of sustainable energy. Which, by the way, is totally possible from a technical and economic perspective; and right now totally impossible from a political will and ambition perspective.

This is not rocket science. I don’t need to explain why we need this; we are all intellectually aligned on that matter. 

But in our current leadership vacuum, somebody does need to be tasked with thinking about: how do we actually achieve that, and what legislation, multinational partnerships and economic measures need to be underwritten to force this progress through in a matter of months and years, and not decades?

Here’s My Suggestion

Every single morning, the Taoiseach needs to wake up and spend one hour speaking to the Chair of Task Force One, Two, and Three. I suspect this is what usually happens during a crisis. During the recent retail bank crisis in the United States, Biden woke up with Warren Buffett and other experts on speed dial. I have no idea what our Prime Minister does when he wakes up, but he does not appear to be asking himself “What can I do today to ameliorate the most devastating crisis this country has seen in generations?”. 

Instead, it should be speaking to the Task Force Chairpersons and asking:

“What can I do for you?”

“What do you need from me to get this done?”

“Can we move faster than that?”

“How do we manage that trade-off?”

“Who else do we need to bring on board?”

This is leadership. This is taking a step, albeit a very small step, to help to create a vision that Ireland sorely lacks. This type of vision, by the way, used to exist in Ireland. Watching a lot of the commentary around the Good Friday Agreement, it struck me how selfless some of the politicians were in the 1990’s. They made decisions that were personally and professionally hard, or even impossible. They risked their families, friends, constituents, and the world that was watching, turning their backs on them. Stakes had never been higher, yet many of them acted with courage and conviction because they believed, their personal circumstances aside, they were doing the right thing.