This is the second in a three-part series that looks at how European, and more specifically Irish, society and the economy is changing. The first part focused on what Ireland needs to do today to address its most devastating disaster of the century. This part 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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In my last column, I told you about the existential anxiety I feel anytime I leave my house right now and the gaslighting I feel by the Irish government which refuses to acknowledge that anything about our world has changed. I also outlined three task forces that need to be established immediately to Get Shit Done™:

Well, this week you’ll be delighted to know that I’m going to move from “existential anxiety” down a level to describe the “what the fu*k”ery that is happening in Ireland (and also more broadly around the world) that also seems like isn’t being addressed, or even mentioned, at all.

If the timeline for needing to resolve my existential crisis issues were immediate: today, yesterday, the day before; the timeline for my what-the-fu*k”ery crises issues are ten to twenty-year timelines. But don’t wait until ten years to think about it. Because by then it’ll be too late. I mean do something about it today, such that in ten to 20 years I’m not writing another, much longer, existential crisis column. 

Again, this speaks volumes to the fact that there is no vision for Ireland; no Ireland 2.0 that we can look to and say- ah, the blueprint tells us that, as a society, we want to optimize X instead of Y, or that we have guiding principles that can help us to navigate thorny social or economic issues. Nope. None.

In light of a vision and leadership vacuum, here is the list of things that the government and policymakers should be extremely concerned about and probably working towards resolving, at least in some capacity.

One: Healthcare

Somebody who owns private medical clinics recently told me that “Ireland’s health system was designed to optimize outcomes for the people providing services (doctors), not the people receiving services (patients)” and it resonated with me. While I (or at least somebody better informed than me) could write an entire book about healthcare systems and their failures, here are a few things to consider over the next twenty years. 

1. Not enough people

We have a lack of people to work in the healthcare system. This goes back to my Task Force Two (demographics) – whether by hook or by crook, the people that work in the healthcare system are figuring out escape plans to get away from Ireland and never have to look back at their long, underpaid work hours. Well, no more! We must find ways to trap these doctors and nurses. To lock them inside the hospitals. To force them to fix us, as and when we need it! Why should they be allowed to leave for the sunnier shores of Australia? 

No, but seriously? The cost of training an Irish medical student through a university program alone (and not post-degree training) is nearly $300,000. Of which an Irish student will pay $15,000. Last year, Australia took in in the region of 400 Irish doctors. Which is the equivalent of the Irish government subsidising Australian healthcare training by around $114 million. In. One. Year. And next year, it’ll be the same. A sum that does not include the additional and high cost of post-university training.

Ok, so we can’t shackle our healthcare workers to their hospitals, but there needs to be a plan to mitigate a) the number of medical staff leaving Ireland every year (see Task Force One: Housing), and b) the economic cost of educating doctors who never work a single day in the system that paid for such training.

Controversial? Yes. Necessary? Also, yes. Is it possible to do this in a way that improves both patient and healthcare worker lives and outcomes? I believe so. But- that requires some strategic thinking and creativity. So, maybe not… 

2. Too many people

Our healthcare system is falling between two numbers: one is of too few people (the staff), the other is of too many people (the patients). That’s right – we’re getting old. I include myself in that statement – another turn around the sun and my general grumpiness has skyrocketed. I’m now writing columns about how grumpy I am. In fact, when I’m not writing this column, I’m sitting in my reading chair throwing stones out the window at cats. 

Anyway, the indigenous Irish population (by which I mean our population excluding recent arrivals from other countries) is aging faster than any other European country. It’s like the Catholic Church finally caved and gave us contraception and female rights and we’ve really gone to town with it. I am part of this problem: I am childless in my mid-thirties, a crime for which I would probably have been stoned myself a generation or two ago.

So many people are aging so quickly, and all of these people are going to end up in hospital at the same time, being looked after by… Who? The ten young people who couldn’t afford the flight to Australia? 

3. No money

We need to massively, massively, massively invest in our healthcare system to turn it into a “prevention is better than cure” system. Proactive, not reactive. Ok, and I’m talking out of my ass here a little because I don’t actually know too much about how the Irish healthcare system is ideologically planned, but from what I am hearing, the whole system is broken.

But hang on a second: we need to 10x the investment into our system to prevent it from collapsing (and indeed in December it sounded like it had already collapsed). However, I’m also reading the tea leaves and seeing that future budgets, predicated on tax income, are going to be way, way, way lower in the future because there are no people to pay taxes!

So, our healthcare system needs 10x investment, and will probably get -2x. I feel like somebody, somewhere, should be talking about this before the whole system has collapsed, perhaps?

Two: Transport

So Ireland isn’t exactly known for its “best in class” transport. I’m no city planner but every road that is now being turned into Bollard Boulevard for dodgy bike lanes seems to be making matters worse, not better. In any instance, transport and specifically public transportation is the number one thing that makes or breaks a city’s economic development. I’ve spent far too many years in grad school and beyond living with urban planners, transport department executives, and Chief Bicycle Officers to think that Ireland has its shit together.

Ok so think about what happens when, in twenty years’ time, everybody is too old to drive. What happens to these millions of old people who want or need to get from A to B but can’t drive anymore? We are about to face a transport crunch; our transport system is in no way suitable for the population demographics change which will see most people in Ireland being unable to go from A to B with their own car. What will they do? At the moment, my friend who lives in Dublin has to visit his great-aunt once a week to do her shopping and do some jobs around the house. He is her part-time carer. She lives alone and has no children- a path that a sizeable portion of the population will take themselves. It takes 45 mins to get to her house each way because, you know, Dublin traffic.

Luckily my friend also doesn’t have kids or a family. But in the future, each of us will have at least one, two, or maybe even three of these types of people in our lives: an aging family with no car, no transport, and nobody else to help them because in Australia the sun shines so brightly… 

Three: Education

At the moment, I don’t own my own house. I get that this is literally the pinnacle of anything and everything Irish: to own property. But I just don’t, and I don’t care, and I think the obsession with it is dated and dumb. I like renting (just not in Ireland). I like being able to move quickly and easily. I like investing in other things. I am decidedly un-Irish in nearly every economically ideological way.

But here’s the thing. A lot of my friends who are Irish or British, who pretend not to look down on this, will accidentally say things from time to time like “oh but you don’t have a long-term mortgage, you wouldn’t understand” or something to that effect. It’s from the similar, but less emotional, playbook which also includes the “oh, you don’t have children, you wouldn’t understand” argument. Eyeroll.

Umm, no. I don’t have a 30-year tracker mortgage. But what I do have instead are two degrees from US universities. Every now and again I have to remind my friends that while they have fancy houses or new kitchens or some new house thing that I honestly don’t care about, I have US student loans which are, most of the time, more than their mortgages. Nope, I didn’t invest in a red brick in Rathmines, but I do have the equivalent in degrees which I’m hoping will have a much more sizable RoI.

When I am forced to bring this up, people are mostly confused. Why would you spend so much on education! Why would you not just do the same degree somewhere cheaper! What a waste of money! Don’t you regret it?! To which I respond: why did you choose Rathgar over Dundalk? Now leave me alone.

But here’s the thing. If I had a child today, I am pretty sure that child, if educated in an Irish university, would also have a mortgage-sized college loan by the time they were 21.

In a few years, I won’t be the only person choosing between a mortgage and a degree. It’ll be a huge number of people.

Don’t believe me? First, look at the upwards trend of university fees. Secondly, look at the downward trends of a taxable population to pay for such fees. Whether we like it or not, the US education financing system is where Ireland and European universities are heading. This is true for any system which has a diminishing tax base and institutions which are increasing in price. 

In fact, I’m going to leave you with this nugget as you shrug your shoulders and say, “no, we’d never accept that here”. One of my good friends was the original student loan Bond Kings, and one of the largest owners of student debt in the US. He also happens to strongly dislike Ireland, the reasoning for which pertains to a set of unfortunate circumstances on a vacation several decades ago. Why, then, has this friend been to Ireland three times in the last two years? And trust me, it’s not for a vacation. 

Student loans are coming. And absolutely nobody is prepared for what the disruption of social and professional hierarchies is going to do for our political or economic elite. 

Four: Farming

Ok so I actually wrote a while back about how the nature of farming and more specifically investing in agriculture is going to change, which can be roughly summed up as:

1. Farming needs to become more efficient to mitigate climate and other environmental impacts
2. Farming needs to be more professionally managed as its inputs and costs are rising if we don’t want food to become a super luxury good
3. There aren’t enough and there is a lack of desire of the younger generation to take over family farms, and so we’re about to hit (yet another) demographics crisis in agriculture as farms will be largely unwanted

The response to this article was very Irish, in the sense that writing about “investment fund” and “Irish land” in the same sentence provoked exactly the response I suspected it would: Never! Not in Ireland!

Anyway, fast forward a year and we’re seeing the farming community is, shockingly, in crisis. There are no young farmers to take over family farms. The economics of farming no longer make sense. Wow- who could ever have predicted!

Regardless of the failings of how we’ve arrived here, nonetheless, here we are. Ireland’s indigenous economy relies massively on agriculture, and while multinationals manage to prop up Ireland’s balance sheets in unpredictable ways, we have long neglected to create a) new, local industries that can take over the burden of MNCs to create a tax income, and b) maintain our current industries to existing or, god forbid, increasing profitability and resiliency.

One of Ireland’s largest industries is in crisis, because of all of the reasons listed in Part 1 of this series, and the response cannot be “more of the same” from the 1800s playbook that was created in response to our British neighbor’s attempt to starve us out of Ireland. 

Five: Taxation

Ok, I find this to be perhaps the most boring thing in the world. But I guess most of my readers are probably accountants or tax-adjacent and (hopefully) find it more interesting. It’s also the one thing that needs to be discussed urgently as it relates to nearly every other “what-the-fuck”ery issue I’ve mentioned so far.

In an increasingly old and small population in Ireland, where do we get our tax money from? And please don’t say Facebook or Google. Time and time again we’ve shown that, only for these hail-mary American corporate gifts, we’d be back to the IMF cap in hand, asking for “please sir, may I have some more!”. 

But seriously: our entire infrastructure is going to need to change to accommodate older demographics. And that’s going to cost 10x the amount of money we currently spend on infrastructure (which is shocking and disgracefully low). Where does that money come from? And how, might I add, do we think about allocating some of that money towards younger people who will need it in the future, too?

This is where we are going to see a radical and urgently needed movement from “tax salaries!” to “tax wealth!”. And yes, by wealth, I do mean that sneaky second, third, fourth, or even forty-fourth house that you might own. I mean derelict buildings. I mean (gasp!) land. Farms. Wealth.

Does anybody actually want to do this? Nope, not those who own the wealth and vote accordingly. But- why should young people like me pay higher taxes for services that need to immediately and foremost serve the generation before me? In fact, for the first time ever, the generation ahead of me is a net burden on the tax system. Which means that the total tax they’ve paid over their lifetimes, combined, does not in any way equal the cost of their upkeep. A cost that will fall, inevitably, to my generation. And- here’s the big and – my generation is also the generation that has not been able to build any wealth to tax in the first place!

So, do you see the mess that we’re starting to get ourselves into?

Thank god Ireland is a country teeming to the brim with clever accountants. Because we’re going to need some heavy-duty thinking about how we pay for all of these what-the-fuckeries that are coming our way.

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A few weeks ago I had two back-to-back trips: one to Vienna for a board meeting and another to Bordeaux for Easter. It took me 18 hours to get home from Vienna via London because of a myriad of travel issues: London Heathrow air traffic control was on strike; the aircraft for Leg 1 of the flight was delayed from Germany; there were no aircraft for Leg 2; by the time the aircraft arrived, there were no pilots. Something similar happened in Bordeaux: my 2-hour flight turned into 15 hours of travel disruptions. 

Travel, it seems, is broken. In my last column, I explained why it felt that the service sector, namely food, bars, and restaurants, also felt broken. People are complaining, and rightly so, that their healthcare system is broken. Housing is broken. Our fundamental way of living is… breaking down before our eyes!

And you can feel it. Or at least I can. I can feel it every time I leave the house and try to do stuff. It’s hard. It’s different. It’s expensive. And yet, this is as good as it’s going to get, most likely for the rest of my lifetime, unless we can radically rethink how we organize our economy and our society.

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When I was in Bordeaux, I got caught up in the protest – the French people, it seems, are not very happy about the additional two years they will have to work before retirement. But how can a government possibly afford to give the gift of up to thirty years of leisurely retirement on a lower tax base? People are living longer, and are becoming more expensive to keep.

Regardless of why they were protesting, the French youth were doing something about their grievances – an admirable activity by any means. Here in France, you have a group of young people that are electorally inconsequential. So really, there is absolutely no incentive for politicians to give their issues any credence. However, as I realised: when they start interrupting businesses, public transport, and daily economic life, their problems become electorally important. And something has to get done. I wonder what Ireland would look like today if our many crises, which impact the young, not the old, were to become a shared burden of the degenerating NIMBYs in Ireland?

All of the issues that Ireland faces today are complex and come with no easy solution. What makes it virtually impossible to create long-term solutions for managing them is the lack of vision about what we want Ireland to look like, as a society. The trade-offs involved with solving these concurrent crises are many; yet, as a society, we have no way of prioritizing goals if we have no shared vision for what Ireland in a post-global world looks like. Still, these are all crises that are in full motion already. They have to be dealt with strategically and carefully planned for.