Modern Ireland is not a disaster – St Patrick would be proud of it
Despite all the negative headlines, this is truly a wonderful place to live
Cheer up, it’s not that bad. St Patrick might not see modern Ireland as such a mess after all. Of course, if he came back and just read the newspapers, he’d probably think we’re in an awful mess and all that Christianity spreading and snake-banishing was a waste of time.
We apparently live in a world of perpetual war, famine, violence, poverty and inequality. He’d see Ireland portrayed as a brutal, uncaring and impoverished society blighted by one crisis after another. There are never enough Government resources allocated to anything – ever. Workers go on strike over pay that is apparently woefully inadequate. Ambulances are always late and the few staff who populate the health service are incompetent if not downright murderous (according to media coverage, anyway). But is it really that bad?
The media focuses on the negative. And because there are more media than ever, it seems that there is more of all that bad stuff.
Yet if St Patrick dug a little deeper he would find another side to the human story altogether.
Let’s, for once, look on this bright side. The world has actually never been a better place, for humans at least.
Even allowing for the awful situation in Syria, the world is getting less – not more – violent. Deaths per capita have plummeted a hundredfold since the 1950s, and a thousandfold since the Second World War.
In the last two decades the number of people living in extreme poverty halved, globally.
The number of small children dying of disease has also halved, with an extra six million a year saved by vaccines and medicine.
Throughout human history the vast majority of adults have been illiterate. Now 85% can read and write – double the level of 1981.
Inequality still appears to be an issue. But this is usually measured with a yardstick known as the Gini index, which is really about a farless emotionally charged concept – ‘income disparity’. China for example, has gone from one of the most ‘equal’ countries in the world to one of the most ‘unequal’ since it embraced capitalism. Why should we begrudge a few extra billionaires their wealth if 500 million Chinese people were lifted out of extreme poverty with a 20-fold income increase?
Using the index, Ireland comes in at about average and is not, despite what we constantly hear,
a highly unequal society relative to others.
Nor is it an uncaring and capitalist one. We’re a social democracy where the State is heavily involved in almost all aspects of our lives.
We hear no end about people who don’t have medical cards – and nothing about the almost two million who do, comprising almost half the population. We spend €44bn on health, education and social welfare, while over two million people will get some form of welfare payment.
We are spending over €5bn on social homes over the next few years. At around €2,200 for every taxpayer, I can’t imagine any other country spending so much per capita on social housing.
Our housing shortage is partly caused by higher standards that make homes much more expensive to build. This indicates a society that actually cares.
The Apollo House episode over Christmas highlighted homelessness. Yet Dublin has far fewer people on the streets than most cities. Three new hostels opening in recent months means we’ve more than enough beds for rough sleepers now.
The State, and by extension taxpayers, is not as uncaring as it’s portrayed. It spends €120m a year on homelessness in Dublin alone. And there’s incredible work being done by the Simon Community, the Peter McVerry Trust and other charities.
Our health service, far from being a ramshackle death trap, has in fact improved beyond recognition, with incredible advances in treatment and technology that have seen deaths from cancer and heart disease tumble, and average life expectancy go up.
We may read all about the ambulance that arrives late but nothing of the hundreds of thousands that arrive on time every year. The number of patients on trolleys is unacceptable but perhaps it is not quite as bad as it appears (a trolley is a bed with wheels and not something akin to a ‘tea trolley’.)
It may not seem like it but Irish pay is in the top 1% in the world. Even among the wealthy EU bloc, we’re near the top of the pile. And the mainly public workers who are threatening to strike over ‘paltry wages’ are better paid than their private sector brethren.
We despise property tax and water charges. Yet practically anywhere else we’d pay more.
You’d never guess it from reading the papers but we’re the 19th least corrupt of 175 countries in the latest Transparency International survey.
By international standards, this is also the 19th happiest place in the world. So why doesn’t it feel like it? The problem is that our expectations rise faster than they can realistically be met. A hundred years ago, Irish people lived happily on today’s equivalent of €100 a week. Food was more expensive but they didn’t have to pay for cars, smartphones and TVs.
If they got anything from the State, they were delighted, whereas today we expect the State doesn’t satisfy our every need. Meanwhile the media has become brilliantly efficient at its (admittedly important) job of taking the Government to task.
It does it so well that any incoming government is soon torn to shreds. Hence the rise of populism, figures like Donald Trump and his alter egos on the hard left and right, all united in their opposition to any existing governments and globalisation.
Globalisation just means countries doing business with each other. What is wrong with that?
Global trade has created the wealth and efficiencies that are eradicating hunger, poverty and illiteracy.
It does need to be regulated to rein in the excesses of greed that see the likes of Apple avoid billions in tax. The answer is not Trump’s isolationism but greater regulation.
And wasn’t St Patrick himself, and his religion, a form of globalisation? What we need to drive out the snakes is a modern-day St Patrick, someone like EU Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, who gave Apple and Ireland a belt of her crozier over their sneaky €13bn global tax avoidance scheme.