When The Tide Goes Out & The Flood Comes In

“Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked” is the famous quote by Warren Buffet that describes overleverage in finance. It is becoming increasingly evident that the Irish State's blinkering prioritisation of the private market and the overreliance on multinational FDI is creating large areas of economic risk and social fragility. Readers of the excellent books The Invisible Doctrine or The Road to Freedom will recognise these policies as neoliberalism, and they will leave the country in trouble when the water recedes.

The keystone ingredient in the polycrisis coming to the boil in Ireland is housing. Successive Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil governments have chosen to follow neoliberal doctrine by turning the housing sector into a fully for-profit endeavour for the private market to feast on. This prioritisation of landlords and institutional investors over renters and over the progression of people across all age brackets and stages of life has spread like rot through the economy and is eating away at the very foundations of the country. Even worse, the government continues to double down on demand side interventions that further spread the rot, such as the recent rental control changes.

The rising rents and reduction of housing supply caused by these policies eradicates the social mobility of the electorate, and solidifies the reliance on high-wage multinational jobs. Public sector jobs can’t be filled because there are no local houses available, or those few that are available are too expensive. Less staff in schools, the HSE, and other public jobs means degraded services, longer waiting lists, and a stretched public sector. Private sector workers, especially those in multinational companies, are wedded to their high-wage jobs in order to pay the high rent or high mortgage payments on the price-inflated home they managed to get. Thousands of young people still living with their parents, professionals wanting to become first-time buyers, or older people looking to downsize, are stuck where they are because the accommodation options and affordability do not exist.

Each of these detrimental effects start compounding into other societal issues when left to fester. The far right with their “Ireland Is Full” lie can easily prey on the worries and struggles of people on the short end of the stick of those stretched public services and the stunted social mobility. The thousands of people emigrating often see no other choice but to go rather than stay and be running to stand still from a financial & accommodation standpoint.

But is this blinkered crusade for housing market profit and multinational FDI worth it? By some measures, it appears so. There are billions of Euro in sovereign wealth funds, GDP is up (9.7%), unemployment is low (4%), house prices are up by 12% this year, and there was €288bn+ in cash on deposit in January.

However, as the saying goes, statistics can be used the same way a drunk uses a lamppost, more for support than illumination. Ireland is booming, but only for some. The problem with this lopsided economy is that it may fall like a house of cards when hit with a shock.

There are clear indications that Trump is in favour of repatriating US multinationals as soon as possible. It won’t happen overnight, but Ireland has to come to terms with saying a slow goodbye to the massive corporate tax takes currently enjoyed by the State. As of yet, there doesn’t seem to be any plan to mitigate against this shock and work on replacement economic drivers. There are no large scale government programmes or campaigns launched to hyper-stimulate local sector innovation hubs, or train workers en masse with climate skills for green transition jobs. There is no IDA equivalent undertaking to super-charge indigenous industry to the same scale as FDI has been attracted and retained to date. The Irish economy will be left swimming naked when the American multinational tide goes out.

On top of that, there are floodwaters on the way, quite literally. Climate change research shows that Ireland will receive on average 15% more rainfall and more erratic weather patterns and storms, which will result in more floods, and large disruption to crops yields and the food security of the country. There have been no lessons learned in the wake of Storm Éowyn beyond the idiotic suggestion to cut down all trees near power lines. No plans to create community resiliance centres, no emergency action to strengthen the grid, no incentives for micro-generation or local battery storage. Ireland's planned climate action won’t even meet the government’s own target of 51% emissions reduction by 2030 and the State will face up to €28bn in fines as a result. To make emissions reduction even harder, the government welcomes plans to insanely bind the country to new fossil fuel infrastructure in the form of LNG terminals.

The situation we are in is not by accident. It is a result of choices made by those in charge. Choices to follow neoliberal doctrine, to prioritise the economy over the climate, and to maintain class elitism. However, if choices got us here, then choices can get us out of here too.

“Hard Choices, Easy Life. Easy Choices, Hard Life.” is a quote from Polish Olympic weightlifter Jerzy Gregorek and is one of my favourite pieces of life advice. It is simple yet profound, and flexible enough to be applied to any situation.

So far, the State has made easy choices. More housing profit, more happy landlords. More FDI, more corporate tax revenue. More data centres, more tech companies. But now it has to deal with the hard life created by those easy choices. More homelessness, more personal financial struggle, more civil unrest, more hate, more racism, more emissions. The state is failing to provide opportunity for prosperity to everyone equally, and it certainly is not cherishing all the children of the nation equally, seeing as over 4 thousand of them are in emergency accommodation, and they will all be doomed to deal with climate collapse.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like this government is willing to make any hard choices. News broke this morning that the government wants to turn the GPO into a shopping centre. They are so blinkered by neoliberalism that the only solution they see to every problem is the private market.

Now more than ever, it’s up to the electorate to make its voice heard. Until the voting window allows for a change in government, it is up to citizens to become more engaged in representative politics by putting pressure on their local and national representatives, by protesting the injustices perpetuated by the state, especially the lack of tangible action against the genocide in Palestine, by taking and promoting meaningful climate action, and by speaking up for the principles and values of Ireland that are being undermined, such as anti-racism, inclusion, equality, empathy, neutrality, and representative democracy.

And when the time comes, choose Left and vote them out.