29/09/2026
The salutary lesson in this report is that Ireland is living beyond its means despite a budget surplus being recorded.
We have health expenditure up over 9% and social protection up over 7%. Ireland faces a doubling of interest payments soon on our national debt while our economic miracle is precariously attributable to a tiny number of U.S. multinationals, whose corporation tax payments and PAYE contributions are disproportionately fuelling our economic overspend.
Despite this our political class, whether in government or opposition continue to bake in these transient receipts into future projections largely because they know the electorate will not thank them for challenging our present financial ethos with a national plan of economic reform!
That failure is on us, the citizens of Ireland. We the electorate have failed to demand a properly functioning public administration that equally weights entitlements with contributions, that adopts performance metrics that come with personal responsibility and culpability across our state procurement and service spending, that weights decision making based on national benefit and not political patronage.
We know what political and citizen expectation allied with state institutional hubris drove Ireland into - a European bailout and state austerity programme which exacted a tremendous toll on many citizens and families. Consider that four-fifths of this present transient income is being used to prop up the national current account spend. Or that our economy now costs 117 Billion euro annually versus 55 Billion euro in 2015?
Political leadership and fiscal planning are both responsibilities of Government. They are about making hard political choices to delay national gratification to build resilience into our economic future. It is governments job and responsibility to implement spending reform and lead by example. Their job also to disarm the political populists and their infantile rhetoric which is based on economic fiction and easily proven to be so - just divide the estimated 35Billion windfall this year by 2 and ask them for their political policies to counter the resulting deficit?
Ireland is facing future uncertainty - to think we can sail on regardless of a changing global environment is political dereliction - It is time we the people told politicians so!
Consumers face the threat of higher food prices with inflation remaining above 3% next year, according to the Economic and Social Research Institute.
