Opinion | Ireland Is Rich. That Doesn’t Mean It’s Happy.

Ireland’s current condition might best be described as an embarrassment of riches. A country that was long one of the poorest in Western Europe now has an abundance of public and private wealth and an economy that is open to the world. It has even proved relatively resistant to the temptation of the far right that has proved so appealing elsewhere; perhaps nostalgia for an imagined golden age doesn’t hold much appeal when memories of poverty, mass emigration and the repression imposed by conservative Catholicism are so fresh in the minds of a well-educated, socially liberal population.

But as Ireland gets ready to go to the polls for a general election on Friday, it’s apparent that there are the same dark subplots here that have made the position of other incumbent governments across the democratic world so precarious.

If politics were a numbers game, the current Irish government — a coalition between the two traditional center-right parties, Fine Gael (led by the current prime minister, Simon Harris) and Fianna Fail, along with the Green Party — would be the surefire winner. A decade ago, there were around two million people at work in the Irish economy. Now the number seems to be rising inexorably toward three million. Unemployment is at historically low levels, and government debt as a proportion of the size of the economy is less than half what it was in 2014.

But people don’t vote for statistics, as the Democrats discovered, to their detriment, in the U.S. elections. The economics that matter most are those of daily life, and knowing that the country is doing well can make voters even more annoyed if they feel that they are missing out. In Ireland the sense of disconnection between the macro and micro is exacerbated by its peculiar path to riches: The great driver of its transformation is external. For U.S. multinationals looking for a base in the European Union, Ireland’s low corporate tax rate, highly educated work force and stable politics, combined with the familiarity of the English language, a common law system and close historical and cultural ties, have exerted a magnetic attraction.

Think of an American multinational — Apple, Pfizer, Meta, Microsoft, Intel, Boston Scientific — and the chances are that it is one of the thousand or so U.S. companies with an Irish operation. These companies spend more than $40 billion a year in a country with a population of just over five million. To put that in context, the stock of U.S. foreign direct investment in Ireland in 2022 stood at $574 billion, roughly triple the total in China and India put together.

As well as paying a lot of wages, these companies give the Irish treasury a windfall of corporate taxes — the full-year total could reach a new high of about 30 billion euros this year. With this much money coming in, the government has been able to live every politician’s dream: cutting income taxes while increasing public spending and reducing debt. Instead of the hard choices that the leaders of most democracies feel obliged to offer their electorates, Ireland is coasting.

Envious readers might wonder why Ireland needs to have an election at all. Can’t the politicians who have delivered these wonders simply be returned to office by acclamation? But the truth is that Ireland does not feel like a very happy place. Part of this is the frustration of fulfilled desires. Ireland has the two things its patriots dreamed of for centuries: political independence and economic prosperity. For a long time, we were an “if only” society — if only the English had not colonized us, if only we were not so poor, if only the church had not become so overweeningly powerful. Those six little letters covered a multitude of failings. They don’t anymore. Ireland’s problems today stem from the collective choices it has freely made for itself.

For just as the country acts as a showpiece for the upsides of extreme globalization, it also demonstrates the downsides. Ireland’s public services and infrastructure significantly lag its warp-speed economy, creating a place that feels somehow both overdeveloped and underdeveloped. And on its own, the globalized market economy does not produce the public goods necessary for a decent quality of life. Ireland may be awash with money, but its young people can no longer afford to buy homes; sky-high rents are making it impossible for many to live in the main cities of Dublin, Cork and Galway; homelessness and child poverty have risen; access to health care is uneven and uncertain; public transport and public schools are often overcrowded; physical infrastructure is seriously inadequate; and the pace of transition to a carbon-free economy has been painfully slow.

But nowhere is the gap between the glowing statistics and anxious feelings more evident than on the most basic issue of all, population growth. This ought to be an extremely good news story. Ireland’s history of mass emigration left it with a strange legacy: It is the only developed country I know of whose population is still much lower than it was in 1840. But the past decade has seen a long overdue rebound, and now about one-fifth of those living in Ireland were born elsewhere. This is globalization in the flesh.

But for years the handling of this immigration — especially of a large influx of refugees from Ukraine and asylum seekers from Asia and Africa — has been somewhat chaotic. The failure of successive governments to adequately expand housing, infrastructure and public services has created a political opening for the far right and allowed the slogan “Ireland is full,” to seem both absurd and credible. This is still one of the least densely populated countries in Western Europe, but it can seem badly congested.

Voters are expected to narrowly stay with the center-right coalition. (Irish people may find their pragmatic centrists a little dull, but there’s nothing like watching the antics of some of the alternatives in the United States and Europe to remind you that dullness can have a lot to recommend it.) Hard-line nationalist groups and independents will probably make inroads — not enough to affect the balance of power but sufficient to give them a foothold in mainstream politics.

The biggest loser could be Sinn Fein, the former political wing of the Irish Republican Army, which won the popular vote in the 2020 election. Already established as the largest party in Northern Ireland, it had high hopes of being able to lead the next government in Dublin, with promises to share the corporate tax windfall more equitably, fix the housing crisis and advance its cherished cause of a united Ireland. But it has been hurt by competition for anti-establishment votes from the far right and by a series of internal scandals.

What most Irish politicians, set on offering the electorate tax cuts and higher spending, are not talking about is the looming second Trump administration and the threat of a trade war between the United States and Europe that could catch Ireland in the middle. For now, they are pretending not to see what might be on that horizon.

Ireland has staked everything on globalization, a gamble that has so far returned handsome winnings. But there are no islands of contentment in oceans of political and economic turmoil.

Fintan O’Toole is the author, most recently, of “We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958” and a columnist for The Irish Times.

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