One of the few possessions I have held onto since childhood is a copy of John Kenneth Galbraith’s “The Age of Uncertainty”, which was published in 1977 to accompany the BBC TV economics series of the same name. It was a birthday present, personally inscribed by my late father. I have long maintained a keen interest in Irish politics (since 1978, when I joined Fine Gael) and in economics (since I first took out a subscription to The Economist). For many years I wrote politics columns for The Irish Daily Mail and for Magill magazine. And for over 10 years I have been writing an economics column for The Sunday Times (Ireland). Now that I’m writing for Gript, what do you imagine that I believe is the biggest political and economic problem confronting Ireland?
Is it our national debt? Could it be Ireland’s dependence on US multinationals? Maybe it’s our institutional constipation when it comes to building houses and delivering infrastructure? Or is it over-regulation? Perhaps it is public sector inefficiency? It is none of these things. It is an economic problem that is vast in scale. It will unleash crisis on our political system. It is barely discussed. Yet it is hiding in plain sight as the facts surrounding it are not in dispute.
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