Si will feel “let down” and “angry”
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get Kelly a login for here
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Hope this doesn’t have a reputational impact on the success of the government investment scheme
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I’d say odds-on he’s here already
“Simon Harris aide critical of the Split Season and thinks Austin Gleeson is overrated”
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“Simon Harris Aide agrees with Donal Og Cusack that there’s no place for the 40m Arc on a hurling pitch”
I know the Irish public are usually great in situations like this but I can’t see them getting behind Simon Harris Aid
Monty Python etc
Is it because lefties are massive egotists or because they are more principled and care more? A bit of both id say! The far righties prob fall out as much for the same reasons.
The far right probably do these days alright, although that’s partly down to social media I think. The skit on the left goes back decades for a reason.
Another 48k in net migration into Ireland last year. Despite the narrative on our youngsters all being sent abroad, it remains at a net of 5k persons going out.
That’s a cumulative net immigration of 511k in the last 10 years.
The CSO in 2018 that a high side estimate of net immigration to Ireland was 30k per year. We are 70% over the high side on average over the last 10 years.
Total population is now over 5.5m. That CSO forecast said Ireland would have 5.21m in a mid range scenario or 5.3m for high side. Ireland has 225k-325k more people than expected, for us to have a “city” the size of Cork more than the “worst case” scenario is extraordinary. You cannot plan a country with this sort of growth.
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Ireland has changed, changed utterly. You only have to walk into many nursing homes or hospitals now to see how dependent the system has become on workers from Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere.
I was visiting an old friend in a nursing home ecently and, from what I could see, the overwhelming majority of the staff were from overseas. I don’t blame Irish people for not flocking to these jobs, caring for elderly people, feeding them, washing them and dealing with all the intimate realities of old age is hard work.
But here’s the bigger issue. We’re getting older, living longer and will need vastly more carers in the decades ahead.
If we can’t recruit enough people here, those workers will inevitably have to come from abroad.
They won’t simply come here to work a shift and disappear.
They’ll live here, raise families and become part of Irish society. So when people talk about how much Ireland has changed, we’re probably only at the beginning of it.
The demographic reality means the Ireland of 20 or 30 years from now is going to be a very different country again.
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Absolutely and it already is. It’s noticeable if you spend chunks of time outside of Ireland. People who come home regularly comment on it.
It’s a huge shift in a decade.
The drivers of these extraordinary migration numbers are several. Some are controllable, some are not. But we should not pretend there aren’t consequences to having a city the size of Cork more people (on the high side) than a population forecaster put together just 8 years ago.
I don’t necessarily see any of this as a good or bad thing; it’s simply the reality of how Ireland is changing.
Go back a few decades and Ireland was an overwhelmingly white and relatively homogeneous country.
People like Phil Lynott and Paul McGrath stood out partly because there were so few Irish people of African heritage.
That’s obviously no longer the Ireland we live in, and in another generation it’ll have changed again.
You can already see that change reflected in sport. Ireland has athletes of African heritage coming through in sprinting and football, while the growth of communities from cricket playing countries could eventually strengthen Irish cricket as well.
France football team is an obvious example of how immigration and the children and grandchildren of immigrants have transformed the pool of sporting talent available to a country. Ireland may increasingly follow a similar path.
More broadly, populations have never been frozen in time. Ireland’s population itself is the product of countless migrations and influences over centuries, Gaelic, Norse, Norman, English, Scottish and others. Today’s migration from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere is another chapter in that process, albeit happening very rapidly.
Twenty or thirty years from now the Irish population will almost certainly look very different from today.
That’s not a value judgement; it’s simply what happens when populations move, mix and change over generations. Nothing stays the same forever.
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That’s population mix changing, even if we had net 30k (the high side forecast), we’d get that too.
This is about the extra city that we have in unplanned migrants and what expectations people have around the impact on government spending and quality of life that it has.
Mexico’s population when they hosted the 1970 World Cup was 50 million.
Mexico’s population when they hosted the best matches in the 2026 World Cup was 133 million.
Be grand.
The Irish state is not bloated. It’s too small to govern the country we have become
![Aidan Regan]
A new consensus is hardening in Irish commentary: the state has grown fat.
Public service numbers are at record highs, the total payroll cost of the state, once pensions and local authority staff are counted, comes to almost €33 billion, and the civil service has expanded by almost half in a decade. The implication is always the same. Spending is out of control, headcount is the problem, and the answer is restraint.
The numbers say otherwise. Ireland employs roughly 50,000 civil servants to run a sovereign state of 5.5 million people, less than 2 per cent of total employment. That 2 per cent must administer tax law, regulate a hyper-globalised economy, negotiate in Brussels, run the courts and prisons, and manage immigration. If that sounds like bloat, it is worth asking what a lean state would look like.
The comparison with our peers is no kinder to the bloat thesis. The entire public service, including every nurse, teacher, Garda and council official, accounts for around 15 per cent of Irish employment. On the OECD’s measure of government employment, Denmark stands at 27 per cent, Norway at 30, Sweden at 28, Finland at 25.
These are the small open economies we claim as peers: prosperous, competitive, fiscally sound. They run states nearly twice the relative size of ours, and nobody describes Copenhagen or Helsinki as failed experiments in socialism.
The same distortion runs through the spending debate. The only honest yardstick of Irish national income is GNI*, the modified measure that strips out the multinational profit shifting that inflates our headline statistics.
Against GNI*, government expenditure runs to about 40 per cent, against an EU average close to 49. Ireland is a modest spender by European standards, and it has run budget surpluses four years in a row, albeit on the back of a windfall corporate tax boom. The vulnerability in the public finances is not profligacy. It is that we fund a permanent state with volatile revenue, while refusing to build the administrative capacity that would put it on firmer foundations.
How did we get here? The answer is austerity. Between 2008 and 2013 Ireland cut more than 33,000 whole-time posts from its public service. The civil service fell to roughly 35,000 people, its capacity hollowed out precisely as the demands on it multiplied.
The growth since then, around 111,000 posts, overwhelmingly in health and education, is not an aberration. It is recovery, and late recovery at that, in a country whose population has grown by close to a million people since the crash, driven above all by immigration, while housing need, healthcare demand and school enrolment surged accordingly.
A state that employed so few people in 2013 was not efficient. It was weak. And a weak state is expensive: many of the failures we now pay for daily, in housing delivery, in planning, in infrastructure that arrives years late and over budget, trace directly to administrative capacity that was cut to the bone and never properly rebuilt.
This is the part of the argument the bloat narrative cannot answer. Everyone in Irish public debate now agrees that state capacity is the binding constraint. The Housing Commission built its 2024 report around the blockages in delivery, recommending a new oversight body to drive it. The review of the National Development Plan flagged the same problem, with the Fiscal Council estimating the country is short some 80,000 construction workers to meet its own targets.
Capacity is not an abstraction, it is planners, engineers, procurement specialists, economists, lawyers. You cannot demand a state that delivers metros and offshore wind and half a million homes while insisting it employ fewer people to do so.
The real structural problem is not size but centralisation. Ireland runs one of the most centralised states in the developed world. Local government accounts for about 8 per cent of public spending here, against roughly 23 per cent across the EU. Local authorities employ around 32,000 people, barely 1 per cent of national employment, with weak revenue powers and thin professional staff.
The Nordic states are not big because Stockholm and Oslo are stuffed with bureaucrats. They are big because municipalities employ the people who run schools, care systems and planning departments. If Ireland is serious about delivery, the expansion we need is local: stronger county and city government, with real fiscal autonomy and the professional capacity to use it.
That costs money, and here the debate needs some honesty. A capable state must compete for talent with Google, with the IFSC, with the Big Four. The Revenue Commissioners shows what that investment buys: a civil service office of roughly 7,000 people that is, by common consent, a modern and formidably effective administration, built by decades of sustained investment in expertise.
We should want more Revenues, not fewer. Paying top engineers and planners salaries that draw them into the public service is not waste but the cheapest infrastructure investment available, because every capital project in the country depends on it.
There are real questions about where public money goes and about productivity. By all means scrutinise them. But the premise of the bloat narrative is false. Ireland is a rich country running a small state, still carrying the scars of the deepest public employment cuts in its history, and asking that state to manage a society transformed in scale and complexity.
The problem is not that we employ too many people. It is that we employ too few, in the wrong places, and pay too little to get the best. Anyone who wants a state that works should be willing to say so.
Clear racism. Please leave any cop-on at the door.
It’s mad that a lad like that could get paid to put forward that piece in addition to whatever academic research he does.
The OECD 2025 numbers has Ireland on about 20% versus the OECD average. The worst thing is that it appears as though he pulled the other country’s numbers from that OECD doc but ignores the Irish data and chooses a different definition of Government employment.
In terms of overall public spending, GDP versus GNI* is still imperfect as a relative measure but even still. The biggest part is likely Ireland having a far younger population than the EU average. If you look at social welfare and pensions spending, Ireland is 12% of GDP versus 27% in the EU. That narrows to 22% versus 27% in the EU when GNI* is considered. Considering Ireland has far more employment and has a much younger population, on a relative basis Ireland clearly spends far more on welfare (and this tallies with Ireland being one of the most redistributive states out there). This would therefore imply Ireland spends less on health and education. On health there may be a factor on Ireland’s private insurance market, but that isn’t actually unique. On education we have some of the best outcomes in Europe. So if we’re spending less but getting more, that would put a @Godshonesttruth argument out the window on the relative efficiency of our assistant principals.
