A half-built nation: Can any of our parties meet the demands of independent Ireland’s second century?

The term of office of the outgoing Coalition coincided with the centenaries of Irish independence: partition, the establishment of the Irish Free State and its consolidation in the Civil War. The joining together of the political heirs of the opposing sides in that conflict, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, marked an apt conclusion to the first century of nation building.
And it’s fair to say that the conduct of the Government they formed with the Greens was also, up to a point, a long-term vindication of Irish independence. The problem is that the point at which it stopped being so is the place where “not bad” should become “very good”.
The new regime had to navigate two big crises. One was Brexit: the election of February 8th, 2020, came just after the UK had formally withdrawn from the European Union, but while its future trading relationship was still to be decided. Over the course of 2020, the taoisigh (first Leo Varadkar, then Micheál Martin) had to have 10 bilateral meetings with their chaotic British counterpart, Boris Johnson, and attend 15 high-level EU summits.
The Government managed this complex process well. Ireland did indeed seem like an independent country. Not only was it free (unlike Northern Ireland) to pursue its own interest by staying in the EU – it was also, for the first time in the history of relations between the two islands, in a stronger position diplomatically than Britain was. It was able to minimise the economic damage from Brexit and to avoid the reimposition of a hard Border.
And while all of this was going on, a pandemic arrived. Just 21 days after the general election, and months before the Government was formed, the Health Protection Surveillance Centre confirmed the Republic’s first known case of infection with the new coronavirus, Covid-19. On March 11th – the same day that the World Health Organisation declared a pandemic – the State’s first death from the virus was recorded. The following day, in Washington, Varadkar announced the immediate implementation of a partial lockdown.
Again, as with the Brexit crisis, Ireland felt like a country that could manage its own destiny. There is much to criticise in the State’s handling of the pandemic (and it is remarkable that Ireland is one of the few democratic countries that has failed to conduct a proper independent inquiry into its response). But Irish people could look west to Donald Trump and east to Johnson and feel that at least it had responsible adults in charge.
We did not have the mad malignity of a US president suggesting that people could inject themselves with bleach or the flagrant corruption of the Tories’ “fast track” on which lucrative contracts for the supply of personal protective equipment were handed out to cronies and party donors. Both political officeholders and public servants were clearly trying to do their best to protect the public. If they made mistakes, they were made in good faith.
We can say, then, that on the outgoing Government’s watch the State showed that it was no longer emerging. It had finally emerged – with sufficient confidence to be able to handle with competence and decency two simultaneous crises. Anyone tempted to take this achievement for granted had only to look at the political bedlam in Britain and the US. Or indeed to think back a mere decade to the failure of the State and the loss of its sovereignty in the great banking and property crash.
The recovery from that crash was, in some respects, spectacular. In February 2020, the month of the last general election, Ireland exported €11.6 billion worth of goods. In February 2024, that figure was €17.6 billion. These statistics (dependent as they are on the vagaries of a small number of giant multinationals) rise and fall, but the broad trend is clear enough: Ireland, as an economic entity, is booming. This export economy rains showers of largesse on to the State – foreign multinationals paid almost €20 billion in corporation tax in 2023 alone.
And yet the question that will now hover over the general election is how come, if we have rather belatedly succeeded at nation-building, the nation still feels half-built? The Brexit and Covid crises showed that the State has the capacity to act both strategically and tactically. The first required long-term thinking, both in anticipating the possibility of Brexit and in trying to shape a stable outcome from this upheaval. The second required urgent reactions to an emergency – not just making quick decisions but actually implementing them on the ground, in hospitals and communities.
So where did all of that sense of capacity go? Was it all burned off in the big efforts of the Government’s early days? Was the State exhausted by these twin challenges? It is very difficult now to see much evidence of an ability to sustain either the strategic focus necessary to map a clear future or the hands-on logistical skill to get things done.
To go back a century, we might ask what those who created the State would have dreamed of. Some of their dreams – a revival of Irish as the everyday vernacular, an end to partition – have not come true. Equally, though, some of what has come true would be beyond their wildest imaginings.
What patriot would have dared to envision an independent Ireland as one of the world’s largest exporters of high-tech products and services, as a major destination for US investment, or as having one of the best-educated populations in Europe? Which of them could have imagined an Irish minister for finance with (as Jack Chambers had for his Budget 2025) a surplus of €25 billion? Who could have fantasised, even halfway into Ireland’s journey of independent statehood, that the island that exported its people by the million would have become a magnet for those seeking a better life?
But also, who could have imagined a century ago that with all these resources available to a native government, child poverty and homelessness would be rising, or that services for people with mental and physical disabilities would still be so dire?
And perhaps it is this unimaginability that is the problem. Oscar Wilde’s quip about being able to resist everything except temptation comes to mind – the State seems to have been able to imagine everything except success. It could not think its way into a rapidly expanding population and a (relatively) vast private sector economy, both of which would require a well-planned, coherent and above all consistent programme of investment in infrastructure both hard (housing, transport, water and sewerage, carbon-free power generation and electricity grids) and soft (childcare, education, health and social services).
The result of this failure of imagination is a place that feels overdeveloped and underdeveloped at the same time. Overdeveloped because, in what is still one of the least densely populated countries in western Europe, there is a sense of being crowded – too many people trying to get into spaces ranging from commuter trains to doctor’s surgeries. (The far-right slogan Ireland is Full is both stupid and credible.) But underdeveloped because Irish people travel. They can see that even provincial cities in most EU countries have exotic facilities such as trains to the airport and visible police.
The most obvious symptom of this disjunction is the extraordinary 35 per cent rise in average house prices over the Government’s lifetime. That in turn is symptomatic of a disastrous failure of planning, compounded by an assumption that market forces would naturally match supply to demand.
The result of this is a clogging-up of the motor of social mobility. The success of centre-right parties like the ones that have always governed the State depends on their ability to keep growing the middle class. That growth happens in the golden triangle formed by white-collar jobs, third-level education and home ownership.
But Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have, since the great crash of 2008, knocked out one side of that triangle. Home ownership for young people has fallen off a cliff. The proportion of Irish people who own their own homes by the age of 30 has halved in this century.
This is an astonishing decline in itself but it is even more so when you consider that, over the same period, the other middle-class marker, third-level education, has gone in the opposite direction. Two things that used to go together – the degree and the mortgage – are now wrenched apart: more and more graduates, fewer and fewer young homeowners.
Result: unhappiness, not just for the young but for their parents. This is, to put it mildly, an extraordinary situation for centre-right parties to have engineered. And it also forces those parties into the uncomfortable position of having to be quite left-wing: the expansion of the State is no longer a lefty position in Irish politics. It is pretty much everybody’s position.
[ Government has a windfall of cash but no coherent sense of how to spend itOpens in new window ]
Equally, however, no one can really afford to be too left-wing when the public finances are so dependent on a small number of US corporations. Even the Trotskyites don’t seriously imagine that they can nationalise Pfizer or Apple. The multinationals have created a set of golden handcuffs that constrain Irish public policy within clear bounds of acceptability.
Which means that the election is not going to be about overall philosophical differences on the role of government. There will be arguments about policy, of course, but those arguments will be largely about delivery. This is going to be, not a “what” election, but a “how” election. The needs are obvious and the opportunities are historic. But the biggest question is not just who governs – it is whether anyone can credibly claim to be able to create a system and culture of governance adequate to the demands of independent Ireland’s second century.