Migrant_Mick

The protests in Ireland are not about just fuel! They are about the distance between Ireland on this graph and every other modern and developed economy. Ireland is second wealthiest but gets waaaaay less than any other country for that wealth. By a golden mile. That visual gap in this graph? That’s what people are protesting. It’s a lack of infrastructure and the everyday enshittification of services, the economy, and the additional difficulty of trying to live, relative to peers in any other country. It also highlights why people don’t get uniformly listened to! - because there is no government architecture to engage meaningfully across this huge gap. That gap is a three hour drive to work in traffic, a 14 month wait for an MRI, buses that don’t arrive, trains that don’t exist, schools that have no places for your kids, houses that are unaffordable, pubs that close before midnight, €12 sandwiches, expensive fuel. People feel this gap, even if they can’t explain it precisely. And that builds into resentment, and ultimately protest. Fuel just happened to be the next thing that could be pointed to, today.

Robert Friedland on the masive copper shortage to meet future grid, clean energy and AI demand: “We’re consuming 30m tonnes of copper a year. Only 4m tonnes of which is recycled. That means to maintain 3% GDP growth — with no [further] electrification — we have to mine the same amount of copper in the next 18 years as we mined in the last 10,000 years, combined. In the next 18 years, I’ve got to mine the same amount of copper as we mined the last 10,000 years. [This is without any new] electrification, without data centers, without solar and wind and the greening of the world economy. You people have no idea whatsoever what we’re facing.”

Why this chart is wrong. Five metrics are used to measure 'infrastructure and public services', as per the first image, which shows Ireland to be a total outlier. Start with public capital spending as share of total govt expenditure. (Unfortunately) rich world governments spend only single digit percentages of total government expenditure on capital spending. As it happens, Ireland has the highest share in western Europe. The actual Eurostat data are charted in the second image. What about doctor density? Unlike public expenditure, where I'd claim some expertise, I'm certainly not an expert in health economics. But I've spent enough time looking at the numbers over the years to know that Ireland is not an outlier in the number of doctors it has relative population. Even the OECD healthcare at a glance report that is referenced as a source shows that. The table from the report is the third image. Finally, Ireland has almost no electrified rail. These figures seem correct, but is the energy source of your rail system indicative of the quality of overall infrastructure? I'd argue no, but that's a judgement call. So, two of the five metrics are completely wrong and the inclusion of a third (which happens to show Ireland by far the worst performer in west Europe) is questionable.

Every week ~180 to 270 new people arrive to feed the Emergency Accommodation industry. Each arrival will cost the taxpayer €122,000. This means each year the taxpayer is being saddled with €1.46billion in extra taxes.

The reason I was suspicious of protests - before the emergence of far-right/culture warrior element - was because the spokespeople went straight to blaming Ukraine, general foreign aid & immigrants - not concerns of typical farmer. This chart shows the truth (IRE very bottom)