David McWilliams

If you're employed by these big multinationals, you have much more money, so therefore you get the nice flats such as they are in Dublin and all around the country.

So basically it sucks in all the resources.

That's the first thing.

The second thing is it creates a monoculture.

And this is something we came back, we talked about evolutionary economics in the last podcast.

Now, monoculture is...

to economics what monoculture is to the environment.

It's dangerous.

The greatest example of monoculture, of course, in Irish history was the over-dependence on the potato.

So if you had seen the Irish...

census in 1840 and you said, oh my God, there's 8 million people living in that country, that must be a sign of success.

Because there was only 16 million people living in England.

So our population was half that of England.

It's now about a tenth of the English population.

It's less than a tenth.

So if you'd seen the Irish census in 1840, we said, oh my God, there's 8 million people.

That must be a sign of success.

But it wasn't.

It was a sign of weakness because it was over-dependence on the potato.

And the idea was if that crop failed, the country failed.