Ireland Is Killing Its Entrepreneurs
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Why is Ireland the worst country for young entrepreneurs?
just before we start a heads up on what is coming up on the show today's podcast is all about the fast rapidly disappearing irish entrepreneur eurostat has just released figures that shows that ireland is not only The third worst, the fourth, the fifth worst in Europe in terms of entrepreneurs. It is the worst place in Europe for young entrepreneurial talent in terms of the people in their 20s who are actually out building businesses. Only 5% of young Irish people are building businesses as opposed to 12% of Slovakians. And we're going to look and see why is this? What does it mean? Why is it happening? And will this make the economy less or more vulnerable to shocks in the future such as AI? That's all coming up in a couple of minutes.
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How are you doing there? It is time for the podcast. John, you're chugging away there, but we're talking about a very serious topic today. Yes, we are. We're talking about a serious topic because Eurostat, which is obviously the statistical office of the European Union, which amalgamates all sorts of statistics all over Europe, and then gives us a snapshot of what's happening, published something last week. And it says in 2025, in Ireland, we had the lowest number of young people the age of 20 and 29 involved in entrepreneurial activity, doing their own thing. Really? Self-employed, self-starters, etc. Only 5.1% of young Irish people are doing their own thing. And how does that compare to others? So Slovakia, it's 12.2%.
Right. So that's, you know, more than double in Slovakia. And it obviously goes from Slovakia down to Ireland. Yeah. Is there something in the water there in Slovakia? The point is... What is an entrepreneur? Why are entrepreneurs so important? And what does it mean for a society where young people are not backing themselves? What else might be going on which militates against people becoming risk takers? So what is going on in the society that means taking a risk, backing yourself is so unattractive? That you would get a job before that. That's the crucial thing. We're going to talk about that in Ireland. Again, it's against the background of the few podcasts we've been doing over the last couple of weeks, which are highlighting, again, this extraordinary disparity between the alleged wealth of the nation on paper and the reality of life here.
Now, what we do know in economics is it's impossible to sustain wealth over a generation without that wealth being created.
Right.
Explain that. So what we're looking at in Ireland is our wealth is extracted.
What are the statistics on young Irish entrepreneurs compared to other countries?
So the multinationals come in. Yeah, yeah. They make stuff here. They pay taxes. That wealth is therefore extracted by Ireland. It's not created domestically by people here because wealth creation domestically, I mean, the greatest example of wealth creation in Ireland would be something like Ryanair. Starts from zero. There's no industrial base here. There's no industrial base in aeronautics. We've never made an airplane. We've never made a wing. There was no air force. There was nothing really of substantial significance of which to build an airline industry. And Michael O'Leary, through his own genius, has built the biggest airline in the world. Yeah, right.
Yeah, yeah.
In a generation. So, therefore, the wealth created in Reiner is created... internally yeah by irish entrepreneurs within the society and within the company right so the question therefore is why don't we have more of them and the question then is Why would O'Leary, at the age of 25 today, have taken the risk that he took then, which was he was given the opportunity by somebody else to take it up? Would he have been working at that stage if he was now in one of the big four, where he had a good salary, where he was paying rent, all that sort of stuff?
I wonder, has he won the million, though?
What I'm saying is that societies... that have entrepreneurial talent generate the wealth and the innovation and that tends to be more permanent than societies that extract the wealth because of course societies that extract the wealth if the wealth extraction argues against people getting up off their ass and doing something that will make you quite fragile so what we're going to talk about john is
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
Why is Ireland the worst country for young entrepreneurs?
0:00–3:10
2
What are the statistics on young Irish entrepreneurs compared to other countries?
3:10–12:31
3
How does wealth extraction affect local entrepreneurship in Ireland?
12:31–14:00
4
What role do multinational companies play in the Irish economy?
14:00–17:29
5
What challenges do young entrepreneurs in Ireland face?
17:29–21:36
6
How does societal perception impact entrepreneurial risk-taking?
21:36–41:10
Speakers
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