Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Just a quick heads up on the podcast. We'll be talking to the brilliant, brilliant, innovative thinker Sinead O'Sullivan about her views of what can be done to fix Ireland. And again, the issue is... Why do we have this incredible standard of living and this lamentable quality of life? Why is Ireland a rich country that feels poor?
It's not just economics, it's data, it's anthropology, it's history, it's society, all put together. Don't miss it. It's coming up in a couple of minutes. To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. This podcast is powered by ACAST. How are you doing there? It's time for the podcast.
And we have a very, very important podcast coming up because we are going to, not some showcase, but we're going to interview Sinead O'Sullivan, who is a brilliant, brilliant young economist, former engineer, MBA holder from the Harvard Business School, a master's in aerospace engineering from Georgia Tech, and a very, very brilliant thinker who has...
Chapter 2: Why does Ireland feel poorer despite being one of the richest countries in Europe?
driven at coaching horses through Establishments Ireland's very, very cozy view of the problems of this country. Okay? So we're going to talk to Sinead in a couple of minutes. The reason is she wrote a brilliant sub-stack highlighting why she believes Ireland is a premature state. Not a mature state, a premature, that we haven't matured.
And the gap between what people hear about the country being the richest country or the second richest country, and their daily, daily experience of housing, of traffic, of health, et cetera, et cetera, that gap can be explained I'm going to let her talk about it, by an inability to build institutions, proper institutions, and everything flows from that.
Now, what I found really interesting, and one of the reasons I wanted to have her on this show, was because of the reaction of Official Ireland to her. Which was? Which was, of course, undermining. To undermine all the time. So what I hate... Why? Let me just talk about it. Knit pickers. Do you know what a knit picker is? Not a nose picker. No, a knit picker, right? A knit picker is...
a sure first sign of a third-rate mind. Right. People who nitpick have third-rate minds. And the reason it is is because their whole energy is diverted towards undermining the big thinker, right? Yeah. So they're always looking at minute technical inaccuracies, perceived inaccuracies, minutiae, tiny little details.
And what they do, so the big thinker comes out with this courageous, ambitious notion, look, this is what explains the world. The little thinker, the nitpicker, gets threatened by that. Okay? They're insecure. They're not imaginatively, they're not emotionally or intellectually ambitious enough or, dare I say, clever enough to do the big thinking. And we know a lot of them.
So what they do is they try to say, okay, I am going to look at the data. So Sinead wrote this piece. Yeah. She probably should have used a thing called GNI, which is a more accurate indicator of Irish wealth than GDP. Right? Okay. Yeah. That's... I don't know what she said was fine. Change it. But the conclusion is absolutely the same, which is that Ireland is missing something fundamental.
Yeah. How can you be so rich and have such second and third rate public services and public infrastructure? So if she used GNP, or sorry, GNI Star. Yeah, so if she used the GNI it would have been, the results might have been slightly different. Slightly different. But the general trust of our point is the same. The nitpicker arrives in. These little wankers arrive in.
Because they've had a go at me, so this is a personal thing, right? Right. I've had a go at you. I'm not a nitpicker. Yeah, but you're not. You're a big... You're just my old mate. You can have a go at me all the time. Your job is to say, you see that little pedestal you're on now? I'm going to fucking knock you down. That's your job, right? But you're absolutely right.
The nitpicker basically stifles any constructive discourse. This is the whole thing. They want to reduce the public confidence in the dissenter, in this case, Sinead. And they want to undermine the credibility of somebody who comes up with a big idea. That's the first thing. They also want to distract, as you said, from the main idea. The big argument.
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Chapter 3: What does it mean for Ireland to be considered a premature state?
And of course, What they really want to do is they want to ignore the big picture idea, ignore the main, substantive, novel, imaginative part of the argument. And of course, the problem with that is that nitpicking in economics
undermines progress yeah because progress is messy progress is going to be incomplete big ideas are going to be for example they could be undermined by nitpicking but the idea is how do you get to big ideas you have to throw caution to the wind you have to sit back you have to take out a very big palette and paint in a in a in a loose loose way and these guys just are incapable of doing that the
But those guys also, it strikes me, are the ones who should have come up with these ideas and this kind of analysis that Sinead has done in the first place. They're not able to. Maybe that's it. But also, as you talk about nitpicking, nitpicking seems to be a trait, a general trait in Irish politics and probably politics in... In Irish economics as well. Right, okay. Very much so.
But it reminds me of, you know, I'm going back a little bit, but it was sometime last year. Why does that not surprise me? But it was sometime last year. I can't remember exactly when. Do you remember they were forming the new government and there was weeks and weeks spent on speaking rights. And it was all about two minutes here and eight minutes there. And I can't remember the detail of it.
For the government to get it done. Exactly. And when I was listening to this, and it's just went on for weeks, like, Who cares? And from a public perspective, who cares? Get on with it. Fix the stuff. Well, I mean, that's just, again, that's the minutiae. I would say that was more of a negotiating tactic by people to say, look, we want a little bit more of this and a little bit more.
But you're absolutely right. It's kind of irrelevant. I mean, the whole idea here is that nitpickers are obsessed by focusing on trivial minor details that don't actually matter. But the objective of the nitpicker is to undermine the big thinker, right? To basically say, you get back in your box. My, in this case, my econometrics is better than yours.
And if I wouldn't have used that data point, and you're like, give me a break.
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Chapter 4: How does Ireland's historical context impact its current infrastructure and public services?
I mean, this is part of... The process of progress is risk-taking. Intellectual risk-taking, financial risk-taking, innovative risk-taking. And the whole idea is the nitpicker wants to stifle creativity. Now, if the nitpicker is also on the government payroll, they're paid by think tanks or what have you, right? Well, then what you do is they are using government time that we are paying for
to undermine an independent individual who is trying to do some good. So all I can say is that when I saw Sinead O'Sullivan being the focus of the wrath of these rather insubstantive thinkers, I decided she's doing something right. The RAF in the Second World War, the Brits, they used to say that, about taking flak, is you only take the flak when you're over the target.
When you actually have something to say. And it was also the other thing that you said before, which is never let the perfect bully the good. Exactly, exactly. And the problem with the nitpickers, right? Bit of Rousseau there, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Ha ha! Ha ha! Right? I'm liking your French worldview there. Bit of Al Russo in the morning. I just love a bit of that.
You get in the podcast, you get in the podcast. But just to come back to it, it creates a sort of resentment, right? And they're trying to foster resentment. They're trying to undermine the big person, you know? It's Gulliver and the Lilliputians, John. Yes. That's what it is. There's the image we have.
So on that, let us go and talk to Sinead O'Sullivan about this extraordinarily brilliant piece of original thinking that she published last week and that got the reaction of the nitpickers, which so substantiated, in my mind, the fact that she is on the right. Now on the line, we have a woman who has been through the ringer. This week, she has been subject to the nitpickers convention.
And that is always, as I said, a good sign because it means you're doing something right. Sinead O'Sullivan, how are you? What a week you've had.
Yeah, I'm good, David. Thanks for having me on. It's been an unusual week for me.
So on Thursday, we did a podcast which is related to an article that I had scribbled last week, which was really about accountability and what is happening in Ireland, etc. And then just by way of background to our listeners, Sinead produced a graph and then a subsequent piece on our sub stack, which we will talk about in a couple of minutes, which I thought was a devastatingly accurate
Not even rendition, it definitely the accurate assessment of where Ireland is as a country. And I suppose what we're talking about is this idea that we're told we're very rich. We're told we're doing all the right things. And yet people's quality of lives, their daily experience is that of a second tier country. Now, Sinead put this into a chart. This went viral. The chart was amazing.
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Chapter 5: What role do nitpickers play in addressing Ireland's systemic issues?
I mean, the big picture is, and anybody living in Ireland will know this, there is a massive difference between what we are told about how wealthy we are and how we experience that wealth through our day-to-day lives. And so, for example, you will constantly hear Ireland is the second wealthiest country in the EU. But somebody living in Ireland only feels the lack of public transport.
We don't have good rail connections. We still have not been able to build a metro system. 75% of GPs are closed. When I moved back to Ireland for a year and I subsequently left, I could not access a GP. just a basic lack of everyday things that you need to create some semblance of a good quality of life are not there.
And this stark difference between how wealthy Ireland is on paper and how wealthy we are in our everyday lives is creating this enormous pent-up energy, let's call it. And this energy is starting to come out. And we will discuss that later, but that's the big idea, that there is this gap between what we are on paper and what we are in reality.
So what you think is... This is a government or a system. This is the interesting thing about your article. You're basically talking, you're talking history, you're talking anthropology, you're talking economics, you're talking complex systems. You're talking about the whole gamut of inputs that goes to creating a society. And what you're saying is that we are a premature country.
This is what I found fascinating. Explain this to the listeners, the notion of a premature country.
Yeah, so most of my academic research actually focuses on premature markets. So, for example, where you might have a technology, let's say solar power in space, because I come from the space sector, right? So this technology could, in theory, exist.
I just want to stop there. Nobody in this podcast has ever said, I come from the space sector. I love it. We've had a lot of spacers. We've had a lot of spacers. So go on. It's a lovely image.
So let's think about industrial strategy, right? So we have solar power in space, but why is there no commercial market around this? And my industrial strategy academic work will say, well, because there is this gap that exists. It is a premature market, which means that the technology is there, but it doesn't matter how much money you throw at this technology. The standards aren't there.
The interoperability isn't there. The basic... legal system isn't there. All of these boring things that create an industry are not there. So this is why and how I think about markets. You can bring this up a level and then use this to think about states. And this is what I've done with Ireland.
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Chapter 6: How does the lack of institutional capacity affect Ireland's ability to address its challenges?
We've been an independent country for over 100 years. 70 years was a pretty much an abject failure, at least from the headline economic numbers. The last 30 years has seen a turnaround, at least again in headline economic numbers. Why do you think that Ireland hasn't put together these basic blocks of statehood which other European countries have.
Yeah, I mean, you know, basically we can look at our history and see that quite a lot of this has to do with where we come from, not necessarily of where we are today. So like, for example, we were a former, we are a former British colony.
And so for many, many years, we did not independently get to make decisions about what infrastructure we're building, how we're spending money, what that money goes on, what our assets, our resources are, because those were made for us on behalf of us. That is, in effect, the nature of what a colony was back then and what it meant to be colonialized.
We then managed to kind of get rid of the British colony, but then something interesting happened. And that gap was filled by other institutions. In Ireland, it was really the Catholic church. So the Catholic church had a huge involvement in the planning capacity that a state would usually do. They were involved in education heavily. They were involved in healthcare hospitals and
And this kind of filled that gap temporarily. Now, another strange kind of thing happened as religion started to leave a lot of the planning aspects of the government. We became an EU member state. And if you look actually quite interestingly, I had a discussion about this recently.
if you look at the infrastructure that we have actually built so so part of the issue is that today that infrastructure firstly we haven't built new infrastructure but the existing infrastructure is not fit for purpose but but let's look at where that existing infrastructure came from and that in itself is interesting when we became an eu member state the eu basically said look you guys need roads or something like we have standards and i'm sorry but you're just not meeting them
So they gave us a list of things we had to do. They gave us a list of how we should do them, when we should do them by, and they gave us money to do them. And we did them. So there again, that state capacity, the role of let's do something and let's build had been overtaken or overseen by an external party.
And then finally, we're at the kind of final stage of this brings us to today, which is the multinationals. Again, we haven't independently created any of the wealth that we're experiencing. We're getting it from elsewhere. And it's again, this external hand that is moving the Irish market.
So if you remove the EU, if you remove the multinationals, if you remove the Catholic Church, and if you remove the British Empire, We've never actually learned how to do this. We are, you know, we are children with pocket money that we're spending.
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of Ireland's reliance on external entities for its development?
It takes a very long time. This is why it's very hard for us to compare ourselves with the others. This is why there's a gap because these countries have existed. I mean, Ireland has existed as a country for a long time. We have not existed as a functioning state for, I don't know, if ever. That is a bold claim, but maybe it's true. So a different type of thinking is involved here.
But I think the first thing is understanding what the actual problem is. And that's, I think it feels palpable in Ireland that people are starting to understand that maybe this is the problem. But, you know, Ireland has to figure this out in its own way. And before we can actually figure out how to solve things, and I'm not one of these people that's like, here's a long list of problems.
I'm not concerned about the solutions. I am. But I guess my point is that we, before we jump to the solutions, we need to understand in the Irish context. what is the actual problem that we're solving here? And then what is the Irish way that we can do this? Because we don't have time. We do not have the developmental path that these other countries had for hundreds of years.
So we're going to have to get smart about this, but it has to happen.
Because it's fascinating you say that, Sinead, many years ago, I worked for a large French organization. And the very first thing we had was a thing called an organigram, okay? And the organigram was basically an engineering structure into which the whole organization worked. Well, you became a sort of a cog in that big machine. So you had a place in the structure.
And this was very much the engineering. Now, initially, the Irish person was like, oh, for fuck's sake, you know, I went back in school, you know, et cetera, et cetera. I'm a professional. But then you realize, actually, no, this is the way you run large multinational companies.
right it was a big bank and i was thought i was talking you know this is pathetic this is this is this is adolescent you know la la la and then you know actually no if something goes wrong in this part and this part there is a system that kicks into place to fix things but what i want to ask you about is the reaction to because what really disappointed me this week
was the reaction of official Ireland to you, a woman, an economist, an engineer, a citizen acting on her own, putting out something off her own bat. And rather than say, wow, This is interesting. This is somebody who's thinking at a level which we know we need to think about at this level, at this angle. The official reaction was nitpicking. Oh my God, her data isn't good.
My econometrics is better than yours. La la la. It was a pile on of official Ireland against you, right? And I know what this feels like, right? But this is, again, you're getting to the crux of the issue. Rather than address... The questions that are being asked and the big, big issue that has been excavated here, we try to shut you down.
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Chapter 8: How can Ireland learn to build its own systems and infrastructures?
It's me. It's me arsing around with data and numbers and using my time and my energy to... to push Ireland to be a better place. I'm not an Ireland hater. I would argue that the people who deny the existence of these problems are doing much more damage to Ireland than the person who's highlighting them. The other thing is I genuinely believe in participatory democracy and
And I myself am actively involved in this. I'm doing multiple projects at the minute whereby I'm creating enormous amounts of policies and auditing stuff that's there and looking at what are the basics that we're missing. And not only to highlight a problem, but I'm actively engaged in creating the solution. Just this morning, it's my birthday.
I'm spending the day creating draft legislation for something that no one really cares about, but that I do. And so I'm not one of these people that's hurling, you know, I'm just, I believe that we should be open to an open discussion around what is the problem? Let's discuss it. And why do people feel gaslighted 24-7? These problems exist.
Maybe some parts of official Ireland don't feel them every day because they have excluded themselves from an environment in which they become more real. But they're there. Don't deny other people's experience of that.
I couldn't agree with you more. I mean, just so you know, listeners, the reaction from certain quarters to Sinead's piece was, I think, as a citizen, pathetic. Because what it did, and I've seen it all the time, the big thinker comes up and says, look, we have a serious problem that we have to digest, we have to analyze, we have to fix at some level of urgency.
And the nitpicker who is actually benefiting from this dysfunctional state, who is probably working in a large state-sanctioned, publicly financed think tank and our outfit like that, decides, okay, this woman's a threat because she's exposing.
So let's try and nitpick our way to chip away at her credibility by saying, well, I wouldn't have done it like this, or I wouldn't have done it like this, or had you done this? And suddenly what you see is you see exactly the neurotic effect
insecure reaction of people who are afraid to look at the big picture and afraid to actually create a framework which might allow Irish people to see, why can't I get a house? Why am I 35 and I'm living in a flat share with my boyfriend or girlfriend that I really wouldn't like? I would like a little one bedroom place of my own.
Why am I living with my mom and dad and I'm 31 and I've got a good job? Why am I stuck in traffic? Why are these protesters on the M50 able to actually shut the country down? And why is the reaction to this? Let's just throw money at it because we can't think of a better way to do it. So I think that what you've done, Sinead, is a national service. You've done the state some service.
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