Ireland is a Hostage to Fortune

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1:04David McWilliams: To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. This podcast is powered by Acast. How are you doing there? It is time for the podcast. This podcast today, I think, is going to be one of the most important podcasts we do on the Irish economy, or we have done for a long, long time. Because last week, we listened to Brendan Greeley. Brendan Greeley talked about Dutch disease, Dutch disease in the context of America's insatiable and apparently unlimited appetite for issuing debt, and how that creates a massively bloated financial sector. It makes the country uncompetitive. It increases the dollar, and basically a country that is over-dependent on one sector elbows out all the other sectors.

2:06David McWilliams: That's what Dutch disease is. As we were saying last week, that applies to Ireland in spades with respect to the multinational corporations. So what we're going to look at today is not the impact of the multinational corporations on the top line, you know, tax revenue, employment, etc. What we're going to look is the slightly darker side of the multinationals in the sense that they dominate the economy so much that they elbow out and choke in effect small Irish businesses. They embolden the public sector to get even bigger. And more importantly, the state is captured by them. So we're going to talk about that.

2:47David McWilliams: I think it's a very important way of looking at the Irish economy. I think it's an interesting novel way of looking at it. and it moves us away from the sort of pedestrian left versus right debates that you get in Ireland all the time with the left saying, oh, we need more spending and the right saying we need less and the left saying we need less capitalists and the right saying we need more. I don't think that's how the economy works. So this is going to be Dutch disease a la Hibernia style. We're going to talk about that in a second. But I'm now looking at John. John is very enthusiastic because his fantasy football has started this week.

3:18Yes. And he is in pole position, I hear.

3:21David McWilliams: in the lads' fantasy football, which, by the way, I have backed out of completely. Ah, you chickened out. Anyway, just like Trump, your taco. Oh, well, we're going to talk about Trump and him. Mac are always chickens out. We're going to actually talk about Trump in a second. But how are you, Ed? Good? I'm good. I'm good. Yeah, yeah. The fantasy football kicked off last night. Liverpool-Bournemouth. Great game. I thought you were going to say Shamrock-Rover's balcony. Great game. 4-0 to Rover. But I'm doing well, but that's only one game. So I'm going to keep my powder dry because the lads will kind of rain in my parade, no doubt.

3:58David McWilliams: Well, you know, Dutch disease is the premiership as well in Irish soccer. The premiership has dominated and elbowed out Irish football and the League of Ireland. It is the same sort of idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is. It is the same idea. It's a weed that chokes all creative stuff. And it's like something that just bulldozes through local stuff. And again, keep that idea in your head. It's the Japanese knotweed. The Japanese knotweed. In fact, I heard Blind Boy on a podcast about the Japanese knotweed not that long ago, which was a beautiful podcast. One of his, I mean, his podcasts are always great, but this puts you in a very chilled and relaxed and Blind Boy-ish mood.

4:36David McWilliams: But let's go and talk about Alaska, John, because this, I know, is something you were looking at, hoping expectations raised, and then a bit of a dance group. Well, I think like everybody's expectations were raised because it was Trump himself who raised them, saying that, you know, things like Putin's not going to mess around with me and if I don't get a ceasefire deal, you know, it will have been a failure and blah, blah, blah. And what do we get? A failure. A big fat nothing. A taco moment. A taco moment. Well, coming back to, you know, my years of living in and working in Russia, it has always been the case that Russia plays a very, very interesting long game when it comes to negotiations.

5:24David McWilliams: It's smoke and mirrors. Remember the idea of the Potemkin villages, John? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Years and years ago. It's the same idea. It's always kind of throwing shapes, pretending you're tougher than you are, but ultimately having very, very strong, clear red lines, which is something that Donald Trump doesn't have. But is this kind of like a capitalist mentality and a failing of the modern US style of capitalism where it's all about the quick money, it's all about, you know... Short-term deal. Short-term deal, exactly, yeah. It's the quarterly corporate calendar approach to geopolitics, right?

6:03That you create the environment

6:05David McWilliams: where you get a quick win, your quarterly profits raise, you take money off the table because you're a corporate titan, i.e. a corporate raider, and you move on. And it's a constant. So, I mean, I think, okay, if we're charitable to Donald Trump, there is a potential strategy there, which the Americans refer to as the reverse Kissinger strategy. So this is all based on the notion that Kissinger flies to China in the early 1970s with a piece of paper from Richard Nixon, the absolute anti communist hawk, Richard Nixon. And he gives Kissinger a job, which is to drive a wedge between Russia and China.

6:51David McWilliams: So ideologically, their two biggest enemies were the Communist Party of China and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. And the Communist Party of China and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were never great, great friends, but they were always clinging on together in an alliance against the United States. And what Kissinger did was he prized China away from the Soviet Union by offering the extraordinary upside for the Chinese of the openness of the United States market to Chinese industry. So that starts in the 1970s. That gives Mao an option. That option is to go down the route of openness.

7:33David McWilliams: Deng Xiaoping takes that up in the 1980s. And by the 1990s, you have this, when we talked about it, I don't care what color the cat is as long as the cat. Catches mice, yeah. Exactly. So that was a seminal transformational moment because the Americans basically grabbed the Chinese, their ideological enemies, into the American Pacific sphere of influence allowed the Chinese to break away from the real dominance of Marxism, Leninism, which they had been committed to. And in the process, drove a wedge between the Soviet Union and China and refashioned lots of subsequent geopolitics. Now, that's what happened with Kissinger.

8:23In a charitable moment, if there is a structure, what Trump is trying to do, and this is where Europe and Ukraine are really, really exposed, Trump's major enemy is not Russia. It is China. America's long-term collision course is not a collision course with Europe or Russia.

8:44David McWilliams: It's not a collision course with China. This is the idea that basically the old power on the decline, the new power on the ascendancy are natural, A, competitors, and B, possibly even competitors on the battlefield, but certainly competitors economically. So against that background, Trump may be trying to prize Putin away from Xi. And that is the only coherent long-term strategy that I can see going on. And it's consistent with the MAGA movement. That's a tall order, though, isn't it? It's a very tall order. But I'm just saying, if there is any sense in this. So the idea would be that Trump treats various members of the BRICS, like South Africa, badly to try and bring it to heel.

9:33Treats India badly. Treats Brazil badly. Look at all the countries that it's actually done shitty trade deals with. They're all BRICS countries. Yeah. Are notionally BRICS countries. But surely this is a boon for the BRICS, as I said before.

9:48David McWilliams: Now, lots of people have said that's because Trump doesn't like Newland Brazil or he doesn't like, you know, Cyril Ramaphosa and he thinks the Afrikaners have been attacked. But maybe there is a strategy. Maybe, just maybe. And that strategy is to prise Russia away from China. And therefore, Europeans are in a very dangerous position because it means in Trump's head, friendship with Russia, by virtue of what it does to the deal that China has with Russia, the permanent concrete friendship that they speak about, is of more concern and consequence to Donald Trump than friendship to the Europeans, who are already in the bag, so to speak.

10:32And that means that Ukraine is just a pawn on the chess table. And that, of course, is where the Europeans have to worry that this

10:44David McWilliams: is the overall American strategy. It's not articulated, but it could be. Yeah, but that's what Trump was saying in terms of, you know, now it's down to Zelensky. But can I just ask you, just on your previous point, in terms of ideologies and changing ideologies, I thought it was interesting that Besant was talking about the US government taking a stake in Intel. And this will feed into our discussion now in a minute. But this is almost like anti-capitalist in many ways. This is like a state-owned company. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. It's kind of like nationalizing intel, like the post office.

11:23And so it's kind of going more in the communist route, as it were. Well, it's interesting. At the core of the MAGA movement is a proximity to old-fashioned European big status.

11:38David McWilliams: is that there are national champions. They are part of the security apparatus. They're part of the military industrial complex. They should not necessarily be owned by shareholders, but they should be owned by the United States government, or at least in part. Why? Because the United States government gives them large contracts. What we're doing is this Trump administration, no matter what you think of it, is tearing up assumptions, rule books, previously set in stone's way of doing business all the time. So they're going to say, we're going to give you an export license, but in return, we're going to take stakes in your company.

12:14David McWilliams: All that sort of stuff. Yeah. It's all, but it's all got to do, and it comes back to what I'm talking about here, with the Dutch disease in the United States. It's all got to do with the financialization of American commerce, with the financialization of American industry. Yeah. They all think, like Besant, like two-bit hedge fund private equity operators. there's always a little upside, there's a little stake, there's a flip, there's a twist. You know, it's all that stuff. I mean, we are talking about people who think like gamblers rather than people who think like strategists. Yeah, yeah. And that is exactly what you're happening.

12:50David McWilliams: And it's happening all over, all over in American foreign policy, in domestic policy, in America's perception of where the stock market should go, in America's perceptions of what should lead and not lead to their economy. we are in a totally, utterly different world. We are digesting it by the day. We have indigestion as a result because we've just digested one idea and then suddenly something else is spewed down our throat. It's like, oh my God, here we go. This is like, can you imagine? This is like Gaviscon on steroids for the intellectual class, right? That it's going to take us years to digest all this stuff.

13:26David McWilliams: In the meantime, the bag is full of assets and contradicting ideas and notions. Get those rainies out. It is fascinating. It is. You heard it here first, the Gaviscon approach to international politics. But part of that, John, is what I want to talk to you about today, which is Dutch disease in the context of Ireland. I think it's a fascinating, novel, exciting and persuasive way of looking at what is happening to our country across a variety of social, economic and financial indicators. And I think it's absolutely worthy of a little bit of analysis, worry, concern, and ultimately resignation that this is what's happening.

14:10We need to understand what's happening. So just to recap what Brendan Greeley was saying last week about Dutch disease in America. Now, essentially, Dutch disease is the curse of a country finding some vast natural resource or whatever, where instead of on paper, and you would think that it would be a good thing, it can actually have a really negative effect on the economy. And of course, it's called Dutch disease because when the Netherlands discovered a huge gas field in the 60s and 70s, it caused them more problems than it solved.

14:45David McWilliams: Yeah, yeah. I think what really triggered me, John, and that's a very millennial word. So almost Gen Z, I was triggered. Magger triggered. During the week, there's a big fight going on between Michael O 'Leary, Dermot Desmond, and the Irish state over the metro, Dublin metro. And the businessmen are saying, this is a ridiculous use of capital. It's a ridiculously expensive idea. So basically, their view is that it is far too expensive to build. Yeah. The state's view is it's far too expensive not to build it, because this is the sort of infrastructure we need. Yeah. So this has been going, they're knocking it around.

15:20David McWilliams: And of course, what is happening is this is all seen through the framework of the state having to make a decision one way or the other, right? Yeah. So everyone's lobbing them in, right? It's kind of, it's the silly season blood sport, right? Yeah. I suppose they're a little bit worried about, you know, having another children's hospital that has quadrupled in price. But this is the issue. Why is it quadrupled in price? So I'm going to come back to this, right? But what interested me was into this mix was lobbed a submission by the American Chamber of Commerce in Ireland. The American Chamber of Commerce in Ireland represents American multinationals.

15:58David McWilliams: And they lobbed in their pre-budget submission. Now think about this, the pre-budget submission of the American Chamber of Commerce. And they lobbed it in last week in saying the state has to absolutely go ahead with this. Why? Because it's for competitiveness, for ease of transport, for quality of life ideas, and ultimately Ireland needs this type of infrastructure. Now, I think they're right. But the point is, why has it got to the stage that the American Chamber of Commerce have a lobby group that lobbies and injects pre-budget statement to the Irish state, how have we got to that state? People aren't asking that question.

16:44And the reason is, the state is captured by American multinationals. Now, lots of listeners will say,

16:53David McWilliams: look, it's not so bad being hostage to people who give you lots of tax and people who employ lots and lots of people. You know, as hostages go, I'll take that, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think they're absolutely right. We have Stockholm syndrome. Yeah, but exactly, exactly. But two things can be right at the same time. What can be right is that the top line numbers of tax and the top line numbers of employment and what I would call the capital transfer from American multinationals. So the way in which they do business, the way in which they train managers, the way in which they introduce capital, the way in which they introduce techniques to Ireland, that's all great.

17:28But there's another side to the story. And the other side of the story is the Dutch disease idea. Yeah. And it is that if you regard the multinationals as a windfall of a one-off spigot, as Brendan used that word, a gusher, that is gushing tax money, then what will happen is over time, but relentlessly, that gusher will become in and of itself the most important economic and financial implement in the economy. And over time, what will happen is the influence of the American multinationals on Irish policy will become overwhelming. So the American multinationals' local handler, if you will, is the IDA.

18:17The IDA has become the central and most important economic agency within the policymaking apparatus. Now, what this does is the following. is that as the American multinationals gush money into the coffers of the state, two or three weird things happen. The first is because the state is one euro in every three spent in the economy, naturally, as the state begins to spend emboldened by this new money, this easy money, so to speak, the prices of everything goes up because the state is the biggest purchaser of the health service. It's also the biggest purchaser of new homes, don't forget. As you said about the dynamic with respect to the children's hospital is happening everywhere.

19:10Because the budget is soft, because this budget constraint has disappeared as a result of the American money, the state in itself is no longer the guardian of tax money. It is the reckless spender of tax money, number one. And number two, therefore, it is driving up the price of everything. Not the private sector, but the state through the public sector agencies. That's the first thing. Second thing is, therefore, as this money goes into the state, it becomes a kind of a land grab from various different agencies, quangos, non-government agencies, departments of this, that, the other, to get their hands on the money.

19:53So, therefore, the source of the money, the multinationals, cannot be in any way challenged. So what is basically happening, it's not that you want to challenge them,

20:03David McWilliams: but I don't think that our state apparatus understands what's happening in the economy. What's happening in the economy is we have a new resource like an oil find. That oil find is so unbelievably tax generative that it becomes the most important part of policy. Yeah. Now what happens then is small businesses can't compete because small businesses need to employ people on similar wages to the multinationals. But they can't do this because they have much less margin. Why have they much less margin? They have much less margin because the multinationals are so capital intensive, right? Just think about how much money they're spending on AI at the moment, the multinationals.

20:47David McWilliams: Hundreds of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars. Nobody can compete with that, right? So therefore, if you're a young graduate, you think, fuck it, Where will I get a job? Will I get a job with David and John and their startup, which may or may not work? Or will I go for a big job in one of the big multinationals? I know I'm going to get paid really, really well. I know I'm going to be pretty permanent. And I know I can jump from there to another one and another one. Then you think, you know what? I'd love to start up. I'd love to be small business, but I couldn't be bothered. And of course, what's happening on the rental side.

21:19Well, this is the story that our friend in Australia was talking about. Yeah, and he was talking about how it impacts the housing market.

21:26David McWilliams: How it impacts the housing market is, of course, it pushes up rents. Because the employees in the high productivity sector can afford, because they're getting paid more, to pay more for a one bedroom apartment in town, or whatever it happens to be. So that pushes up rents for everybody. What happens then is the employees of the small businesses come back to their employer and say, look, I can't survive on these wages. So they look for an increase. as they look for an increase, the profit margins of the small companies are squeezed, but they have no choice because the people will leave. And then, of course, as the multinational appetite for workers is voracious, immigration increases.

22:04Why? Because they need the foreign tech specialists

22:08David McWilliams: and they need the people with the languages. Which adds more pressure to housing, etc. That's more pressure to housing. So what you can see is the one-off windfall which should have been an opportunity for everybody to improve the society, actually becomes a source of deep dysfunction. As a dysfunctional economy becomes crowded out, it's an expression in economics, to be crowded out by this behemoth called the multinationals. But as the state becomes increasingly captured, because state power is financed by the multinational went for, the state then does everything in its power to keep the status quo going.

22:53David McWilliams: And nobody is explaining to the Irish people what is actually going on. And you get left-wing commentators talking about Marxism and right-wing commentators talking about capitalism. It's not about capitalism. It's about state capture. And of course, traditionally, state capture has been always and unambiguously a bad thing because it means that, you know, crony capitalists get control of the resources of the economy. This is the curse of resources and they line their own pockets. In Ireland, it's actually more complicated because there's lots of good stuff coming from the multinationals, but there's also lots of complicated.

23:32So it's not a one-off, this is a simple black and white story. This is an interesting, complicated, complex, and not always, not always ultimately positive story. So like the multinationals have been in Ireland for 20, 30 years. So are you saying?

23:51David McWilliams: Yeah, about 50 years if you go back to basic manufacturing. But the last 30 years is the big thing. Yeah, with tech and pharma in particular. So, you know, is this state capture and influence over the Irish government becoming even more pronounced now? I think it absolutely is. I'll give you some numbers. I'll give you some numbers, John, right? So apart from the infamous Apple tax money, the 13 billion, the one that we put in a little jar over the telly, and nobody was allowed to touch. Okay, it's like people's communion. Don't even look at it. You've already allowed to touch it. Don't even look at it.

24:22David McWilliams: Don't even look at it. Don't spend the money your granny gave you. Okay, so apart from that, Ireland collected last year 28.1 billion euros in corporation tax. And 88 % of all that revenue was paid by foreign-owned multinationals. Yeah, wow. Despite the fact, John, that these companies account for only 11 % of all companies in the country. So they pay 88 % of the tax. There's only 11 % of all the companies. This is all foreign, not Americans, it's all foreign multinationals. The top 10 multinationals accounted for nearly 60 % of all the receipts, 57%. That's up from 52 % in 2023. So the revenue base is becoming more and more concentrated in fewer and fewer companies.

25:11David McWilliams: Corporation tax receipts account for 36 % of all receipts collected by the exchequer. This is way out of line with other developed countries. I'll give you an example. In the UK, corporation tax is around 10 % of total tax take. In Ireland, it is moving towards 40%. So we're four times more concentrated than the UK. And the UK has similar figures to Germany, France, Denmark, etc. Right. So despite making up only 3.2 % of every enterprise in the country, multinationals employed 623 ,128 people last year. That's 27 % of all the nation's workers. So 3.2 % of total enterprises employ nearly 30 % of the nation's workers.

26:01David McWilliams: Now this all looks great. It's all a bit skewed, all right, yeah. It's really skewed. So you can see how it's so dominant. Now, this looks great. There's more money to spend. There's more jobs. There's more projects that can be financed. People are making a living. But looking at just one side of the balance sheet doesn't give you the whole picture. The bigger picture is one of an excessively dominant and favored sector, bending the economy and the society to its whim. So ironically, and this is the weird paradoxical situation we're in, the more tax money we get from America, the more dysfunctional the general Irish economy becomes.

26:37Less democratic? Well, definitely less, but democratic. Definitely less democratic. So again, these are problems of success. These are not problems of failure. But unless we understand what is happening to the society. And unless we see the power of the multinationals in and of itself influencing policy, but much more importantly, unless we tie up all the dots and we join all the dots, John, what we're getting is a situation that people don't understand. Oh, there's too many immigrants.

27:13David McWilliams: Oh, I wonder why that is. Or, oh, this Irish kids are leaving. Oh, why is that? It's to do the housing market. Okay, but why is the housing market so dysfunctional? Oh, okay, because rents up. Well, why are rents for bullets? It's just supply and demand. All this stuff, right? And then you think, why did the state, John, increase government spending from 77 billion to 105 billion in the last five years, which is a nearly 50 % increase in expenditure? Where did it get the money? It got the money from the multinationals. What did they do with the money? Where's the roads? Where's the railway? Where's the underground?

27:47Where's anything? Where are the houses? Where are the new schools, right? Where is the money going? And of course, this is essentially what I want to focus on, which is because the Department of Public Expenditure has its hands on the spigot, okay? Because it's getting all this free money gushing into it. There's no budget constraint. Everything can be financed. Is that what the oversight committee are supposed to be doing?

28:15David McWilliams: Yeah, but they're not doing it. They're not doing it. Why? Because the oversight committee are politicians and the politicians obviously want a little bit more sugar in their tea. Who doesn't want more sugar in their tea? But eventually, you don't want any more sugar in your tea. You can't sweeten the world, right? Yeah. In every juncture. But that means, oh, you can support this NGO or you can support this department of planning, expand that, or you can have a little quango here, or you know what, why don't we expand public sector employment, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Let's get another report from the big four.

28:46You're absolutely right. The big four are basically state-adjacent companies. Yeah. That's the great con in consultancy, right? The great con in consultancy is that they are, in effect, running the state because the civil servants have decided to abdicate in terms of responsibility. But they're abdicating responsibility when they've never had more money to spend, which is actually the disaster side. So what you see, John, is a whole society that is bending to the whims and the arcs of external corporations. On the top line numbers, this is great because we've got loads of money. But going back to our Dutch disease, what it's doing is it's skewing and elbowing out and crowding out small businesses.

29:38So much so that we may well end up in a situation in Ireland where we have an incredibly bloated multinational sector, which is feeding an incredibly bloated public sector, and all the while the small business sector contracts and contracts and contracts. That is the direction of travel. Can I just ask you now then, though, that when Brendan Greeley was describing Dutch disease in the 60s and 70s after discovering gas, how did they rebalance their economy and the structure of their society and come out of that? But before you answer that, let's do a bit of this.

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32:06Okay, Max, so we're talking about Dutch disease. And I was wondering that in the 60s and 70s, Holland found this huge gas resource. So how did they rebalance their economy? How did they kind of get out of this, as it were?

32:22David McWilliams: Well, because remember, I've said many years ago, never bet against clogs when it comes to money, right? Yes. The clogs in general are very good with cash. They have a very diversified economy. They have a very strong economy. They have also a couple of massive companies like Philips, these sort of big, big electronic companies. But it took them a while. It took them two decades. They had a severe recession in the late 1970s. The 1980s, they kind of chugged along, basically been dragged by Germany. But what actually happened to the Dutch was because a lot of Dutch industry sells into Germany. As Germany recovered, certainly in the early 2000s, Dutch industry also recovered.

33:02David McWilliams: But they have a very, very diversified finance sector. Yeah. They have a very inventive high-tech sector. So, for example, we talked about chips a couple of years ago, microchips and Intel. Yeah. One of the most sophisticated cogs in that supply chain is a Dutch company that makes these microchips. So they're very diverse. One of my points is it took them a while. Yeah. So diversification is the key. Diversification is the key, and it took them a long time to get back to where they were. And now they're back to where they are. But if in this current climate, when we have tariffs and we have the orange man in the White House, who knows what's going to happen, but they might be pulling pharma out of Ireland or whatever.

33:49So are we heading for a recession or could we be heading for a recession? And where does this end? I think that's a really good question. I mean, what has always intrigued me is most economic commentators are worried about

34:05David McWilliams: what I would call the quantitative fear. That a bit like, you know, if you were a Saigon brothel keeper, John, just imagine you were keeping a brothel in Saigon, right? And the American GIs were your business. Your big fear was the Americans would pull out and your business would be gone. The brothel would close, right? So a lot of economists remind me, and I stopped that now. That's the quantitative thing, that the Yanks disappear and there's a massive hole in our public sector balance sheet and we have to retrench and have austerity, right? That's the fear that you hear articulated all the time, right?

34:41Which is one fear.

34:43David McWilliams: That's the quantitative issue. I'm much more interested in the qualitative issue, which is what is this doing to the society? Yeah. What is it doing to the various links in the chain? What is it doing to house prices, to the cost of living, to the diversification? You talked about diversity, right? What every ecosystem needs is diverse ecosystems where if one thing goes down, something else replaces it, and we move on. The last thing we want is monoculture. As you know from your environmental science days, you really do not want monoculture. I mean, the worst example of monoculture in Ireland was the famine.

35:27We had one crop, and when that crop failed, we were screwed. Now, imagine just take that idea. So what I'm more interested in is the following, is that how can we build an economy that is not dominated by and jumps to the tune of foreign corporate boardrooms, while at the same time keeping all the upside. And that's why one of the first podcasts we ever did was use the windfall money

36:00David McWilliams: as a startup fund, not a pension fund. The sovereign wealth fund, yes. Exactly, to use the sovereign wealth fund. This is before any of those fellows, even we're talking about sovereign wealth funds. But don't use it as a pension fund for future generations because that's only rewarding people for getting old. That's hardly a prize, okay? Everyone gets old. Use it for a startup fund to encourage young Irish people to stay here and start up businesses. Because only by having an entrepreneurial business savvy, small business biased country that supports small business but also creates the environment where people feel welcome to do these things.

36:41That's the only way forward. It's a diverse ecosystem. Use the money to seed these businesses. Lots of them will fail, but some of them will succeed and you will change the essential commercial DNA of the country. You don't do that. That's what I'm much more worried about. If you don't do that, then it's not that the Americans will pull out. I don't think that's the fear. I think they will stay here. But so they will become bigger and bigger and bigger. and more and more dominant. And at the end of the day, Dutch disease, which is like a virus, it might not be the worst one, but you do need a vaccine against it.

37:17And that vaccine has to support the rest of the body rather than focus on just one area. So that I think, John, and we leave it here, is a very persuasive way of looking at what's happening in the Irish economy. it's non-ideological it's non-political it is not left it is not right it is not corporatist it's not anti-capitalist it's not socialist it's just saying this is where we have arrived at some of the things are really good but some of the things are corroding destroying and imperiling the very financial commercial ecosystem that we need to have that diversified economy let's leave it there

38:02David McWilliams: and we'll talk to you on Thursday John just before we go speaking of diverse creative ecosystems Lucy has a new track out today which is called I Know It's Hard it's a beautiful track and let's play out with it I've heard it Mac and I have to say I've always called Lucy the golden voice but her voice is front and centre in this and it's gorgeous so a little bit of nepotism to end the podcast this is Lucy Mac Williams with I Know It's Hard

38:50I know it's hard, but it's the right thing to do. I know those eyes, they look like kisses, look like months So should you say you're fine? I know your face, what you like, what you hate You say I don't know you I know it's hard to pretend I don't want you I know it's hard, but it's the right thing to do Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da I know it's hard, but it's the right thing to do And I can tell, I know it by your smile It's okay, it's been a while since we've said it And when I'm old and there's new faces in the frame Will you be asking her to change? Will it only be her name?

40:15And every night when you're lying in your bed You'll never keep me out of your head All the things you could have said And it's hard

40:29Maybe you'll leave it to another day And it's hard And you'll call me and you'll hear me sing uh Mmm

40:49Thank you.

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