Is Ireland the Worst-Run Rich Country in Europe?

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0:47David 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. The podcast coming from the barricades. Well, not necessarily from the barricades, but Ireland has been barricaded in in the last week. we are going to try and take a bird's eye view of the protests, the strikes, the fuel prices, the relationship between the government, the inability of the state to get its act together, all that sort of stuff. But on the line looking very Antipodean is John from Melbourne. How are you, Ed? I am very good working on my tan, Mac, working on my tan.

1:34Well, in comparison to my pasty self. You look positively. You look like a positive Adonis. A Greek god is what you look like in comparison to the translucent Reds are here. You can actually see through him completely. What's the crack? How is it down there? Well, I have to say I'm loving Australia. It's fantastic. Well, I've got, what, 48 hours left here. But we've driven about 2 ,500 kilometers. Wow. From Melbourne down along the Great Ocean Road all the way to Adelaide and back. And back through the Grampians, which I absolutely loved. They're a mountain range. Sandstone mountain range. Beautiful.

2:15I know I've been sending you some pictures of birds and stuff, which I know you've been deleting. But that's okay, Mike. I'll print them out and give them to you. I don't want people going through my phone pictures of exotic birds. And believe me, dear listener, we are talking about flying birds. Yes, I should have made that clear. Yeah, exactly. Thank you, John. But one thing, I'll tell you, Mac, one thing that I found kind of interesting and funny in equal measure was, you know the way in Ireland, you go to any village or town and there's loads of pubs. You know, there's a disproportionate number of pubs to the population.

2:52Yes, and there used to be many, many more. Yes, yeah, it's changed now. But in Australia, I've found, maybe it's just me, but I've noticed that it's the same here, but with barbers. Every street, in every town, in every village, there seems to be a barber. Are they a Turkish barber? They're not a Turkish barber, but the ironic thing is that Australians aren't exactly known for their nice hairdos. They do. They resuscitated the mullet. They didn't really, I don't think they invented, but they absolutely resuscitated it. Absolutely. They have the worst haircuts, but the most barbers. What's going on?

3:30I can't quite figure it. That is one for the listeners. Please, please, if you could actually, on Twitter, if you could actually answer John's dilemma. Barbers, the ratio of barbers to haircuts. This is the sort of thing for which this podcast is famed for, John. You know, eclectic, bizarre observations. Now, I want to talk to you about Ireland. I don't know if you've been seeing what's been going on. Very little, very little. Okay, so as listeners will know, And again, for international guests, this is probably something that is bubbling under the surface everywhere. We remember the gilets jaunes, which were the yellow vests, which was the yellow high-vis jackets, which was the name given to French protesters about 10 or 15 years ago, who started to appear on the motorways and on the roundabouts of France.

4:22And they were protesting, the protests were triggered by an increase in a carbon tax. Now, this seemed to many people to be rather unusual because the carbon tax increase was, number one, was very small, but number two, the elites in France who were all environmentalists said that we have to do this for the good of the planet. And this triggered a ferocious response in France of people who described themselves as the gilets jaunes, which were the yellow vests, which were the high vest people. And they brought France to a standstill. Now, when the elites of the 16th arrondissement of Paris, which is basically where most of the wealthy live, most of the policymakers live, etc., in the western side of Paris, began to look at what was happening in France.

5:13they realized, one, the rage came from the fact and the location of the Gilets Jaunes on the roundabouts came from the fact that these are the people who drive. These are the people who don't benefit from the fantastic metros, from the TGVs, from the high-speed trains. These are the people in central France who drive everywhere. And an increase in their fuel bill is an increase in their daily costs, and it goes right down to the bottom line, number one.

5:39David McWilliams: And number two, these are the people who are being squeezed by a relatively high cost of living and reasonably low wages outside metropolitan areas of France. We have this now in Ireland, okay? So initially it was farmers, John, then it was truckers, and now, of course, the anti-immigrant guys have got involved in it. But what it has proven to us is just how fragile the governance of this state is, and just how fragile the power of the state has been seen to be because the place has been completely closed down, right? And it also then focused our attention, John, on what is actually going on. And I think what is going on in Ireland is a theme that we've been talking about for the last couple of months.

6:32It is this weird intersection of a country with a huge amount of tax money, which is unearned, right? Because it's coming from the Americans. So it's not as if we're earning it ourselves. So it's easy money,

6:44David McWilliams: and it is allowing the state to have absolutely no control over budgets, projects, etc. So here's the transmission mechanism, John. I asked a question last week. Is Ireland the worst-run country in Europe and possibly in the world? Is there any other country that has wasted so much public money so quickly in so many ways? Has there ever been a country that has achieved less with such extraordinary public spending? Because what we see in Ireland is absolutely no consequence for the public sector missing its targets, budgetary targets, both budgetary and time-lapse, right? So budgetary, time, and quality.

7:31David McWilliams: These are the three things that project management is all about. How do you build something? Where do you build it? When do you build it? How much does it cost? Now, in the private sector, these are existential targets. If you miss them, you get fired if you're a project manager. Absolutely. In the public sector in Ireland, nothing happens. There's never been a senior public servant, as far as I know, demoted and are fired for missing a spending target. And as a result of that, what you get is what I would call fiscal incontinence, John. Incontinence is a lovely word, right? Okay, but it's drip, drip, drip, lack of any sort of control.

8:13David McWilliams: Now, the reason, and again, dear listeners, what I would like you to get your head around, is that it's not just a budgetary issue we're dealing with here, but we'll do that in a minute. What it actually is, is the way in which a small economy works. So in Ireland, the government is about, let's say, the late 30s, 40 % of all spending is state spending. So that's 40 % of GDP. Now, what does that actually really mean in real life? It means that four euros out of every 10 that are spent in this country go through the funnel of the public service, right? Now, what does that mean? It means that if you lose control of public service money, if you're missing your targets, if you're spending like a drunken sailor, or as I said over the weekend, if you're just pissing this money up against the wall, what actually happens is because the state is the biggest spender in the economy, if the biggest spender in the economy has no budgetary control, it is the cause of inflation because it is pushing up the price of everything because it has no budgetary control.

9:23David McWilliams: So what you're getting in Ireland is the windfall of the American taxes is running through the country like a dose of salt, number one. Number two, it is facilitating project managers who are just wasting public money all the time. Because there is no consequence in their jobs, every time one agency or one department overspends, it gives permission for the next guy to overspend and the next guy and the next guy. And suddenly what you get is you get an almost torrent of overspending and waste. And then, of course, all this pushes up the price level of the economy. And once you push the price level of the economy up, two things happen.

10:06If you're in what they call the traded sector, John,

10:09David McWilliams: so there's a traded and non-traded sector. If you're in the traded sector of the economy and your price level is increasing and your cost levels are increasing because the state has no capacity to stop spending, you then get squeezed because your export prices are fixed by the competitive external market, world prices, okay? If your domestic prices are rising faster because the state is pushing everything up, you get squeezed, your margins get squeezed, your cost of living gets squeezed, your take-home pay gets squeezed, your after-tax income gets squeezed. That's the first thing, number one. Number two, if there is no control over public spending, the relationship between people's taxes, their tax burden, and what they're getting from the state breaks down.

11:01David McWilliams: because what you feel is that I'm paying a huge amount of income tax in particular here. And we know that Irish income tax system is unbelievably jaundiced towards middle and upper taxpayers. They are the people who are actually shouldering everything. And they are getting squeezed and there's no relation between their tax that they pay and the public services they get. And then the third big thing, John, is the budgetary arithmetic, that if we keep spending and spending and spending, what happens if we get a shock to the system? What happens if the tax base begins to deplete? Is any government going to be able to inflict the austerity that will come in the event of a massive shock to the system?

11:51David McWilliams: So all of these three things are bubbling up under the surface. The third problem is one thing that economists worry about and financial markets worry about. But the second two problems are people's everyday experience. When you get out of bed on a Monday morning, what you're facing. So what I'm going to do, John, is we're going to talk to you about the cost overruns because the figures are off the scale. Yeah, okay. A couple of things there. You were talking about four euro in every 10 is spent by the government. Yes. How does that compare to the rest of Europe, to France? It's much lower. It's much lower.

12:28I mean, France is 57%. So the French have got themselves into a total pickle. Like France is basically a country that has expanded its public sector to such an extent that it's almost infantilized the country on a certain level. So Ireland is still one of the countries that isn't spending so much of its GDP, but that's because our GDP or our GNI, whatever you're using, is so inflated by the American multinationals. So what you're saying is if the multinationals disappeared, which, you know, they may or may not, then we're in serious trouble and then there'll be an awful lot more spending. The interesting thing, I don't think it's that the multinationals disappear because they're making so much profit here that they're like, this is a sort of treasure island for them, right?

13:13Yeah. But I think just to allow listeners to get their head around, if the multinationals weren't here, GNP or GNI would be much, much lower. Therefore, state spending as is, as a percentage of that much lower GMP would be much, much higher. So again, and we would be, I would say, close to the French level. But the French have public services. This is the key thing. The French have bloody metros and they have TGVs and they have a very, very brilliant health service. So what the French state provides is actually incredibly impressive. Our problem is the state provision is not impressive. You try to get around this city, the transport is a disaster, the housing is a disaster.

14:03We're going to talk about that in a second, right? And yet we are spending a fortune.

14:07David McWilliams: And then the question is, why? And it's very easy to blame politicians, but the politicians can be actually voted out every four years. What the real cynicism at the core of Ireland, I believe, and I call it cynical, is the upper civil servants, the sort of Mandarin class that run the country, that pay themselves exceptionally well, that are never seen, that are behind the veil. It's the permanent government, in effect. They don't care if it's Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael or even Sinn Féin or Labour, whoever's in power, because there's a cynicism at the heart of it. Let the ministers do whatever they want, but we run the show.

14:52David McWilliams: And there is a contempt. I think the upper civil servants have shown a total contempt for the citizens in the way in which they spend the citizens' money, because it's not between left and right, the problem in Ireland. I read them. I think it's between care and contempt. These are the two issues. If the public service care about the public, they will spend the money of the public in such a way as to respect the cash. If they are so contemptuous of the public that they can have cost overruns and they don't give a shit, right? What you're talking about is a profound, profoundly cynical Mandarin class, the Mandarin class with a class that ran China for many, many years.

15:39David McWilliams: And they were, again, it's this idea of a caste behind the veil. And behind the veil is that they can't be touched. And they are heavily unionized. They are gold-plated when it comes to all their benefits and their pensions, etc. But more importantly, they don't seem to have the concern for the state. And they are happy to allow everything just go to shit. And as long as there is American money coming in, there's always going to be enough money in the purse to pay them, to pay the overruns. And of course, what you get is these massive overruns. And it's not corruption, John, in the old-fashioned way, right?

16:24In the Charlie Hawley way of, thank you very much, big fella. Can I have a million quid in my bank account?

16:30David McWilliams: But it is a corruption of the system, that the system is being corrupted from the inside out because the incentive structure deep in the public service is never to get value from money. It's always to get money. and therefore you have this idea of the theory of the bureaucracy, which is a very old-fashioned, very old way of looking at it, that the bureaucracy's job is to keep the bureaucracy growing. So it's like this huge tumour inside the system and its job is to keep absorbing in as much money, as much resources, as much influence as possible and to be as unaccountable as possible. So when you have an unaccountable caste running the system, running the projects, running the project managers, what you then have is monumental waste, number one, but no accountability, number two, no consequence, number three, and therefore no incentive to change.

17:29David McWilliams: And all of this has been facilitated by the windfall of the American money. But even if the American money were to remain, John, what we are doing is we are destroying the country from the inside out. And that, I think, is what is driving many of the protesters. They might not necessarily have linked all the dots together, and they might be inchoate and rage and anger and disperate. It's all part of the same thing. But nobody's explaining to them, this is what's happening. The problem isn't the increase in fuel, the strengths of Hormuz, the Iranians, the Americans. Yes, that's a problem, but there ain't anything we can do about that.

18:13David McWilliams: No amount of tractors on the M50 is going to change the facts on the ground of the Middle East. But what we can do is explain to the average person listening to the podcast, here are all the links. Here is the intricate ecosystem that has been profoundly, I think, badly affected at every level by this Mandarin cast. and the Mandarin cast who are the senior public service. It's not the average little dude who's on the average wage who's in some department, right? It's not that person. It's the cynicism of the people at the top who have decided that it is tolerable to miss all these targets. And we're going to give them in a second, John.

19:06David McWilliams: And that cynicism percolates down to the bottom. and therefore what happens is as long, and we know this from any sort of management theory, you don't have to be Peter Drucker to figure this thing out, if the management of an institution is sick, and by that I mean if the incentive structure are not healthy, if the people at the top are cynical, if they're playing politics, if they're not looking at clear, open, transparent targets that can be communicated all the way down, what you get after a while is that institution be it the department of this, that and the other, is simply sick. And sick, I mean, they can't do the job.

19:46David McWilliams: And that is what's happening. Okay, so let's get into this then, Mac. And give us some figures on this and some examples, actually, more to the point. Well, this is where I would ask listeners to get yourself a cup of tea. Settle down. Or maybe some of it's stronger. Yeah, you're afflicted by hypertension. Take your blood pressure tablets right now. Go into a dark room, maybe with a damp towel so you can put it in your head when it's about to explode. MetroLink, John. Right. Okay, let's start there. Metro has been planned since 2000. That's a quarter of a century ago. Yeah. A quarter of a century.

20:20It has consumed 200 million euros of money in reports

20:25David McWilliams: and not one piece of construction has yet begun. It is now projected to cost between 9.5 billion or 23 billion, depending on a variety of things. So just think about this, right? So the lower end, the best possible outcome, the lower end cost per kilometer is 505, so half a billion euros per kilometer, right? Right. In Spain, in Madrid, the Spanish capital, a kilometer of metro is costing them between 64 and 72 million euros. So how is it possible that it costs eight times more, Eight times, not twice, not three times, eight times more to build a metro in Ireland as opposed to building a metro in Spain.

21:15And what is the answer that's given when you ask that question?

21:17David McWilliams: The answer that is given is the people who are deciding how much money this is going to cost do not care about the cost. So they, rather than actually say, well, the problem is planning and the problem is the legal system, well, fix these problems in order to bring down the cost, be aggressive, if it is a planning issue, if it is, but it can't just be. So the cost of construction internationally has to be the same. You're buying the same machines, you're digging the same holes in the same streets. You have all sorts of, over the last 20 years, all around Europe, and particularly from China, huge, huge increases in the productivity of public projects because the Chinese are figuring out how to build quicker, how to build cheaper, better materials, etc., etc., right?

22:14And of course, the Spaniards are copying that. So we're trying to claim that all the increases in prices, the eight times more, has got something to do with our planning,

22:24David McWilliams: our legal system. That makes no sense at all. So what you have is you have a gouging system where the people who control the budget have no control over, which is why they have the audacity to say, well, it could cost$9.5 billion or$23 billion. We're not that sure. So that's the first thing, right? That's outrageous. Think about it's everywhere the public purse touches, turns to waste, right? And again, this is a criticism not of the country. It's a criticism of a cast that is running the top of public service because they cannot be voted out. They don't lose their jobs, right? Lewis Extension, right?

23:05The Lewis, right, ran three times over budget. Dublin Port Tunnel cost twice the original estimate. There was a planned dart underground, which was shelved after 47 million was spent on reports. and it was replaced by a planned Lewis extension to the airport, which was also abandoned. It's just bonkers, right? Then you look at the health system, right? Irish healthcare. Now, I was in St. Vincent's Hospital visiting an old friend over the weekend

23:35David McWilliams: and the care he is getting is amazing, right? And again, so this is not a criticism of frontline health workers. It is not a criticism of the nurses, of the radiographers, of everybody who are in the health server, what it's about is getting value for money. Because the first thing is Ireland has the youngest population in Europe. So that means that we should have amongst the lowest health spend because typically young people don't get sick. So if you have a very, very old population, you're going to have a massive, massive disparity in terms of health spending vis-a-vis a country with the young population.

24:14So we should, if the place is managed properly, have low health spending. So what is the spend? So Ireland's per capita health spending is€7 ,394. That is the second highest per capita health spending in Europe. The average in Europe is€5 ,000. But for all the money, Ireland's health outcomes, so how sick are the people, how good is the system, how long are people sick for, how people are getting in and out, all that sort of stuff.

24:47David McWilliams: The health outcomes put us only 15th out of 43 European countries. And that is European countries that are very poor, like your Albania's and your countries in Eastern Europe and all those places, right? Like we should be, because we're spending the highest, we should be number one, but we're not. Well, do you know what, Mac? Not only that, but we also have the lowest spend on mental health compared to other European countries. Apparently, the average across Europe is about 10%. I think actually in the UK, it's about 14 % of the overall health budget is spent on mental health, which, and as you say, with a young population, it's even more important to have good mental health.

25:30And our target is supposed to be 10%. But you know what? That's also one of the reasons why we have such a strong charity sector because they're filling in the gaps that the HSC should be doing, like on the kind of street-level services like homelessness, autism, disabilities, age charities, all that kind of stuff that should be covered in the overall health budget. But the charity sector is left to pick up the pieces, as it were. Yeah, but I mean, these are things that have to be addressed over time. But if you talk to particularly nurses and doctors,

26:07David McWilliams: they will tell you that the levels of management, the ratios of managers to nurses and doctors, to frontline staff has exploded. That basically there are managers everywhere in the HSC. Nobody knows what they're doing. The management system is appalling. And all this is coming out in things like the children's hospital, right? Oh yeah, that's such a joke. Well, it was originally budgeted for 650 million euros to be completed in 2020. Now the budget is$2.24 billion. That's an overrun of 220%. And nobody's been fired. Nobody. No contractor has been told, off you go. No project manager at the top of the HSC who commissioned all this has lost their job.

26:58David McWilliams: Nobody's been demoted. Nobody's had a wage cut. It just goes on and on. And we've had several health ministers during that time too. Yeah, because the health ministers are just sort of, they're the bed blockers. They're kind of sitting in the middle, being run rings around by the permanent Mandarin caste. Like you are now in Australia, right? We are losing huge percentages of our young nurses and young doctors are leaving, going to Australia. And they're all going because of conditions. They say the conditions in Australia are much better. They get paid more and they work less, right? Now, can you imagine if you're spending more per head than anyone in Europe, how is it possible that the conditions for essential workers are worse than anywhere else unless the management is appalling and the caste that is managing and taking those senior, senior decisions are not only, again, inefficient, but they're cynical.

27:59It's the cynicism that gets me, right? Think about housing, right? The housing crisis, we haven't built enough houses, etc. You'd think, okay, well, basically, the Irish are not spending enough on housing. That's why they have a housing deficit, right? Wait for it. Ireland spends proportionately the second highest on housing across the EU, right? We spend most on housing benefit. That's€755 per person, far ahead of the second place, which is Finland, which is€484 per person.

28:31David McWilliams: Now, what is happening, John? Our annual housing budget now is running between€8 and€9 billion, right, for each of the last three years. That is up from€1 billion in 2015. So in 10 years, our annual budget has gone up by nine times, right? And yet we have house prices still rising at close to 10%. Yeah, yeah. Rents up 115 % since 2010. Homelessness up at 17 ,000, highest ever. 20%, only 20 % of our working population are able to afford to rent the average apartment. Absolutely. Okay, you need a combined salary of between 110 ,000 and 140 ,000 to afford a two-bedroom apartment in town. And we have the second fewest homes per capita in Europe.

29:24Now, what does that tell you? Right? What does that tell you? It tells you that we are pissing money up against the wall. We are spending. This abject failure, it's not from a lack of ambition, John. Like there's loads of ambition. There's reports of housing for all and delivering housing and housing first. La, la, la. Yeah. It's a lack of competence. Yeah. The National Development Plan has allocated 36 billion euros to housing to 2026 and 2030. Right? And yet house and apartment construction is still lagging behind targets all the time. So we're spending more and we're getting less. And where are they coming up with this figure of 36 billion?

30:04Like, where is that? How is that divided up and where is that allocated? Well, obviously, there's the givers and the takers, John, right? In every transaction, okay? And the takers are the construction industry who are saying, look, you know, it's going to cost X, Y, and Z, right, to do this. Now, obviously, there's always an incentive if you are in receipt of state spending to overestimate how much things are going to cost because that's your job. The job of the guardians of public money

30:36David McWilliams: is to interrogate all those bids to such an extent that you get the best value for money for the punter. What I'm saying is there is no interrogation. Now, the question is, why is there no interrogation? Is that a lack of expertise? It could be a lack of expertise, but then you hire in the expertise, number one. Yeah. There could be a situation where over the last 20 years, the county councils, which used to build things and have engineering departments and used to have roads departments that were actually good at what they did, they have been outsourced to private contractors. And those private contractors, in a sort of an ideological way, have decided they've been outsourced ideologically.

31:23And now, of course, the private contractors are in control. But the private contractors have a totally different set of objectives to the public contractors because the private contractors really want to gouge if they can.

31:36David McWilliams: The point is nobody is protecting the public purse. Now, that would be bad enough if it weren't for the added idea. We spoke about Dutch disease a couple of weeks ago on the show. that the money coming in from the Yanks is like turning on a tap for an alcoholic because we have a problem. The problem needs to be fixed by cutting spending. But what we are doing is we are feeding the beast by giving it more and more and more money. So this is the resource curse that we speak about, right? That in effect, Ireland has too much money and that money that's coming in is infantilizing us. It's making us childlike in our decision making and we know that if children are not given boundaries that their bad behavior will continue and continue and that will become contagious.

32:34David McWilliams: So this is all about boundaries, John. And the boundaries have to be actually implemented by the caste that is charged with managing the public purse, the Department of Finance. It starts in the Department of Finance and then percolates out. But from what I can see at the Department of Public Spending, what I can see, not just me, what everyone can see, is there's absolutely no decisions being taken at that level which stop this extraordinary waste of public resources and public money. But Mike, we live in a democracy, right? And every four years comes around, we have the opportunity to vote in and vote out and all that kind of stuff.

33:17But what you're saying is that it seems that it's almost a pointless exercise because no matter who we vote in and what minister takes up whatever department, it doesn't really seem to change anything. You know, you talked about housing, you talked about transport, you talked about health. So what do we do apart from man the barricades and throw a few Molotov cocktails? I'm not adverse to that. I have to say. Well, I am, but that's just me. I'm the centrist dad in this relationship. Let's talk about that after the break. Okay.

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35:49So, Mark, just before you get your balaclava on and your molotov cocktails later on. The least terrifying public activist the world has ever seen would be me. I'd be negotiating, chatting. Cup of tea, maybe. Cup of tea, definitely cup of tea. down with that sort of thing. But what can we do? Because I certainly feel, at the beginning you were talking about you might need a little wet cloth on your head and a little lie down afterwards. I certainly feel like that because I kind of feel a little helpless. And at the last election, Mac, myself and my girls marched down to the polling station to cast their vote to elect a responsible, sensible politician that's full of ambition and enthusiasm and all the rest to get in there and change the world, change Ireland for the better and get houses built and the whole lot.

36:44But that doesn't seem to be working. So what do we do? Okay, so I think that the first thing is to identify what the problem is.

36:53David McWilliams: One of our dilemmas in Ireland and all over Europe is that we still impose a left-right, if that even has any purchase intellectually anymore, prism on the world. So what Ireland's been offered now is a left alternative. Now that may well have some sort of plausibility, viability, etc. But the problem we've just identified is too much government spending, not too little government spending. The problem isn't between, I don't think, left and right. If you think about intellectually, right, the right wing take their economic lessons from one book, which is The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, which was published in 1776, which is 250 years ago.

37:44It is now the 250th anniversary of the publication of that particular book, right? So that's largely the right wing Adam Smith liberal, neoliberal Bible.

37:57David McWilliams: The left wing have got their Bible, which is Das Kapital, 1867, published, right, by Karl Marx. And in that, so if the right wing take their view from a book that was published before the Industrial Revolution, okay, think about this, right? Yeah. Which is Adam Smith's book, right? The left wing take their economics from Das Kapital, published in 1867. The core of Das Kapital is that everyone is stereotyped into a class, right? So you're working class, bourgeois, whatever. And then once you're put into that class, this is how Marxism figures out the world. Once you're put into that class, it is imputed from that class that you will behave in a certain way.

38:43So it has an extraordinarily facile view of the complexity of human nature. So we're all corralled into a class, and then once we're in that particular corral, we then all behave in a certain way. And that is what the sort of class war of the left is.

39:00David McWilliams: Those two ridiculously simplistic worldviews, the liberal and the Marxist, right, are insufficient to explain what's going on. Because what's going on here is a type of cronyism. But the cronyism isn't some really rich guy who's basically bunging the state and who is bribing politicians. It's an entire system that is leeching off American multinationals that are in themselves leeching off our tax system. Because they're only here because it's a tax scam. Yes, yeah, yeah. So once you look at it in that way, you think what we need are managers, not ideologues. dialogues. It's so boring. It's so dull.

39:46David McWilliams: It's so run of the mill. But we need more, John, dare I say it, accountants. We need legions of accountants and project managers and fellas with them, girls with Excel spreadsheets whose jobs are only and explicitly defined by getting value for money. The rise of the clipboard. Exactly. Once you impose that sort of discipline on everything, be it hiring, be it firing, be it spending, be it capital budgets, be it current budgets, what you get then is a shock to the system, which puts at its very core the idea that public money is sacred. Public money is yours and mine. And when we have a cost overrun, money is being taken out of your pocket.

40:42David McWilliams: That's what people have to begin to think about, that it's actually you are being robbed. You are being degraded. You are being immiserated by this. And then you've got to think, okay, well, who is in control of that? and if you have politicians who are in control of that, those politicians need to go to the public and say, I am going to reform the caste that spends your money and I am going to go in and get unashamed cost controllers in there. Now the problem with the left and the right is the following. The left see the solution in more state, more spending, more government because ideologically they're driven from a good place i think which is you know if you have the money you give it to people you try and increase everybody's chance and you know all the boats will rise that's their their basic idea yeah yeah yeah and i think it comes from a really good place but the problem is i don't think it understands the human condition because it's imputing class consciousness into people who don't feel that the only defining characteristic of their lives is the class that some Marxist ascribes them to belong to.

41:59David McWilliams: I don't believe that that actually understands the human condition. That's the first thing. But the second thing is the neoliberal view and the liberal view is that as long as the budget deficit is fine, well then everything should be hunky-dory. But the budget deficit is only fine because the revenue that is coming in from the Americans is so extravagant, right? And I think that what we're talking about here and what we have to be talking about here is management, management, management. Dull, run-of-the-mill accountancy. And that's not the sort of thing that wins elections, right? No, no, it's not.

42:40I'm on the cost-cutting accountancy wing of the party, you know? The difficulty I have with this, though, is that where do you get these kind of people? Like, are we talking about an Elon Musk type doge kind of situation? No, no, no. Or are Michael O 'Leary coming in and running the show? Well, we are talking about people who understand the value of money, right?

43:03David McWilliams: And understand that if you waste it, two things happen. One is people get angry. But from a macroeconomic perspective, the rate of inflation rises dramatically in the country that is wasting loads of money. this has a dual impact of reducing the quality of life of people no matter what their income is number one and number two it hollows out the productive sector why because the rate of inflation in Ireland means that it's impossible to compete in the open market and what you do then is you get a massive reduction in the small business sector and a massive increase in the public sector and the multinationals.

43:49David McWilliams: So Ireland ceases to be a dynamic economy and it is just one leeching sector which leeches off to another one. So it's the public sector leeching off the multinational sector and the multinational sector is only here because it is leeching off the global tax system. That, John, is a recipe for total chaos in the generation to come because what it does is this golden opportunity we have, which is we have all this money, is being wasted. And it's being wasted by a cynical cast who know that they're going to be paid massive pensions, that nobody really looks at what they do. And as I say, we're going to end here.

44:33David McWilliams: It's the image of behind the veil that you are operating or they are operating in secret. And in a way in which they are above the law and they are above scrutiny and they are above accountability and they are above consequences. And then you have the distraction in elections of politicians pretending it's a left-right issue. It's a capitalist versus Marxist issue. It's a labor versus capital thing. Once you refuse to identify the problem, John, you are condemned to come up with the wrong answers. Yeah. Key thing here, John, it's not between left and right. It's between something much more profound.

45:15David McWilliams: It is between care and contempt. The people who spend other people's money in such a wasteful way are contemptuous of the citizen. I would much prefer to have a little bit more care and less contempt in the society but I know that if we keep hurtling down this road we are going to end up with a situation that will make the 2008 crash, the subsequent austerity and the total dislocation of a generation seem like a walk in the park. We'll talk to you on Tuesday. I think I need a little lie down now.

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