TO mark 50 years in the EU (EEC as it was then), the Central Statistics Office in Dublin has produced comparative charts of house prices, earnings, exports and much more for 1973 and 2023.
The figures show a dramatic transformation from a predominantly agricultural society with only 50,000 non-Irish residents to a modern, highly educated, advanced technological, diverse, multicultural society.
In 1973, 41% of all exports were live animals and food with 24% of the workforce in agriculture. Now 4% are in agriculture. Food and live animals account for 7% of exports.
A substantial proportion of the world’s Viagra and Botox are produced and exported from the south.
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Total exports in 1973 were €1 billion, now €208 billion. Average weekly industrial earnings were €38.25, now €825.
Yes, there’s a major housing shortage and waiting lists for medical treatment are too long, but prosperity has soared. There is much greater disposable income. In 1973 the average household spent about 30% on food, drink and clothes; now it’s 10% of their budget. One telling illustration is that among the items used to calculate the cost of living index, broccoli figures instead of cabbage.
Collapse of the UK
By contrast, the UK is in decline and that means the north, always ‘on the hind teat’ as Seamus Heaney said, suffers worst. Or, as the saying goes, “If England catches cold, the north catches the flu.”
This time last year, after Liz Truss had crashed the economy and cost anyone with a mortgage or bank loan thousands, there was a brilliant essay in The Atlantic by Derek Thompson, who writes a weekly newsletter called Work in Progress. His essay was entitled ‘How the UK became one of the poorest countries in western Europe.’
He summed up the reasons neatly in one paragraph: “The British economy chose finance over industry, Britain’s government chose austerity over investment, and British voters chose a closed and poorer economy over an open and richer one.”
Britain has the lowest productivity among major European states and its lack of investment is illustrated by the fact that in 2020, it had fewer than 100 robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers, less than any rich country and less than Slovakia and Slovenia. (Why not? The average Slovene is better off than their British equivalent).
Real wages have been static for years except when they fell, and the Conservatives have wrecked the benefit system, cut local government funding and destroyed the NHS.
People in Britain know all this. In the summer The Times asked: “Why are we so poor?” The Daily Torygraph, wrote in July: “Britain is now a poor nation. This is the number one issue we face, yet our leaders ignore it.” Tim Harford, who writes the Undercover Economist, visited Germany in the summer and wrote: “This is prosperity and we don’t have it.”
Now, here’s the question. The British media complain bitterly about falling behind eastern Europe, especially Slovenia and Poland (in 2025) and draw unfavourable comparisons with Germany and the US. For example, take away the zillions generated by London’s financial centre and the rest of Britain is as poor as Mississippi, the poorest US state.
Republic's superior figures
OK. Why then does our local unionist-dominated media always and forever compare this benighted place with, altogether now, ‘the rest of the UK’? Is parity with the UK the best we can hope for when the UK is, as its economists and many of its politicians admit, at the bottom of the pile? No.
Why never compare poverty, bad wages, low benefits (the lowest in Europe), inequality, with superior figures in the Republic? This failure to compare is important because we have a choice, unlike – altogether now – ‘the rest of the UK’.
We can vote to leave for greater prosperity, life expectancy, higher education standards, better health outcomes, higher pensions.
It isn’t only a matter of how to have constitutional change; referendums and stuff. The why is equally important for ‘persuadables’.
