Fintan O’Toole: How can Ireland be both filthy rich and bankrupt in ideas and ambitions?

The State is a half-arsed alchemist. It has somehow cracked the secret formula for transmuting the base metal of an underdeveloped society into bucketloads of shiny bullion.

The problem is that it seems able only to perform the trick in one direction only. It can’t turn those heaps of gold back into the tangible currency of a decent and sustainable prosperity.

How does a State end up rotten with cash it has no idea how to spend? How can it be both filthy rich and bankrupt in ideas and ambitions?

We’re in the money. Our ship has come in. The Department of Finance is projecting a cumulative budget surplus between 2023 and 2026 of a staggering €65 billion.

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In addition, Irish households have nearly €150 billion just sitting in their bank accounts, doing nothing. We are currently saving twice as much of our incomes as we were before the pandemic.

And yet everywhere you look there is public penury. In housing, in health and social care, in public transport, in childcare, in education, in basic infrastructure like water and sewerage, we are the poor little rich kids.

How do you arrive at this increasingly surreal co-existence of wealth and squalor? By way of Gold Digger syndrome.

The Gold Digger is a stock figure from novels and movies: the smart and beautiful young woman who uses her wits and bodily charms to ensnare rich old men. To Becky Sharp and Holly Golightly we should now add the most successful of them all: Cathleen Ní Houlihán.

Ireland has become rich by making itself attractive to guys with money. The State infuses its economics with a whiff of the erotic. It is the mistress of the “come hither” look.

Come hither and you’ll enjoy the pleasures of low taxes, a highly educated workforce, political stability and a little bit of America in Europe. And come, of course, they do.

That’s where the State’s bursting bounty comes from. It has arguably manipulated the rules of attraction more profitably than any small and underdeveloped country has ever done before.

If well-paid workers can’t get housing and the students who are supposed to fill all the new skilled jobs are struggling with outright poverty, Ireland will end up more Blanche DuBois than Holly Golightly

This is a spectacular success story. It is, indeed, much more of a success than even the most starry-eyed of optimists can have imagined – no one expected Ireland’s gold-digging to hit quite so rich a mother lode.

But gold-digging is a dangerous game. Sooner or later, the successful grande horizontale must learn to stand on her own two feet. She has to use the money gained from her youthful allure to create an independent life for herself.

Otherwise, she ends up like Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, a fading belle displaying increasingly outdated charms. Blanche relies on “the kindness of strangers” – a poor foundation for long-term security.

[ How should the State’s €16 billion surplus be spent? Here are 16 ideas ]

The downside of gold-digging is that, even at its most lucrative, it is a form of dependency. For the State, it has created a profound assumption that development, innovation and transformation are things it attracts – not energies it generates for itself.

The essential problem of the State, the core of the contradiction between its monetary wealth and its poverty of ideas and capacity, is that it continues to apply the idea of attraction to areas where it does not and cannot work.

Ireland can entice multinational corporations. It can’t entice equitable and available housing, an end to child poverty, coherent long-term planning, a fair and well-functioning health service, a revolution in public transport, a transformation to a zero carbon economy, an education system that generates creativity, or the preservation of its natural beauty and biodiversity.

Being alluring is great for drawing in money and utterly useless when it comes to knowing how to spend it effectively, justly and sustainably. “Creating the conditions” is fine for getting an American corporate giant to invest – but it does not work for the kind of nation-building Ireland so desperately needs.

If you don’t get this, you end up pretty much where Ireland is, with a dynamic economy and a sclerotic State. You end up with a country that is simultaneously overdeveloped and undeveloped without ever becoming developed.

[ Fintan O’Toole: Is Ireland a developed country at all? ]

We can’t live with these contradictions anymore. They were (just about) manageable for a long time because they existed in separate spheres: the globalised economy here, the provincial governance culture over there.

But now, the latter is beginning to undermine the former. If well-paid workers can’t get housing and the students who are supposed to fill all the new skilled jobs are struggling with outright poverty, Ireland will end up more Blanche DuBois than Holly Golightly.

And the next phase of economic transformation – the rapid switch to a zero carbon economy – can’t happen in a State that is so passive that it is unable even to create functioning regulatory systems for growing trees or developing offshore wind farms in Europe’s windiest seas.

The State is now dirt poor in something else that it has relied on: excuses. It has been deprived of the luxury of the impecunious – the assurance that it would do all these wonderful things if only it had the money.

We’ve done well out of the kindness of strangers. But the future will be unkind to a State that does not seize the opportunity to make its own fortune.