Roy Keane’s most famous mantra: “Fail to prepare, prepare to fail” referred to the Saipan debacle at 2002’s World Cup finals, but it has been invoked repeatedly in reference to Ireland’s structural and economic challenges.
In recent weeks Stripe founder John Collison argued in an essay published in The Irish Times that the country was “going backwards” on housing and infrastructure planning and the Department of Finance published an analysis of the coming decades that Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe described as “really alarming”.
According to the senior civil servants who penned the Future Forty document, unless action is taken, a future landscape dominated by deglobalisation, an ageing population and growing national debt awaits.
A central scenario points to the potential for declining corporation tax revenues and the risk of a major fiscal black-hole.
Economic growth and living standards could easily fall in the years ahead with unavoidable costs around climate change and a growing pension bill.
The report warned that the housing crisis could last another 15 years.
It said that if policies were not changed, then the country’s debt would grow to almost
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