Opinion | Ireland Is Rich. That Doesn’t Mean It’s Happy.

Ireland’s current condition might best be described as an embarrassment of riches. A country that was long one of the poorest in Western Europe now has an abundance of public and private wealth and an economy that is open to the world. It has even proved relatively resistant to the temptation of the far right that has proved so appealing elsewhere; perhaps nostalgia for an imagined golden age doesn’t hold much appeal when memories of poverty, mass emigration and the repression imposed by conservative Catholicism are so fresh in the minds of a well-educated, socially liberal population.

But as Ireland gets ready to go to the polls for a general election on Friday, it’s apparent that there are the same dark subplots here that have made the position of other incumbent governments across the democratic world so precarious.

If politics were a numbers game, the current Irish government — a coalition between the two traditional center-right parties, Fine Gael (led by the current prime minister, Simon Harris) and Fianna Fail, along with the Green Party — would be the surefire winner. A decade ago, there were around two million people at work in the Irish economy. Now the number seems to be rising inexorably toward three million. Unemployment is at historically low levels, and government debt as a proportion of the size of the economy is less than half what it was in 2014.

But people don’t vote for statistics, as the Democrats discovered, to their detriment, in the U.S. elections. The economics that matter most are those of daily life, and knowing that the country is doing well can make voters even more annoyed if they feel that they are missing out. In Ireland the sense of disconnection between the macro and micro is exacerbated by its peculiar path to riches: The great driver of its transformation is external. For U.S. multinationals looking for a base in the European Union, Ireland’s low corporate tax rate, highly educated work force and stable politics, combined with the familiarity of the English language, a common law system and close historical and cultural ties, have exerted a magnetic attraction.

Think of an American multinational — Apple, Pfizer, Meta, Microsoft, Intel, Boston Scientific — and the chances are that it is one of the thousand or so U.S. companies with an Irish operation. These companies spend more than $40 billion a year in a country with a population of just over five million. To put that in context, the stock of U.S. foreign direct investment in Ireland in 2022 stood at $574 billion, roughly triple the total in China and India put together.

As well as paying a lot of wages, these companies give the Irish treasury a windfall of corporate taxes — the full-year total could reach a new high of about 30 billion euros this year. With this much money coming in, the government has been able to live every politician’s dream: cutting income taxes while increasing public spending and reducing debt. Instead of the hard choices that the leaders of most democracies feel obliged to offer their electorates, Ireland is coasting.