From The Guardian - 19th November
An Economist report states that Ireland is the best country in the world to live in. But what with the nation's gangsters, high suicide rates and debts, Irish Times columnist John Waters is sceptical. Meanwhile the novelist Joseph O'Connor looks on the bright side.
Firstly John Waters
What's the crack?
The idea that Ireland is the best place in the world to live comes - in a sense, and to a certain extent - as no news to Irish people. On the other hand, most of us know that it's a load of yesterday's Horlicks. We have no trouble believing two things at once, and even less believing two opposing things at once. And anyway, if the Economist magazine is saying it, who are we to refuse a compliment from such a distinguished source?
So, yes, on learning that a report from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) has ranked Ireland top of the list of 111 (for a moment there, I thought it read "ill") countries for "life satisfaction", we smile coquettishly and say, "But of course!" We, who take pride in the progress of an Irish fly up a foreign window-pane, are not about to look a gift survey in the pie-chart. We may hesitate momentarily in anticipation of the hubris it may occasion at the heart of government, but we make a mental note to deal with that later and head out to look for the "crack".
Most Irish people, you see, when asked to name their preferred aspect of living in Ireland, will instance "the crack". "The crack", which is sometimes annoyingly conveyed in the Irish-language spelling "craic", is a quintessentially Irish indicator of what in other cultures translates roughly as "fun" - except that the crack is much more than fun.
The Economist appears to have made no attempt whatever to measure "the crack". Instead, the study combined a series of what are described as "quality-of-life measures", from income per capita to gender equality, and found our aggregate score put us top of a league in which the US came 13th and Britain 29th.
Dan O'Brien, an Irish economist, was quoted this week as attributing Ireland's league-topping position to our having retained "the good parts" of national godfather Eamon de Valera's vision of a strong community and having added to it the prosperity that descended, apparently from nowhere, about a decade ago. Apparently, the Economist found that Ireland, unlike other wealthy countries, has retained strong "traditional values" rooted in family, and that, while Ireland is not immune to western lifestyle problems such as family breakdown and addiction, it is less affected than other societies. We rank less well, apparently, in areas such as gender equality, health and climate, but not even the Irish weather was enough to significantly retard our lead.
Strangely enough, the Irish national conversation had just begun to come around to an entirely different opinion, and signs that the Irish people are succumbing to debt, drunkenness and despair have returned to fashion those of us who make our livings from foretelling of doom.
A couple of months back, the Central Bank published figures indicating that increasing levels of personal debt were exposing huge numbers of Irish people to serious consequences in the event of a sharp rise in interest rates. This was great news for the commentariat. Explosions in mortgage lending and credit-card debt mean that the average Irish taxpayer now owes more than his annual after-tax income. The consequent boom in consumer spending has been tracked by an alarming increase in alcohol consumption, particularly binge drinking. With the average Irish drinker now consuming more than 12 litres of pure alcohol per annum (double that of, for example, French drinkers), we are fast recapturing our reputation as the Manchester United of drinking nations. Recently, a government strategic task force on alcohol report revealed that alcohol-related problems were costing the Irish economy close to €3bn per annum. The "crack" may be an intangible phenomenon, but some of its aspects lend themselves more readily to quantification.
There are other relevant matters. Gangland murders, a recent phenomenon, have increased exponentially during the Tiger years. Ireland now tops the world table for suicides among young men between 15 and 25. One in three children is now born out of what used to be called wedlock.
At a more humdrum level, the sense of collective frustration about traffic gridlock, inadequate health services and the high cost of living is creating a discernible though as yet unquantified outrage towards those who run things. The concept of "rip-off Ireland", a phrase coined to describe the escalating arm-chancing of service providers and suppliers, has hit a sensitive nerve in the popular imagination. The idea, reported in the Economist survey, that Irish income per head of population is fourth in the world, will draw a hollow laugh from many Irish consumers.
Although it is true, on paper, that Ireland has never had it so good, there is a growing sense that this is not the full picture and that, in many ways, the alleged panacea for our past ills may just be a recipe for a whole new set of problems. Listening to radio phone-ins, one certainly gets the impression that popular outrage against politicians has never been greater. A growing sense of the constriction of personal freedoms - evident in innovations as diverse as wheel clamping and the national workplace smoking ban - have created a fear of nanny-statism and global homogenisation.
Indeed, the staggering economic growth figures of the past decade may themselves be contributing to a kind of national mental double-bind that is causing people to doubt the evidence of their own moods and feelings. The indicators assure us we are better off than ever, but we just don't feel it.
In the Economist survey, you can see the shadow of an explanation for this national sense of dislocation. In the survey, Ireland can, for example, pick up points for both "family life" and "gender equality", although the two concepts appear to be in mutual conflict, one traditional, the other modern. What is established by Ireland's aggregating points under conflicting headings, is that the country is now at the optimal point of balance between two cultures, gaining high points for the moment from its old values while chalking up increasing scores for its modernising achievements. This, like the dawn, is a fleeting moment, which soon must succumb to the reality of the choices already made.
In Ireland in recent times, many of our public discussions have been underpinned by a division between those who approved of where we were going and those who regretted what we were leaving behind. A new cultural thoughtcrime - euphoric recall - was created to prevent people harking back to the perceived benefits of the old. All evidence of loss or damage was dismissed as dangerous nostalgia or a necessary trade-off on the road to the Promised Land.
What the Economist tells us is that we are, right now, at a moment analogous to that just after you fill up your petrol tank and drive off on a long journey. For the first 30 or 40 miles, the fuel gauge doesn't move, creating the illusion that you are not using any fuel at all. But then the needle flickers and drops, bringing you back to the reality of the unfree ride.
This may be the last survey to include evidence of both old and new in a single graph. For now we move into a different grade, to be judged among our peers and by their standards, a modern state distinguished only by its intangible and increasingly elusive "crack".
And now Joseph O'Connor
Gridlock and latte; Things aren't so bad
I woke up yesterday morning to the wonderful news that I am living in the best place on earth. The quality of life in Ireland is officially magnificent. Norwegians envy us. The Swiss want to be us. All those outmoded countries that have functioning social welfare systems, those cold, northern places ruined by fripperies like rat-free schools, have now realised the error of their ways. Their lives are rubbish. Ours are the business.
The Scandos want our Guinness, the French our sense of style, the Italians our food and the English our scenery. Having owned quite a lot of our scenery in days gone by, you would think the English might have moved on by now. But no, the whole world wants to be hip, rich and Irish, up to the minute yet admirably authentic. We are exporting moneyed insouciance the way we used to export our poor. I guess we've never had it so good.
As I scanned the morning papers, I wanted to weep. But thanks to the Economist, I now know they must have been tears of joy. Yes, there were reports of a health system so eerily appalling that a week on a trolley is now seen as a holiday. But that's Ireland for you now. We're ungrateful auld sods. Little luxuries like artificial hips, that's what we want.
Battling through the morning gridlock, being abused by fellow motorists, I consoled myself with the thought that "quality of life" is perhaps a relative term. Arriving at my meeting, I had the usual light-hearted conversation with my colleagues, about how none of them can afford a home, unless it's a shed on an island. My, how we laughed, in our feckless Celtic way. Then we set out to brave the muggers, in search of lunch, for which we had all contributed the proceeds of selling our first-born child.
Not all of the homeless beggars we met on our Joycean ramble appeared to have had access to the Economist's intelligence unit. I don't know if I could say they were happy; they certainly didn't look it. One of them asked if I could spare him €11 for a cappuccino. His quality of life was clearly improving by the minute.
I suppose, when I think of the awful country in which I grew up, where your chances of a job were as remote as Saddam Hussein's, where you were more likely to bump into a heroin dealer than an aspiring novelist, life has definitely improved for most of us in Ireland. We have full employment now; the only emigration is voluntary; there is a sense of a culture more outward-looking and vibrant. (We also have the Corrs, but nothing is perfect.) The grip of an authoritarian church is no longer felt. Those are not small things, by any measure. The country has changed beyond recognition. Yet there is a certain streak of gloom among some of the Dublin commentariat, who refuse to accept that things are better now than they were in the Ireland of Frank McCourt.
That said, it is important that the grating note of self-congratulation that sometimes sounds through contemporary Irish life be questioned often. Irish lives have improved, for most of us anyway; but there is more to quality of life than smugness and caffe latte.
He took over his fathers business, has built a beautiful house by a lake, and is now happily married to a lovely local girl. 
