In my last substack, I dug quite deeply into the philosophical elements of defense and neutrality. If you haven’t already read it, I urge you to do so before embarking on this essay, as this is going to try to build on some of those elements.

But even for the sake of readers who have already finished it, let me begin where I left off: that for all its fury, the passionate argument over neutrality is not actually an argument about neutrality, but a nation hurling the same handful of words at one another with total certainty, albeit with no shared meaning. And doing it so loudly and so righteously, and for so long, that none of us have been able to notice the noise is little more than a hiding place, and a way to debate forever about what we should do, so that we never have to debate who we should be.

Subscribe now

Part of this endless debate is centered on the Triple Lock, which is what I said I would discuss in this essay. For the benefit of non-Irish readers, this is a hard rule that Irish soldiers cannot be deployed abroad without three keys permitting it to do so, simultaneously: (1) the Irish Cabinet, (2) the Dáil (Irish parliament), and (3) the UN Security Council.

The parties leading the Irish Government want the third key (of the UN Security Council) gone, on the grounds that it is intolerable for Moscow, or Beijing, or Washington to hold a veto over Irish peacekeepers. The Opposition within the government, however, call this the dismantling of neutrality, as it could give way to Irish military being deployed more readily — the slippery slope argument. And wedged between them sits a third camp, led with great irony by a former Fianna Fáil Defence Minister inside the Taoiseach’s own party, who wants to reform the triple lock, but not scrap it.

As of writing this, the revolt has won its next round and the whole thing has been shoved back to be debated endlessly again in the autumn.

So: One side of this debate argues about what we may do, another about who we are, a third about how we’re allowed to decide it. And almost everyone has agreed on something: the Triple Lock debate has become a useful proxy for the ten million aspects of neutrality we’ve never defined, which I suppose is exactly the appeal of this debate. Which is that this single mechanism fits on a ballot card, whereas the entire question around state identity is too big to argue about.

So unlike neutrality, the debate around the Triple Lock gives us something slightly more tangible to grasp onto as we try to figure out the shape of the question we’re actually trying to answer.

A video was recently posted by political party Aontú, stating that a serious public discussion on the Triple Lock is long overdue. Yes, this is correct! However, in the video, the presenter says:

Neutrality wasn’t cowardice; it was a statement. A statement that we are a sovereign nation. And that policy of neutrality has defined Ireland ever since.

In one breath, and less than a minute into the video, there is a sentence that manages to weld together the two issues this whole argument keeps entangling. Neutrality (who we are), and sovereignty (what we do). And it is the Triple Lock at the center of these two huge issues, that supposedly proves that Ireland has both.

My last essay teased apart the first knot of who we are, and found neutrality to be a word we’ve never defined, sitting on top of a version of “self” we’ve never really considered.

But the Triple Lock asks a different and fundamentally more practical question about what we do. Whether we send soldiers out, and on whose permission, and by what right. However, the unspoken assumption through the entire neutrality and Triple Lock debate, and that Aontú makes in an opening sentence, is that these two questions are the same question. That who we are feeds into what we do.

But it doesn’t; and these are not the same questions. You can know exactly who you are and be unable to do anything about it; while you can act on your own accord and have no idea who you are. The debate about Ireland’s neutrality and the Triple Lock lives in the gap between these terms, of neutrality and sovereignty.

So if the last essay was about who we are, this one is about what we do. The nuts and bolts of sovereignty.

Sovereignty

What even is sovereignty? When I first started working on defense and security policy in Europe nearly three years ago, I got used to hearing the following, exclaimed passionately with fists slamming into tables, accenting the last word:

“... but we are Europe! We are sovereign!”

The problem with this statement is that sovereignty is not something that you choose to be, it’s something that you choose to do.

Looking at this definition again, with its two elements.

The first is the authority to choose. It is the recognized right to make your own decisions, such as to sign your own treaties, set your own laws, declare your own neutrality. This is the part that gets the fists slamming into tables. It is also the part you are simply handed by virtue of the fact that you are a country. You have a flag, the ability to write laws, and the right to be left alone. You have these simply because you have borders.

The second element is the power to back that choice, which is to say having the actual capacity to make the decision lasting even if somebody pushes against it. This is the part nobody just gives you, meaning that you either build it, or you do not; but you cannot accidentally obtain it. It roughly covers (in a military aspect) the ability to defend your own territory, to see and control what moves through your seas and skies, and to make a choice and enforce it without a higher power controlling you. All of this is earned at a huge cost, over many years.

The second element is why sovereignty is not something you declare, it is something you build. The man at the table shouting we are sovereign has confused having the ability to write your own laws from having the ability to uphold them. In order words, he has mistaken the right to choose for the ability to enforce that choice.

So let’s look at the individual constituent parts of sovereignty:

Start with the left circle. Authority without power is a wish. You may hold the recognized right to decide, but without any way of enforcing it, your decisions only matter for as long as nobody more important objects to them.

Real-world examples of these “just wish” countries are the micro-states that are fully sovereign on paper and entirely dependent on a larger neighbor for their defense; in other words client states whose foreign policy mirrors their patron’s. In the starkest cases, they are states that hold a UN seat while unable to enforce a single decision inside their own borders. The former US constitutional lawyer Robert Jackson gave this condition a name: the quasi-state.

Now look at the right. Power without authority is just force. This is the capacity to impose your will with no legitimate claim to do so. For example, imagine a warlord in a collapsed state that is holding territory with nothing but weapons; or the revisionist power that holds military strength and uses it beyond the bounds of any rule it recognizes (which is what Russia is doing in Ukraine right now); with the capacity but not the right to seize territory, and which does so anyway. So you can see, force that is decoupled from authority is not sovereignty either. It is simply domination, and “history” is essentially just a recounting of the ways in which the world has tried to build rules to contain it.

Sovereignty is that very narrow place in the middle where both authority and power overlap — it is having the right to choose, and the strength to make the choice tangible. It is a much harder and rarer thing than either other side of the Venn diagram, because it is the only part that you have to make. You cannot be given sovereignty.

So where does this leave a country like Ireland? Because we clearly do not land in the middle, and this is by no accident. For eight hundred years we were actually on the receiving end of the thing on the right of that picture, the just force. We experienced the empire, with its raw power with no authority; the proverbial boot on our necks. And when we finally got rid of this boot, we were so determined never to be that coercer throwing its weight around that we fled all the way past the middle and into the circle on the left; taking with us the recognition of our new statehood and our new flag, while never building the power to make any of it endure.

In fact, we ran so far away from just force on the right hand side, and with such speed, that we landed in the furthest distance of just wish on the left hand side.

C.S. Lewis made a point that may seem unrelated, but that cuts to the core of the morality of sovereignty — a topic which we have convinced ourselves we lead, but that we don’t even truly understand never mind possess. Lewis wrote that you only ever learn the strength of a temptation by resisting it. That you find out how strong a wind is by trying to walk against it, not by lying down.

Another way of framing this is that the person who always gives in never discovers how powerful the thing he surrendered to actually was, because he never once held out against it. And so Lewis discussed, in a seeming contradiction, that bad people in a strange way know very little about badness, because they have lived a sheltered life by always saying yes to their temptations. This claim suggests that virtue is not the absence of struggling, but what is left after the struggle.

The implication of this for Ireland is that it is possible to conflate “innocence” with mere “untestedness”. In other words, it is possible to think that our neutral “goodness” is defined by being as far away as possible from “badness”. But this is not true. The person who has never been in a position to do harm is not therefore automatically good; they are just unproven!

In fact, it is more coherent to praise a soldier who could kill and yet still chooses restraint; than praise the soldier who has never lifted a rifle, because there is no moral high ground in having no capacity. If goodness lives in the gap between what you could do and what you choose to do — and if you have closed that gap by making yourself unable to do anything – then you have not become good. You have only removed yourself from the arena in which goodness is decided.

This is precisely what Ireland has done, and it is why our neutrality has always carried the air of a higher morality, sitting far above the squalid business of force. But what if it is in fact something closer to the opposite?

We did not hold power and then refuse to abuse it, which is arguably the much harder and more noble thing. We simply never built the power that sovereignty requires, and yet somehow still interpreted our incapacity as a moral principle.

So why am I going down yet another path of philosophical questioning, if I told you I was going to discuss the Triple Lock? Because the cost of this arrangement we have with sovereignty is ultimately philosophical! This Venn diagram I’ve outlined is the reason our principles seem to collapse the moment they meet resistance.

In short: a principle you have never had to enforce is a principle you have never actually held. And it is the reason the two great rows of current Irish foreign policy, which look like separate arguments about separate things, are in fact the same argument

First, the Occupied Territories Bill (OTB). Here we had the will to do something! A clear, popular, democratically arrived-at decision to ban trade with illegal settlements. We had the authority to choose; and we chose. And then the choice simply… evaporated. It was hollowed out to cover goods but not services; then stalled for eight years, and finally explained away by the Taoiseach himself:

We don’t have the power, if we wanted to even, to stop trade.

Read. That. Sentence. Again.

It is not saying we don’t want to. It is saying we cannot. That some higher power (the United States) overrides our will, and that there is nothing we can do about it. The OTB was the left hand of the Venn diagram (a just wish) without the right hand (just power). We knew exactly what we wanted, and then we were alarmed by our discovery that we are not sovereign enough to have it!

Now take the Triple Lock. On the surface, this is a completely different debate; some sort of technical fight about whether to keep a rule that requires UN Security Council approval before Irish troops deploy abroad. And sure, from the outside it looks like a question about whether or not we want to be neutral: (1) keep the Triple Lock and you keep the neutrality; (2) remove it and you start walking down the road away from neutrality. And while one side says it is intolerable that a permanent member of the Security Council (Russia) holds a veto over where Irish soldiers can go; the other side says removing that veto is the first step out of neutrality. The whole thing is conducted as a false choice of in or out, neutral or not.

But tear back the outermost layer and look at what the OTB just taught us! The Occupied Territories Bill showed us that with or without the Triple Lock, we still do not have the ability to be sovereign on the moral questions of war.

The OTB had nothing to do with the Triple Lock. There was no Russian veto involved, no UN mechanism, no rule to keep or scrap our posturing. It was a litmus test of whether Ireland could take a clear moral position on a war and make it stick… and we could not. A higher power overrode us anyway, through nothing more formal than economic dependence and American displeasure at our desire for autonomy (how dare we!).

Again: We don’t have the power, if we wanted to even.

So the Triple Lock debate is, in a sense, a fight about the wrong thing. Both sides believe that the question on the table is whether a foreign power gets to override our will: if we keep the lock and Russia overrides it, but if we scrap the lock we get to take decisions back into our own hands. But the OTB has already shown us that this is an illusion. We do not take the decision back into our own hands by scrapping the Triple Lock, because the thing that overrode us on Gaza was never the Triple Lock to begin with. It was our lack of power to be able to enforce our own wishes!

In fact, if we remove the Russian veto, the next moral question of war that we will run into is exactly the same wall the OTB ran into – which is that our problem is not a rule we can repeal, but a dependence on others for security that we never addressed, let alone acknowledged.

This is the thing the whole country is arguing around, but never about. The Triple Lock looks like a referendum on neutrality, but the OTB has already shown that neutrality is not the variable that matters. Sovereignty is.

And whether we keep the Triple Lock or not, while declaring ourselves neutral or abandoning the policy entirely, we will still be a country that cannot enforce our own moral choices about war. Why? Because we built the authority to make those choices and never built the power to back them, which is the definition of sovereignty. The OTB is not a separate scandal from the Triple Lock; it is the answer to the debate on the Triple Lock.

So if sovereignty is the thing we are actually missing, then the obvious question is how we came to be missing it. And the answer is surprisingly simple, and one which doesn’t include bad luck or a failure that we back into without knowing. Actually, it was a choice. A specific one, made very early, even if we have never consciously discussed it.

A small country gets to pick two of the following three things: sovereignty, neutrality, or being unarmed. A country can be neutral, and it can be without a serious military, and it can be sovereign… but not all three at once.

• Switzerland chooses neutral and armed, and it keeps its sovereignty

• Iceland chooses unarmed and allied, in that it doesn’t have an army, but inside NATO; and thus kept a version of sovereignty by pooling it (trading some autonomy for a security guarantee).

Ireland? Well, we obviously chose neutral and unarmed.

Which means… drumroll… that we chose the corner that gives up sovereignty. We are the country that kept the unarmed posture with empty barracks, subtly letting the sovereignty go; while simultaneously spending one hundred years telling ourselves this combination was the sovereignty.

Simply put, when you do not defend yourself, someone else does. And that “someone else” is never neutral.

Irish airspace is policed by the Royal Air Force. Irish sea lanes and cables run through a security order underwritten by the United States and the United Kingdom. We are not, somehow magically, floating free above the world’s political and military blocs; we are under the umbrella of two very specific powers. And no, you do not get to choose the politics of the umbrella you stand under. A protector’s protection comes bundled with a protector’s posture. Our security guarantee is paid for, whether we openly discuss it or not, in alignment.

And sadly, the two powers whose umbrella we shelter under are the very two whose foreign policy we find most repellent. We march against American wars while American troops transit through Shannon to fight them! Indeed, we condemn the conduct we deplore while we depend, for our own safety, on the power conducting it. Our neutrality does not hold us apart from great-power politics even if we endlessly tell ourselves this falsity. It actually binds us to it, on the worst terms, with all of its ugly dependence and none of the leverage to object effectively.

The Occupied Territories Bill finally exposes this incoherence. We are a former colony; a people who understand the trauma of dispossession all too well, and yet, on Israel and Palestine, the Irish state is pulled again and again, over and over, toward the position our protectors hold rather than the one our history should dictate. So while we wanted to be the country that stood with the colonized, we built ourselves, instead, into a country that cannot afford to.

You see, our security (as well as the economic order that sits atop it) depends on the two most steadfastly pro-Israel countries on earth. This contradiction is structural, in that we have built both our economic prosperity and our protection on patrons whose ideology we do not share, and yet are somehow surprised that we cannot freely go against our patron on the question it cares about most — Israel.

What economic sovereignty might look like is a question for another day that I’ll come back to. For now, I want to discuss how we might achieve Irish sovereignty: by either forfeiting neutrality or by becoming armed.

And since my last essay was on the question of neutrality, now I want to look in more depth at what it means to become armed. At defense.

Subscribe now

The anatomy of power

While the “power” part of the sovereignty Venn diagram can refer to many things, the most foundational aspect of this is defense. But what even is “defense”? It’s important to define, because it can mean many things to many people, and is yet another source of people shouting past each other endlessly.

Think of defence as a chain with five links, running from the most defensive at the top to the most offensive at the bottom.

At the top is awareness, which is simply knowing what is happening in and around your own territory. Radar, sonar, maritime patrol, watching the seabed and the cables, and the cyber equivalent of these same things. This is the most “harmless” end in that it threatens no one.

Then there is protection, which entails stopping a threat once you have seen it. For Ireland this would include air and coastal defense, defending the power grid and the hospitals from attack, search and rescue, etc. Still wholly defensive, as it acts only when something is already coming at you. These first two links are what we might call “home security”, and together they are the entire substance of sovereignty; the part that you build for yourself, and yet that we rely on others for.

The third link is the standing force itself. The people, the training, and the institution of armed forces. Think of it as a body of knowledge. I have separated it out here simply because a lot of what people feel about “defense” is really feeling about armies and soldiers, and in the Irish context, it is where we have a deep reflex that says “armies” are what was done to us.

The fourth link is deterrence and projection, which is the capacity to reach beyond your own borders, or to hold a threat credible enough to change someone’s behaviour without even using it. Here is where you cross from defending your own territory to shaping events elsewhere, and it is the place where neutrality kicks in. This is the place where a country can reasonably say not us. This, in fact, is the link the Triple Lock actually oversees.

Importantly, up until this fourth layer, is everything that is included in neutrality.

Finally, the fifth link is the means of attack. It is the offensive weapons themselves and the business of manufacturing and selling them. Think about missiles, strike aircraft, the arms-export business, and the dual-use technology that ends up in someone else’s war. This is the part of the value chain whereby someone starts to think: “warmonger”.

Now here is what a coherent neutral does with that chain:

• It builds the top link by watching its own waters and defending its own ground, because that is what keeps it independent (read: sovereign)

• It declines the “projection” link, as it does not project force or join others’ wars.

• It polices the “means of attack” link hardest of all; it refuses to be a supplier into anyone else’s war, because feeding a war is the most direct possible breach of taking no side.

A serious neutral may keep an army and still never touch the “means of attack” within that chain, as the top end is what neutral countries build, and the bottom end is what it refuses.

But look at what Ireland does, which is not even a milder version of that, but its exact opposite!

We are absent from the top. We do not watch our own seas in any serious way, and we cannot defend our own sky. So the awareness and protection a neutral builds first, we have simply never built. We have withered away at the “standing forces” link, as we have a defense force that is shrinking below the size needed to run even what little it has. And we decline the “projection” link, loudly and constantly. We would never project a war; we would never join. (And this is the one place we and the coherent neutral actually agree).

And then, at the very bottom, we find the one link that a neutral refuses most strictly, but in that Ireland is actually a supplier!

Aughinish Alumina, on the Shannon estuary, is Russian-owned, one of the largest alumina refineries in Europe, and it feeds the aluminium that feeds the Russian war machine even now. Indeed, Ireland licensed some €20 million of dual-use technology for export to the Israeli military in 2024. And as I wrote about in the Irish Times, it was literally the same week that Anthropic’s technology was pivotal to a US strike on an Iran school, that we welcomed the corporation as Dublin’s latest American tech company.

So, Ireland refuses to build the parts of the defense chain that a neutral is permitted to build – and indeed must build to gain sovereignty – while we participate in the part of the defense chain that a neutral must never touch.

Despairingly, the defense chain, for Ireland, runs exactly backwards.

This is a very bitter thing to understand about our own country, and I understand that it’s hard to hear while even harder to comprehend. Some people have been confused by my public demands for an increase in the Irish defense budget while also stating that we should not allow US defense-mandated companies to operate in Ireland. Some people have gone further still and suggested that I am talking from both sides of my mouth in this debate. She want neutrality! But she also wants defense spending! Make it make sense!

This is confusing only if you conflate “increased defense budget” with “reduced neutrality”. In fact, it is the opposite. An increased defense budget is exactly what will enable our sovereignty, such that we are able to make the decisions around our own moral positions so that we can, without contradiction, be neutral.

What I am asking us to build is awareness and protection, and the capacity to see our own seas. That is home security, and home security is not the opposite of neutrality; it is the precondition for it.

So the two halves of my position are not in tension; they are the same position. I believe to be morally consistent, Ireland should build the part that defends ourself, while refusing the part that implicates us. Why? Because people in Ireland seem to want neutrality, and it is the only coherent version of neutrality that there is.

Similarly, a larger defense budget is not a step away from our moral independence but the only thing that can give us moral independence. The reason we could not hold our position on Gaza was not a shortage of conviction; it was a shortage of power. That we depend on others for our security — economic and otherwise. But if we build the capacity to defend ourselves? Well then we build the capacity to mean what we say, and to take a moral position on a war and to make it endure.

Yet we do not do this. It is sobering to realize that the one part of the defense chain we actually engage in is the means of attack. We have somehow talked ourselves out of the cable-watching while doubling-down on the alumina.

The company we keep

It is also worth discussing the most sordid part of the defense chain — the means of attack — because unlike any other neutral country, it is the only part of the chain that we are, with both feet, very firmly and shamefully standing in.

I can tell you from experience, as I teach this topic, that the global arms industry is extremely dysfunctional. By which I mean a structural dysfunction that has two distinct features which, when considered together, make the industry dynamics highly corruptible.

The first is a single buyer. A defense company ultimately sells to governments and mostly only to governments, which means it avoids the normal discipline of a market. So in this industry, prices are negotiated rather than competed, and the state cannot let its “national champion” (aka Boeing or SpaceX or Thales) fail, so bailouts of such companies are always implicit. These companies are “too important to fail” and thus can do whatever they want.

The second is that there are only a handful of sellers. A wave of mergers a couple of decades ago collapsed dozens of firms into a few giant defense “primes”, so that a few sellers now face one buyer in a closed loop.

On top of this, there is also a revolving door of:

Government officials → Company boards → Think tanks that write the threat assessments that justify the budgets → Weapons deliberately built across as many districts as possible so that no program can ever be canceled.

Voila, now you have a machine that manufactures its own demand, ready to be applied at will to any enemy (or friend) of Presidential choice. Eisenhower, who built the largest war machine in history, is the one who dubbed it the Military Industrial Complex while warning us about it. And no, he was not a crank. He was right about his judgement of this industry!

And yet this machine, which works hand in glove with the governments of America, the UK and others, has helped produce a run of catastrophes that the people who oppose Irish defense have every right to point at. I use the word catastrophe in this instance because no single other word can encapsulate the scale of horror about which I am discussing.

Iraq, invaded in 2003 on intelligence that everyone now admits was false, left hundreds of thousands dead, a region destabilized and the preliminary conditions for the creation of the Islamic State. Similarly Afghanistan endured twenty years of warfare and trillions of dollars of US spending, only to have the same regime back in power at the end of it but without the men, women and children who made up its population. Oh, and in Libya – an intervention that collapsed the state, opened slave markets, and created a migration nightmare that is of an overwhelming proportion.

These were not defensive wars. They were force projected across the world by powerful states — aided by the bottom of the chain I just outlined — and they were completely avoidable disasters.

Now. There is no committee, or cabal, or single hand on the wheel of these wars, as some conspiratorialists like to believe. However, it is probably even worse than that, and yet somehow even more boring. These wars are the natural outcomes of what a system produces when groupthink, careerism, the budget-maximizing instinct, neoliberalism and (as always) a total absence of consequences are allowed to run unchecked.

I, more than most given the time I’ve spent with Congressional policy-makers in the defense world, can confirm that threat-inflation is the safest career move in Washington DC; no one was ever sacked for over-warning (or over-warring). Can you name a person who lost their job, or a pension, or a seat in the Situation Room because of Iraq? No. The industry, and in turn the government, get positively giddy at the thought of increased military spending. If for no other reason that it is always a useful tool for propping up the industrial parts of any economy that is starting to slow.

And even worse, is that the people who presided over these catastrophes do not, ever, end up disgraced. Rather, they end up rehabilitated! They are given chairs at the great universities, and fellowships at the institutes, with endless slots on endless panels, in which they reprocess their decisions into the bloodless language of tradeoffs and of “hard lessons learned” while they sound like a CEO discussing a bad quarterly earnings report. Don’t believe me? Listen to Anthony Blinken’s recent (and shocking) remarks at Harvard Kennedy School in which he discusses the “ooops” of Gaza.

The laundering does actually happen, and it is done in some of the most prestigious institutions in the world, which is exactly why it is so effective and so fucking hard to tolerate, because these are the same institutions upon which I built my own career, in this very industry.

So because of recent hostility to my writing about security, let me be clear about what this does and does not make me. I am not standing outside this world pointing at it, like a lot of Irish commentators on defense. I am from Harvard, a globalist university that has a questionable moral track record, and for most of my career I have, in some capacity, worked along the defense chain. I am, on paper, precisely the kind of person you should be suspicious of when they start telling you the country needs to spend more on its military. For god’s sake, I am credentialed by the same institutions that do the laundering, and involved in the industry that profits from the spending on the killing! If you distrust people like me… well, you are right to.

But… for every person in the defense industry that has later converted their hand-in-wallet decisions into respectability, there is at least one more who, like myself, will turn this into a devastating argument against unaccountable projection. And if you have read anything else I have written, you will have noticed that almost all of it, in the end, is about accountability. Why? Because the world’s evil trades on power that is left unchecked. Just last night, I had a few drinks with some American friends in the military domain, and we talked endlessly about military and governmental ethics; or the current lack thereof. It is not a coincidence that I care so passionately about accountability and sovereignty; it is a product of being in an industry that relies on countries like Ireland not having the latter (sovereignty) so that it can avoid the former (accountability).

Again, people have often misread my desire for our neutrality to be defined and labeled with a desire for it to be reduced; and yet this too is the wrong way around. I want definitional neutrality such that its current opacity cannot be further used, without accountability, by those in power, in exchange for economic benefits such as jobs and economic gain that reduce our sovereignty.

Keys to locks

So, let’s go back to the Triple Lock, and remind ourselves of what the debate looks like from the outside: a technical fight about a rule, and some sort of a referendum on whether we wished to remain neutral.

And now look at what is really underneath that. A ferocious argument about sovereignty, not neutrality, being argued by a country that can not tell the difference. Both sides are indeed fighting over whose veto we would live under, with neither side noticing that the veto was never the problem; the missing power behind it was.

But here’s another question that’s rarely asked: why is this coming up now?

The Triple Lock has been there, mostly unexamined, for the better part of two decades. We were content to leave it alone, unnoticed, because that deferral worked perfectly fine while nothing forced our hand. And now, suddenly, it is the live wire of the worst type of Irish politics because the ground underneath the question has started to move under us, and from the outside.

Ireland’s entire strategy, for a century, for both neutrality and sovereignty, has been the deferral of choice. In such a way that we never, ever answer the questions that matter.

That permission to defer the debate however is being withdrawn. Whether we like it or not, Europe is rearming, and the scale and speed of it is hard to overstate. Poland is building the largest army on the continent and positioning defense as the engine of its economy; Germany has abandoned eighty years of restraint and is building a whole security architecture being rebuilt around the exact question we have spent a hundred years refusing to answer. Zelenskyy is insisting that Ukraine be ushered into the EU at lightning pace, bringing with it an oversized and heavily militarized economy. The EU diplomatic service has announced new top roles with a defense focus. Canada is positioning itself as the replacement for the United States, and as the de-facto leader of Europe’s military re-industrialization. And as this new structure takes shape, the space to stand inside it economically while standing outside it on defense starts to shrinks rapidly.

Just to be clear, I am not celebrating Europe’s re-arming, which is a response to a genuine threat. Anything but! I mean, this is a vast diversion of resources and attention toward the tools of force, and nobody who has spent time near such tools mistakes their proliferation for good news. If I had a vote on whether the world should be moving this way, I certainly would not vote for it.

But I suppose that is precisely my point. I do not have that vote, and neither does Ireland. This is not happening because we want it to, and it will not stop because we wish it would. As I move through my career, it is becoming more obvious to me that good policy-making is, uncomfortably, dealing with the realities that others find too ugly to look at.

The Triple Lock may be the first place this is surfacing in our politics, but it will not be the last. It is the leading edge of a much larger reckoning, arriving from Berlin and Warsaw and Brussels. Not from Dublin. So the choice Ireland faces is not the one the Triple Lock debate thinks it is. It is not “keep the rule or scrap it.” Actually, it is not even “rearm Ireland or stay neutral”, although this also sucks enormous oxygen out of the air. It is more brutal than that: decide deliberately about what and who we are, or have the decision made for us by a structure we did not shape.

So let me leave you where we began, with the fights about the Occupied Territories Bill and the Triple Lock. While one is about controlling trade, and the other is about controlling our troops; both are actually about whether Ireland can take a moral position in the world and be able to enforce it. Whether we have sovereignty or not.

The OTB already gave us the answer, even if we still haven’t allowed ourselves to comprehend it: no, we don’t. Because conviction without power is a “just wish”, and we have spent a century praising ourselves for never having that power. There is a difference between having conviction in a decision and having the tools to be able to reach for that same decision.

Both sides in the Triple Lock debate believe they are arguing about whether to be overridden by Russia. But we can’t take military decisions into our own hands just by removing the Russian veto, because it is sovereignty that we seem to actually desire. So if we lack the sovereignty to control our own military posture, then who controls it?

The Triple Lock is arguing that it is the Russians, while the Occupied Territories Bill is an implicit acknowledgement that it is the Americans.

There is an obvious asymmetry between those two vetoes. The Russian one that we are tearing ourselves apart to get rid of is the only one we ever chose, and the only one we can see, and therefore the only one we could ever actually repeal. Yet the American one is unchosen, mostly invisible, and unrepealable until we do the much harder task of fighting our way out of an economic and security dependence you cannot eradicate with a single vote in the Dáil. And of course it is the Russian veto we jump towards, because saying no to Moscow is the most natural path for us — the “reactive self” yet again doing the only thing it can, in our refusal and rejection. And it is… free. It costs nothing, risks nothing, and hands us the superior feeling of saying No to a great power without our having to build a single thing.

But we are overruled from outside either way, which is our seemingly permanent condition, and the only thing the great debate is really deciding is whose name sits on that overriding mechanism. In the end, we are fighting amongst ourselves, and with everything we have, over a lock we don’t even hold a key to.

Which is to say that we would still, even now, so much rather say no to Russia than yes to ourselves.

It’s been a while since I last wrote here, and as much as I’d love to blame the numerous late nights in my office (of which there have been way too many), I suspect it actually has more to do with the fact that I have just spent so much time trying to figure out how to discuss the topic of Ireland’s security and defense.

[A quick note: so as to not interrupt this essay, I have decided to declare my conflicts in the defense industry at the end — of which I have none, but since I work in the sector…]

Subscribe now

My first instinct is to brain dump the extraordinarily long list of anger-inducing failures of the successive governments to create any institutional capacity in this regard and walk away.

I mean, I could simply argue that measured against any comparable European state, the Irish security posture is not only thin, but very nearly absent. Defense spending stands at roughly 0.3% of our GDP compared to the average of 2% for others, and 5% for some. Meanwhile, and connected, is that our Defence Forces have fallen below 8,000 personnel, against an official need of nearly 10,000, having lately touched their lowest strength in fifty years.

We are the only country in Europe to have no primary military radar. No fighter aircraft and no means of intercepting another aircraft in the air. No surface-to-air defense of any kind, at any range. So when an unidentified aircraft enters Irish-controlled airspace (yes, this happens!), it is the Royal Air Force that goes up to look at it, under an arrangement between London and Dublin that has never been published and that no Irish citizen has ever been permitted to read.

Of our naval vessels, perhaps four can be put to sea to watch an Exclusive Economic Zone of some 880,000 square kilometres – among the largest in Europe, which hosts the Atlantic landfall of the transatlantic cables that carry the data of a continent and upon which our entire FDI economy rests. We have no idea what the 245 Russian shadow fleet vessels were doing while they passed through our waters more than 450 times in the first seven months of last year.

What doesn’t help is that the intelligence function itself is split and diffused with an architecture that is unfit for purpose. There’s a domestic security service inside the national police, a separate military one inside the Department of Defence, and no foreign service at all. This creates a system-wide fragmentation that leaves us reliant on other states for what happens on and off our island, an arrangement that exists in no other European country.

Indeed, even for the most sensitive of that work, there is no oversight whatsoever by the Oireachtas or by anyone else. There is no published national security strategy, even after seven years of “drafting” one. Of the 60 or so frameworks that a modern European state has as a minimum baseline to function, Ireland has…. less than 5.

One analyst of Russia’s services has called Ireland a “soft target,” citing that our counterintelligence is “effectively nonexistent”, despite Ireland having one of the densest concentrations of internet and global economic assets in Europe. And yes, it shows! Russian military intelligence is believed to run operations from Irish soil against British and European targets, and those pesky Russian boats in our waters? They are constantly mapping where the transatlantic cables come ashore; and they do so knowing that we can see them, but are unable to do anything about it. Well, that is, other than calling the Royal Navy (His Majesty’s navy, the same Majesty we spent quite a long time trying to banish from our waters), which in the past has had to surface a submarine beside the vessel to send the Russians home (temporarily, before coming back again).

The temptation is to call this a failure of money, but you’ve read enough of my work now to probably realize it is not. We are a rich country! We can buy or create whatever security equipment or services we wish to have. So the next temptation then is to say, once again, that we are lacking the institutional machinery that turns FDI revenues into a serious security apparatus and suite of capabilities.

But I shan’t, because you and I already know this to be true.

In fact, this essay has been hard to write because I wanted to get past a discussion of the institutional failure and say something about neutrality itself. And neutrality is the one subject on which this country can generate infinite noise with very little rigor.

Are we neutral, or were we ever? Is neutrality a value or a habit, a principle or a façade? Is buying a radar “defense,” and so permitted, or the first step onto the slope that ends in NATO and other people’s wars? Is a cyber unit “security,” which sounds civilian and safe, or “defense,” which sounds martial and suspect. And what, while we are on the topic, is the difference between them? Is a drone that watches a cable defensive or offensive; is a satellite “dual-use”; is a data centre critical infrastructure or merely commerce, and does guarding it commit us to something we never agreed to? Does Article 42.7 oblige us to die for Estonia, and did we accidentally sign that without reading it? And over all of it, carried through the argument, is the Triple Lock; the mechanism by which Ireland handed a veto over the deployment of its own soldiers to the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, Russia among them, so that Moscow may help decide where an Irish peacekeeper is allowed to stand. Which the Government now moves to abolish; as the President calls the core of our neutrality and wants put to a referendum. A referendum which one half of the country mourns as a red-line limit and the other derides as a Russian veto we volunteered for, and on whose plain meaning I have not found two people to agree on.

Hello? Are you still here? Are you dizzy yet? Do any of the adults in the room actually know any of this? Are there adults in the room? The discussion around this is like pulling a complex thread (or pulling teeth); in that the answers to all of the questions above are probably simultaneously yes and no.

The President is right that the Triple Lock sits at the core of how we have described ourselves. The scholars are right that abolishing it would not change what actually defends this island. They are both correct, because they are answering different questions, yet have not noticed that while one person is speaking about “who we are”, the other is speaking of “what we can do”. It appears that despite endlessly ferocious debates, very few people are ever disagreeing.

However, we are using four or five exhausted words (Security! Defense! Neutrality! Sovereignty!) to mean about three dozen different things each, and then are somehow shocked that we cannot understand one another. What is happening today is not a debate. It is a nation of people, emotional with certainty, grasping onto a different dimension of the same few words, never willing to concede that we have never, in a hundred years, agreed what any of them mean.

So, before anything useful can be said about Irish neutrality, we have to go back to the beginning.

To War, Or Not To War

There’s a tradition of thinking about war, force, and the state that goes back thousands of years. Its ideas run underneath practically all of modern politics, because sooner or later every country has to argue with itself about how it should defend itself, and ultimately what its soldiers are for.

However, and contrary to common thinking, these aren’t technical questions for generals to settle and everyone else to ignore. They’re the most fundamental assumptions a state is built on. These questions about power and war aren’t downstream of the state; rather the state is downstream of them. So refusing to think about war and power isn’t rising above “unworthy things”, it’s leaving the foundation unexamined, and running a country without ever asking what the country is for.

Ireland has taken in almost none of this. It’s worth running quickly through what we skipped, because a lot of what’s wrong with our defense follows straight from it. There are four questions here, and every serious country has answered them.

Question One: Is war ever justified?

The oldest question is whether war can be judged in moral terms at all. One tradition says no: war is simply a fact of the world, like the mathematical constant “pi”; it’s not good or evil, just something to be managed through necessity. This is the hard-headed realism that runs from Thucydides to Machiavelli. The opposing tradition is the “just war” theory handed down from Augustine and Aquinas, which says that force can and must be judged; that there are right and wrong reasons to go to war, right and wrong ways to fight it, and clear duties once it ends.

Every defense policy in Europe falls somewhere between these two poles. And each one rests, even if no single policy explicitly ever mentions this, on some idea of when killing is justified.

Ireland has no such idea, because Ireland was never forced to form one. Instead, we built a national identity out of moral seriousness. We are the small country that speaks up for poorer ones while occasionally lecturing the great powers on international law from the floor of the United Nations. But we do all of this without ever having built a real army, and without any actual power to act in the world. So our moral seriousness never cost us anything and never put us at any risk. In other words, we have precisely zero skin in the game.

Of course, it is easy to take the moral high ground when claiming it costs nothing and risks nothing. While Ireland does have an army (one that has served abroad with real distinction!), the State never gave it the scale or the investment to put any weight behind our words. This is not to be confused with pacifism, which is a genuine position, argued for and paid for. It is simply that we are… unarmed.

Question Two: How does war actually work?

The founding idea here comes from a Prussian soldier named Carl von Clausewitz, who wrote that war is “the continuation of policy by other means.” He meant that war is just politics carried on with weapons, and that an army is the force standing behind a country’s foreign policy; the silent but lethal threat that makes other states take its words seriously.

Others added to this millenia-old debate. Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese strategist, said that the best commander wins without fighting at all, through careful positioning and deception. A line of thinkers after a guy called Kant argued that democracies do not go to war with one another (hello globalization). The strategists of the technological and nuclear age showed how the threat of force alone can change an enemy’s behavior without a single shot being fired, and that more lethal weapons become, paradoxically, the more likely peace.

The common thread is simple: military power and foreign policy are bound together as two sides of the same coin, and it is the ability to act with force that gives a country’s words any real weight.

Now hold Irish foreign policy up against that framework. It is close to Sun Tzu, perhaps, except with the whole strategy thing (the important part) removed. In that we are all talk but without any force; merely words with nothing standing behind them. When Ireland speaks at the Security Council, every other country in the room knows there is nothing giving credence to our words. We have no military or leverage to uphold. Sadly, for a long time, we have confused being heard with having influence.

Question Three: Who do the soldiers answer to?

Who should a soldier ultimately obey? A general? The prime minister? What about the citizens? Brussels? Even NATO? It is a live question today, in a Europe that has begun to talk about a “European army”, and indeed a real question that several Gardaí provoked during the fuel protests as they wondered to whom their allegiances lay: the farmers or Jim O’Callaghan.

The modern democratic answer is what’s called the Parliamentary Army, in which elected civilians sit firmly above the military, and the military does what they decide.

Ireland has perfect civilian control over its armed forces, but only for the same reason a person without a car has a perfect driving record; there is almost nothing there to control. And on the rare occasion the system is actually tested, the hollowness is obvious. Let’s revisit the fuel protests, when our Minister for Justice called in the Army to clear cars, as if the military were just an arm of the police.

In Germany, the constitution flatly forbids this. In France, it would take a formal request passed up the defense chain and signed off by the President. In Ireland, on the other hand, as farmers and hauliers blockaded the country’s only oil refinery in April, the Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan announced that the Defence Forces were being sent to clear them, and warned the vehicles’ owners not to complain if their property was damaged. There was one problem: the Army was not his to send. Soldiers answer to the Minister for Defence, and reach the streets only on a formal Garda request for “aid to the civil power.” O’Callaghan had committed the military from the wrong department, and without consulting the Defence Minister or the Defence Forces, who learned of it along with the public.

The deployment itself was pretty inconsequential as it was only a couple of recovery trucks. But the point is that the soldiers had no clear legal power to use force, so the Government passed a retrospective law, after the fact, to authorize what it had already done. This is literally something that could have become an episode of Father Ted, except for the fact that it would have been too absurd.

And this is what happens when a country has never deliberated upon one of the most foundational questions of a state — who its soldiers answer to; and when no line has never been drawn to be crossed in the first place. Hence you can only imagine how absurd it is for Ireland to be brokering the most consequential contemporary decisions of European defense over the next few months.

Question Four: What is a country’s military character?

Finally, there is what scholars call strategic culture. This is really about the deep-set assumptions and instincts a country brings to the use of force, often without realizing it has them. This topic is enormously important when creating defense strategies and policies

Germany, scarred by the twentieth century, built up a powerful culture of military restraint, so deeply held that breaking it, in 2022, required a special word: Zeitenwende, “a turning of the age”, just to acknowledge the shocking change. This is the proof, if ever you needed it, that a country’s military character is real, long-term, and very deliberately chosen. And that a nation can change it, too, when it needs to.

America’s character is the opposite in that it is decisive, technology-driven, and drawn to the overwhelming force of a Western great power. China built a culture of patience and plays the long game, content to wait it out. Its instinct is to hide its strength, bide its time, and let a rival wear themselves out, so that the contest is half-won before it has openly begun.

Each military culture is a stance a country thought its way towards, and could explain and defend.

What about Ireland? We would like to believe it is restraint, and that Ireland, like Germany, made a serious moral decision to stay out of the business of global conflict. But Germany’s restraint is a strong state deliberately holding itself back; it is restraint chosen from a position of strength. Irish “restraint” is the condition of a state that never had any strength to hold back in the first place; but in which it occasionally dabbles when the commercial impetus exists. Germany’s historic restraint is a decision, while the Irish restraint is an indecision. And the central lie of Irish strategic culture is that we have spent a century pretending to be like the first type of restraint when in fact we are the second. We convince ourselves that our refusal to build any defense at all is a wise and principled choice.

Ok, so with that foundation, let’s roll up the sleeves and get into the topic that everybody’s shouting about.

Subscribe now

What is Neutrality, Really?

So, neutrality. Before we argue about keeping it or dropping it, there’s a more basic problem: the word has at least five different dimensions.

Legal status, or policy posture?

At one end, neutrality is a formal legal status, à la the 1907 Hague Conventions. It is a binding bargain that says: you must stay strictly impartial; it is your responsibility to keep belligerents off your territory by force if you must; and in return your borders are legally inviolable. At the other end is policy neutrality; a loose, unilateral posture of staying out of military affairs which is cheaper and comes with flexibility, but ultimately very flimsy, holding only as long as others choose to respect it.

Ireland sits at the loose end, with our neutrality being in neither a treaty nor Constitution. But the spectrum isn’t really the point, as Sweden and Finland sat at that same loose end and armed themselves heavily anyway. You see, they understood that exactly because a neutral has no allies, a neutral must be able to defend itself. That is exactly what the Irish idea rejects, and is the only example of neutrality in the world to do so. To everyone else, “neutral” means armed and self-reliant; to us it means unarmed and uninvolved. This is not a softer version of the concept but its complete opposite. In fact, we couldn’t be legally neutral even if we tried! Because it would mean arming ourselves for our own defense, which is the exact thing our current definition of neutrality exists to avoid. Neutrality for everybody else produces independence, which is the entire point. But ours produces dependence.

A means, or an end?

Is neutrality a tool we use, or a value we are? A tool is something that you use while it works, and then get rid of when you no longer need it. A value is something that you hold onto, no matter what. Irish neutrality began firmly as a tool that served two purposes at once. Abroad, it kept a small, broke, newly independent state (Ireland) out of the Second World War and off the Cold War’s front line. At home, it justified keeping the army small, because the last thing our newly formed government needed were more state-sponsored militia to rival the new political apparatus. Although even abroad our “neutrality” was never as “neutral” as we discuss, as all through the war we helped the Allies, feeding them weather reports (one that even fixed the date of D-Day) and returning their downed airmen while interning the Germans’. It began as a tool, in short, that was used to manage threats abroad and rivals at home.

But over the decades the tool became a value, and a part of who we think we are. And once neutrality turned into an identity, it became impossible to question. To suggest Ireland buy a radar surely means you are “abandoning neutrality”. It is therefore now discussed as if a defense purchase were a betrayal of the national soul.

Negative, or positive?

Negative neutrality is just staying out of things, whereas positive neutrality is doing something active for peace. We vastly prefer the positive story, and to be fair it is a real one that we mostly all identify with. Irish troops have worn the blue helmet almost continuously since the early 1960s, while holding the line in south Lebanon since 1978, and have died doing it. It is an honorable record.

But two things have gone wrong with it. First, we use it to dignify what is mostly the negative version (i.e. not spending, and not joining, and not committing) as though a few hundred peacekeepers answers the question of national defense in its entirety. Second, even the honorable part needs capacity, and that capacity is rapidly draining away. The Defence Forces are at their lowest strength in fifty years, and the overseas service we are proudest of gets harder to sustain every year. You cannot be the world’s peacemaker without… peacemakers. And equipment to give peacemakers. This needs to come from… an increased defense budget. The one respectable thing we point to, we are rapidly losing the ability to do.

Armed, or unarmed?

So, the big one. If you have no allies, the entire job of defending yourself falls on you alone. That is exactly why every other neutral in Europe is so heavily armed. Switzerland conscripts its men and keeps fallout shelters for its whole population. Meanwhile, Finland fields one of the largest artillery forces on the continent and a reserve it can call up in days, because it shares a border with Russia, which it is constantly reminded of.

Ireland, however, managed the one combination that makes no sense at all! We have maximum responsibility for our island, but with minimum capacity. In other words, we took on the full burden of defending ourselves, with no alliance to fall back on, and then built almost nothing (no fighter jets, no primary radar, no air defence of any kind, a navy that cannot put most of its ships to sea) to do so. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes said it best four centuries ago: “covenants, without the sword, are but words”. Which is why the moment our defense is tested, the people who actually respond are the British and the Americans.

Recognized, or not?

This is the one facet of neutrality we like least, because it takes the matter out of our hands entirely. Neutrality is not something you declare; it is something others grant. It works only because violating a recognized neutral carries an enormous diplomatic, legal, and reputational cost; and that cost is what keeps the bad actors out.

If you remove the cost, there is obviously nothing left to deter anyone. As such, Ireland imposes no cost to those who seek to interfere with us. Russia runs intelligence operations from Irish soil against the rest of Europe, sends its shadow fleet through our waters hundreds of times a year, and has had vessels mapping the cables on our seabed openly, because it knows nothing will happen in response.

Our friends don’t exactly treat us as self-sufficient or neutral either. Britain defends our airspace for us, which is the opposite of recognizing our capabilities. Of course, Churchill spent the war itching to seize our Atlantic ports, just as the Americans have used Shannon as a military waystation for decades. To our enemies we are an undefended gap; to our friends, a dependent that can be extracted from. So if neither our friends nor our foes see us as neutral… Are we?

Across each of these five dimensions, Ireland attempts to take the most impressive interpretation yet delivers the more hollow one. And beneath this lies enormous questions. Neutral, but to what end? Non-aligned, but against what? Defended, but to protect who?

What Are We Protecting?

Defense policy is so tightly interlinked with philosophy because it seeks to answer a single question: what are you protecting?

Strategists call the thing being protected the referent object, and they’re strict about what counts. It isn’t the thing that’s merely useful but the thing of ultimate worth. The thing whose loss would feel like losing yourself, not just losing a function; and something a country holds to be worth surviving for, for its own sake. In French, they call this the raison d’être.

Ask the question in Ireland, and many defense hawks will say: we’re protecting the subsea cables, the data, the grid, and the sovereign sea. And the threat to those is absolutely real, so sure! But none of them is a thing of ultimate worth. Nobody loves a cable, just as nobody ever bled for a data centre. They aren’t what we’re protecting; they’re the equipment we need and the infrastructure an open, connected society relies on to keep being itself.

Because underneath what are you protecting lies a harder question, which is: protecting which way of life?

A couple of years ago I spent a week in the Austrian Alps with the Austrian military, on a cross-border European exercise. Afterwards I got talking to a young Austrian soldier about Europe’s rush to rearm. I asked whether the new military posture worried him; why he didn’t just take an office job in the city. He nearly teared up as he told me he would die to protect the life his family had lived in those mountains for generations. It made me think about Ireland. Do people die for tax havens? Would anyone give their life to defend a low corporate rate?

What way of life – what something that is recognizably ours – are the undersea cables, at the end of the day, there to serve? To say what way of life you’re protecting is to say what you value. And to say what you value is to say who you are.

Go one level deeper still and you reach the oldest question of all. What is a state even for? The textbook answer is that a state is the one body allowed to use force inside its own borders, and its first job (the thing that justifies it existing at all) is to protect the people in it. Protection is indeed what earns a government the right to govern us. A state that can’t protect its people hasn’t earned the authority it claims over them.

Ok, but Ireland might concede all of this about physical defense and say: that was never what our state was for. Perhaps Ireland, like much of post-war Europe, was able to redefine what protection means. That this meaning has moved away from protection against physical threats and towards something more domestic: social protection. The safety net of a roof, a hospital bed, a pension, and a school place. In this model, the state is not as a guardian standing at the gates, but a carer looking after the people inside it.

But is the Irish state actually protecting us there either? It is the question I have been circling in these essays, and the figures are not suggesting that it is upholding this definition either. This is a state failing at both hard and soft protection; that is unable to defend the island from a hostile foreign or domestic power, and unable to house its own children or treat its own sick people. By the state’s own founding logic, a country that protects its people in neither sense has stopped doing the one thing that justifies a state at all.

From Colony to Colonel

The political philosopher Frantz Fanon understood the colonized mind as well as anybody could. The “self” that is created under colonialism, he wrote, is a “reactive self”; one that is built in opposition to the colonizer, and that only identifies itself only by what it isn’t. In this way, it can tell you, fluently, everything it is not. But it has little to say the moment you ask what it is.

That is the founding condition of the Irish state, and it explains the empty space where a defense should exist. Irish identity was forged over centuries of unsparing struggle against Britain, and it was importantly built almost entirely out of refusals.

We’re not British! We’re not imperial! Nor are we militarists! The Empire was an unyielding war machine, so to be Irish was to be the opposite of such a horrifying apparatus. The army, the navy, and the whole setup of organized force were the tools of the occupier. They were the very things our newly created state had defined itself by rejecting. A people that wins its freedom by refusing the oppressor’s tools doesn’t then turn around and build those same tools for itself. So unsurprisingly, to arm seriously would have felt, somewhere consciously or subconsciously, like becoming the thing our previous generations died to escape.

And so historically no defense policy could ever be built, because there was no positive identity to build it on. You can’t reason your way from we are not a war-making power like our former masters… to… here is what our physical power is for. Because the first sentence forecloses the second. Thus, an identity made entirely of refusals can’t produce a plan, because a plan needs a positive claim about what you are and what you mean to do. It requires the one sentence the reactive self has never managed to say.

In short, we knew, with our whole hearts, what we were against. But we never decided what we were for.

There’s a real grief in this. We spent eight hundred years learning, brilliantly, how to say no. To British landlords, to an overseas parliament, to a bloodthirsty empire, and later to a church that moved into the same overbearing space. We became the Great Refuser! And that refusal bled into an entire genre of literature, of politics, and of a national character of real and lasting beauty, that has long since defined us.

And then one day, the very institutions we had defined ourselves against finally let go of us, and there was no one left to refuse. So what does a country do when it has spent eight hundred years refusing, finally has nothing left to refuse, and never built a positive identity to put in its place? It must perform one instead.

Subscribe now

The Expressive State

There’s a name for these identities that are performed freely; something that you’ll find has been woven through many of my last essays.

Call it the expressive state: a state that buys the expression of an identity while skipping the investment that would make it real.

Neutrality is one of the clearest cases of this. “Neutral” is an expressive good. It says something flattering about us. We’re moral! We’re independent, peaceable, and far, far above the grubby arithmetic of bigger nations! We bought this identity quickly, of course, but what we refuse to buy alongside it is the one thing that would make it true: the armed self-reliance that “neutral” means everywhere else.

Like everything, we wanted the meaning of the word without the cost of it. We wanted to be Switzerland in the imagination of our self-reliance, and Liechtenstein in our budget. Yet we ended up as neither a respected armed neutral, nor an honest partner in a shared defense contribution. We are a free-rider claiming independence under a security paid for by others, while somehow still blowing through budget after budget regardless.

And the Expressive State is not just about defense, as it runs straight through the thing we are proudest of – our moral voice in the world.

We are forever the first to speak yet hardly ever the ones who have paid for the speaking. We had to be the first country to throw open our doors to Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s invasion (a genuinely generous and moral thing to do), but then never built the capacity for such generosity. As we watch beds run out, we now pay them to go back to the war they came from.

We condemn Russia in every room we can reach and arm Ukraine with our words, while on the Shannon Estuary sits Aughinish Alumina, one of the largest Russian-owned industrial assets in the European Union, shipping significant output to Russian smelters in a chain that investigators have traced toward the manufacturers supplying Russia’s war. Indeed, successive Irish governments have lobbied to keep the plant exempt from sanctions in a bid to protect the jobs around Limerick, and a senior minister has said flatly that there is no contradiction between supporting Ukraine and shipping the alumina. And we lecture the world on Gaza; the first EU state to call for a Palestinian state, decades back, and among the loudest against Israel now; while in 2024, at the height of the assault, our own Department of Enterprise signed off €20 million of dual-use technology bound for the Israeli military and its defense ministry, and only stopped granting the licenses in 2025, after a reporter dragged the figures into the open under freedom-of-information law.

Three causes we are proud of, with three loud moral postures, propped up by material facts indicating that what we say and what we do, are in fact different things entirely. That is the expressive state in its purest form. Buying the sentiment we wish to extend cheaply, but skipping the expensive substance, over and over, until the gaping hole between what we say and what we do becomes the most reliable thing about us.

So why won’t we just do the hard thing? Why, if offered an identity that actually fits us, do we cling so hard to the empty one that we all seem to despise?

Mirror, Mirror, On The Wall…

The answer goes deeper than money, as always. The crux of the post-colonial struggle, long after a war of independence is won, is the one that actually decides whether a nation becomes “free” or merely “unoccupied”. This hard and oft-failed task of getting past the reactive self to a generative one, is the one we now face. It is the one in which we are not defined by a refusal but by the agency of our own choices. To decide our own identity.

Most post-colonial countries never finish the transition, because the reactive self is so much more comfortable to live in. Refusal is morally clean, but those that have neither skin in the game nor the courage to move forward, are the same ones that also sadly end up with very little to lose.

We see this frequently at the level of a person who, years after the bad parent or the terrible ex, is still organized entirely around the wound they were left with. Their identity has fuzed with the grievance, meaning that the person who hurt them is still, in a sense, running their life. Why don’t they change? Because they experience the same comfort a nation finds in neutrality. For as long as you are the wronged one, you are never the one at fault. And you therefore never have to make the terrifying, exposed move of saying this is who I am and this is what I want, because wanting something means you might not be given it, and trying to build something means you can fail at it. So of course, refusal keeps you safe in a way that pursuing a desire never can. But the trouble is that it also keeps you alone, and small, and stuck. Everyone knows someone who has grieved a life they didn't go on to build. And Ireland is that person: a country that a hundred years later is still so busy not being Britain that it never got around to becoming itself.

Perhaps this version of neutrality is our reactive self’s last and favorite hiding place, allowing us to avoid defining who we are. And the reason it is debated so passionately.

And that is the real reason this essay was so hard to write. I could sit down to write about the Triple Lock, or radar systems, or the vast sea dotted with Russian-speaking vessels, but what would be the point? Because neutrality is not the problem. It is only the part of the problem that can be seen from the surface. Pull the thread and our lackluster defense apparatus is downstream of a neutrality we never defined; and the neutrality we never defined is downstream of a state that never decided what it was for; and that empty space at the centre of the state is downstream of the hardest thing of all. Of who we are, a people patch-worked across eight hundred years made entirely out of “we are not’s”.

Security policy is downstream of the state — but importantly, the state is downstream of us.

Which is why the great debate I started by describing with settles nothing, however fierce it gets. No radar fixes an ill-contemplated identity, just as no referendum can answer the question the referendum exists to avoid. Keep the Triple Lock or scrap it, but either way we still won’t have the aircraft we need to go up to meet the Russian jet, just as we likely won’t have one more ship to put to sea, nor one more cable on the seabed being watched. Changing the Triple Lock will still leave the real question exactly where it was placed a century ago.

And this argument feels enormous because it is enormous. It is a real fight, about a real question, with real stakes. But the very size of this question around neutrality is also exactly what makes it so useful — because the debate has come to mirror the thing it is about. Neutrality is an ill-defined word we each pour our own meaning into; just as the debate over neutrality has become an ill-defined fight we each pour our own conviction into. Passionately, righteously and strangely certain, and yet still we never quite reach the actual question underneath that we need to get to. Which is, in the end: what is any of it for?

Note: Since I started this substack specifically to write about power, geo-economics and defense, it seems strange that I should have to say that — yes, I am involved in these things! I am a defense economist, investor and policymaker, and have been for quite some time. I also run Security Ireland, which might be called a think tank on a good day, but is probably closer to being a website with my policy musings which has generated interesting discussions with some academics who similarly like to pontificate in similar ways. Needless to say, I have no commercial interests in Ireland’s policies, and have on numerous times rejected all donations to do it more formally. I write about these topics, including this post, because I am deeply interested in the subject area and because, of course, I care about Ireland.

I will discuss this in greater detail in my next post, in which I have decided to take the leap and wade into the discussion around the Triple Lock.

I also want throw out there that I am the exact embodiment of what pockets of people in Ireland have feared arriving for a long time to Ireland’s shores: a trans-Atlanticist elite, trained at the School of Evil Globalism (Harvard, and I don’t necessarily disagree with this framing), having interacted with just about every defense, security, and intelligence agency that there is. On a more serious note, I want to actually break this down by discussing the defense industry, and will do so next time.

Thanks again for reading, if you’re still here! S.

To date I have written three essays on Ireland, each of which has done something specific:

• In Mind the Gap, I showed you what this system… looks like.

• In The Failure Premium, I showed you what this system… costs us.

• In I is for Immigration, I showed you where this system is… most visible.

You see there is, in fact, some method to my madness. Today I want to show you something different: how the system defends itself against being fixed. There has been the discussion around nitpickers already, however I want to dig into another extraordinarily well-used mechanism by those who are resisting change, which is intended to create obfuscation and distraction every time someone raises the issue of a structural problem in Ireland.

And this is a pattern that we need to name so that it can, eventually, become powerless in public dialogue. Because only when the response can no longer be used by the political incumbents, can we start having a genuine discussion about solutions that Ireland has been avoiding for forty years.

Subscribe now

Basic Rules of Economics

I was sent this morning a video of Peadar Tóibín, leader of Aontú, a party that sits on the right in Irish politics. It showed Tóibín in the Dáil making a point that came pretty close to what I wrote about in my last Substack, which is that the level of services and infrastructure in Ireland have not kept pace with the enormous growth in Ireland’s population. Among structural reforms to housing planning and investing properly in infrastructure, Tóibín asked: will you decrease the number of people coming to Ireland during this crisis?

This was a clearly worded question, with a direct ask for the Prime Minister. And without commenting on the politics of any parties mentioned herein, it’s worth noting that this was a fairly straightforward argument that follows the basic rules of economics, and one that mirrors my own: if we do not scale a country’s infrastructure at the same pace that we scale its population (although ideally more), then we are bringing all sorts of trouble upon ourselves.

I want to unpack the response from Micheál Martin, Ireland’s Taoiseach, which was not very long and yet contained the entire problem with how Ireland governs itself.

He said, and I’m somewhat paraphrasing:

The population has grown 52% since 1995; there are positives, because we had been declining as a population until the 1960s. But I’m not clear on what you’re suggesting? It’s not easy to unwind that.... If you look at our health sector, we need these [immigrants]. Our health and care sectors are significantly dependent on migration.

While every word of that retort is technically true, every word of it is also a masterclass in not answering the question. And what Martin did in thirty seconds is what the Irish state has been doing for forty years: using the genuine complexity of interconnected problems as a shield against acting on any of them.

This works every single time because most people don’t have a framework for hearing what’s actually being said. So let me give you one, with the hope that in the future you can start to see how those who are in favor of the status quo are able to defend it from change, at any and all cost.

Defense 1: The Snapshot

A snapshot is when you take a photograph of the current state and present it as a fact of nature, rather than tracing the sequence of decisions that produced it, and dealing with what led to the snapshot in the first place.

Let’s look at a non-economics example:

Imagine a patient arrives at A&E with chest pain. A bad doctor will take a snapshot of the patient, at that moment, and see someone with a high cholesterol. They will then decide they need a statin to reduce the cholesterol before sending them on their merry way.

A good doctor, on the other hand, traces the sequence of events that led to the high cholesterol. Perhaps they realize that the patient is working sixty-hour weeks because they can’t afford their mortgage, and they eat badly while not exercising. The stress of sitting on the M50 for three hours a day raises their blood pressure. Oh, and they couldn’t see their GP because they didn’t have one, so the condition went unmonitored for years. Now they’re in A&E with a crisis that has five causes, and only one of which is cholesterol.

The statin, in other words, won’t solve this problem. Because the problem is everything that led to high cholesterol, not the high cholesterol itself.

No competent doctor says “well, the heart, the diet, the stress and the housing costs are all connected… it’s very complicated… I’m not clear what you’re suggesting.” Instead, the good doctor traces the chain of events and identifies intervention points, so that they can sequence the treatment. They would likely say: your heart is going to get a stent now, with urgent lifestyle changes to follow such that the underlying causes get whittled down over time. Further, the deep connection between a bad lifestyle and a bad outcome is the reason you need a coordinated treatment plan, not a reason to send the patient home with a few paracetamols.

Going back to the Dáil, and now listen to what Micheál Martin says: “Our health sector is significantly dependent on migration.”

That’s a snapshot. It is true today; but if you trace the sequence behind it, here is what it actually says: Ireland never trained enough nurses and doctors domestically, while it failed to pay them properly or to provide affordable housing near the hospitals where they work. This meant that they swapped Dublin and Cork for cities like Melbourne and Abu Dhabi in search of a lifestyle that did not exist at home. And in their place, instead of fixing the root problem, the state recruited replacements from Pakistan and Nigeria at lower salaries, while placing them into the same conditions that drove the Irish ones out. There was no desire to actually improve any institutions along this trajectory; the staff just got cheaper and more disposable, and at a higher cost to taxpayers.

The dependency Martin describes on migration is not a fact of nature that was somehow thrust upon his leadership. Look at the problem with any discernment at all, and all you will see is the endpoint of decades of government failure at every prior step, overseen largely by his own party’s policies. So while the snapshot says “we need these immigrants”, a more honest sequence instead says “we are the ones who actually created the need by failing at everything else first.”

A government that is only capable of parroting Snapshots will never fix any problems, because every problem discussed through that lens looks like a natural law that cannot be changed, rather than a product of choices that can.

So the next time you hear a politician describe a crisis as though it simply arrived, ask the one question that breaks the Snapshot open: what led to this? Who decided what, and when, and why? For a snapshot can only exist for as long as nobody traces the sequence that created it. As such, we need to dissolve this Snapshot back into a chain of decisions that could have been made differently in the past, to figure out how they can be made differently in the future.

Defense 2: The Tangle

The Tangle is more sophisticated, because it acknowledges that problems are interconnected, before then presenting the interconnection itself as the reason nothing structural can actually ever be done about it.

“It’s complicated” is the polite political version of “we don’t intend to change anything; please stop asking us about it.”

Actually, we’ve seen this before.

Ahead of the 2008 financial crisis, every institution in the Irish economy could point to every other institution and say “we’re dependent on them, therefore we can’t change what we’re doing.” The banks couldn’t stop lending because the developers needed credit, and the developers couldn’t stop building because the banks needed loan growth. Similarly, the regulator couldn’t intervene because the tax revenue funded the government, and the government couldn’t slow things down because the employment figures depended on construction. On, and on, and on it goes.

So yes, every node in the system was “dependent” on every other node. And that interdependency was used, exactly as Martin used it last week, as the reason nothing could be questioned.

Let’s again look at what Martin said: “It’s not easy to unwind that... you can’t look at this without looking at health, demographics, the economy...”

What he’s gesturing at here is The Tangle. And the tangle is real! As I wrote in the Failure Premium piece: housing failure means nurses can’t afford to live near hospitals, which means agency staff at three times the cost, which means health budgets are consumed by staffing premiums, which means waiting lists grow, which means the state pays private hospitals to clear them, which defunds something else entirely. Again, here we have a chain of Failure Premiums so long that nobody in the Department of Health would ever think to blame the Department of Housing.

And that is precisely why Martin reaches for the Tangle. It allows him to present himself as the sober realist — the only adult in the room, dare I say — whose acknowledgement of complexity is itself meant to demonstrate a comprehension above the scale of the problem. In reality though, it is nearly always the precise opposite. This is little more than state-led fragility disguised as intellectual sophistication. As those in power cannot actually manage the complexity that is currently engulfing the state, they attempt to do the next best thing, which is to signal the recognition of complexity as though the recognition were, in itself, a form of competence.

By saying “you can’t look at this without looking at health, demographics, the economy…”, Martin is not actually proposing to look at any of them; he is simply using the fact that they are connected as a reason to act on none. Thus, the interconnection becomes an excuse to leave things unfixed, not a mandate to fix anything.

It goes without saying, however, that a serious government would look at that chain and say: Oh my, this is out of control; this is why we need coordination across departments, and need to sequence intervention; this is why someone’s job has to be seeing the whole system.

Canada looks at the same complexity and builds absorption modeling that coordinates immigration targets across housing, health, education, and the labour market simultaneously. And Denmark coordinates welfare provision across municipal and national governments at the same time. In fact, every functioning peer country manages this kind of complexity as a daily matter of fact, because managing complexity across departments is, in a very real sense, the entire job of the government.

Micheál Martin looks at the Tangle and says: see how complicated it is? And with a single hand wave, quickly moves on.

Meaning that when you hear a politician invoking complexity, don’t waste time arguing about whether the problem is complex — we all know it is. Instead, ask the following: who has been put in place to manage that complexity? Where is the coordination architecture that holds these departments together? Where is the person whose entire job is to see across the system?

Defense 3: The Circle

The Tangle says the problem is too interconnected to act on. The Circle goes further: it says that because every starting point depends on something else being solved first, the process cannot even be begun — and therefore should not be attempted at all.

Listen to where Martin pulls out the Circle in his response: “If you look at our health sector, we need these people. Our health and care sectors are significantly dependent on migration.” The dependency is named and accepted, before the conversation is effectively shut down.

This is the deepest defense against reform and the hardest to argue against, because within the circle of the argument, every individual statement is sadly true:

1. We can’t reduce immigration because we need healthcare workers.

2. We need immigrant workers because we can’t retain Irish ones.

3. We can’t retain Irish ones because we can’t house them.

4. We can’t house them because we haven’t built enough.

5. We haven’t built enough because we don’t have the construction workers.

6. We don’t have construction workers because we depend on immigrant labour.

7. The circle closes and continues in an impenetrable fashion.

Every point of linkage in that chain is accurate, however the circularity of the argument means that any single entry point you pick for solving the problem(s) looks like a reason not to act at any other point! The Circle is the system’s most feverishly accomplished defense, because it makes every proposed intervention appear as though it will break something else. And so, in the pretense of actually saving the system, nothing is ever attempted — even though refusing to attempt anything is precisely the thing which will eventually kill it.

The Apollo program had exactly this problem, except the interdependencies were orders of magnitude more complex; something that is true of any space mission. I know this, because this is exactly what I spent years working on! At NASA, I used to design human spaceflight missions through “complex systems” methodologies, and I suppose having done this for so many years in so many different forms, for NASA and other institutions, is the very reason that I am able to see The Circle so clearly when it makes an appearance (which is often in Irish public discourse).

Consider that at NASA, the choice of propulsion system for going to Mars depended on the guidance system, which depended on the trajectory of the spacecraft, which depended on the exact date of launch, which depended on manufacturing timelines, which depended on budgets, which all ultimately depended on Congressional approval. And this approval could only be given when all of the rest of these questions had already been answered. An enormous, decades-long, multi-billion dollar game of chicken-and-egg.

Even worse, if a single one of the hundreds of thousands of design decisions changed, the entirety of the other hundreds of thousands of decisions changed. So then where, or how, do you even begin to resolve such a self-encapsulating problem?

Well, I’ll start by mentioning that NASA’s response was not “It’s very complex and I’m not clear what you’re suggesting”...

Quite simply, NASA created the coordination architecture to manage these enormous interdependencies. My entire job, actually, existed to manage these kinds of wildly coupled problems, by taking the messiness that looks impossible to untangle and by making them manageable. How? I had loads of different tools available to me, such as trade studies that evaluate options against each other (sometimes billions of different alternatives), lots of maths and statistics, interface control documents that define how every subsystem connects to every other subsystem, using technology readiness levels to sequence what gets developed and when, and new design processes that allow thousands of teams to work in parallel without contradicting each other.

So when I hear Micheál Martin using the Circle as a reason for (yet again) doing nothing, I feel an irreducible rise of anger with the performative and wildly pathetic helplessness of it all.

Alas, when the Circle is invoked and every proposed intervention is met with another link in the chain that has to be solved first? Ask them to name a country with the same problem that hasn’t already broken its own version of the Circle. They all have! Every functioning state on earth has had to pick a link and accept that breaking it would cause short-term cascades elsewhere, and act anyway. This is called having political leadership and courage; because the alternative is a scorched-earth approach of watching the whole system collapse from inaction.

The methodologies to break apart difficult and deeply-coupled problems like this are not secret, and nor are they theoretical. As I am fully aware, they are practised every day by any serious organization on earth that builds anything more complicated than a “taskforce report”. I spent years breaking apart problems far more coupled than Ireland’s housing-health-immigration circle, and I can tell you with absolute certainty: the reason this circle is not being broken is not that it cannot be broken. It is, shamefully, that nobody in power has ever been forced to try.

Fragments

Peadar Tóibín stood in the Dáil and asked a perfectly clear question about infrastructure and investing, saying: will you decrease the number of people coming to Ireland during this crisis? There is nothing ambiguous about that question; you can agree with it or disagree with it, but no English speaker can pretend to not understand it.

And yet Martin’s response of “I’m not clear what you’re suggesting” is the only plausible retort when the question is so comprehensible that any semblance of an honest answer would require actually taking a position – the very thing this quagmire of a system is designed never to do.

In thirty seconds, Martin deployed all three defenses. There was first the Snapshot (“the population has grown 52% since 1995”), framed positively as if the number simply arrived from nowhere, having nothing to do with the party he leads. He pulled out the Tangle (“it’s not easy to unwind that”), using interconnectivity as a reason to engage with nothing. And he closed with the Circle (“we need immigrants because our health sector depends on them”), effectively presenting a dependency that his policies created as the very reason any intervention would only make things worse.

If you’ve ever looked into a kaleidoscope, you’ll be familiar with the trick it plays on your eyes. It takes only a handful of broken fragments yet reflects them through what feels like millions of tiny mirrors, allowing them to self-rearrange into patterns that look beautifully distracting and novel every time you turn the barrel, even though the pieces inside have never actually changed.

This is, sadly, how Ireland chooses to govern itself. You can pick any issue; be it housing, health, immigration, demographics, or the economy. And within that issue, you will find the same fragments being endlessly rearranged into whatever pattern the political moment requires. You can turn the kaleidoscope’s barrel once and see the Snapshots that reconstruct the present as though it has just arrived as such, unmoored from any decision before it. Turn it again and you get a Tangle so dense it even seems to be capable of arguing against its own resolution. And a third turn allows you to turn the Tangle into a Circle that is so perfectly sealed such that one might feel a certainty whereby nothing can be done about anything, ever. A snake eating its own tail.

Each turn of the kaleidoscope looks like a new mosaic to a different question, meaning that each time we peer inside, we are momentarily distracted by the intricacy of the fragments, allowing ourselves to forget that these are in fact the same pieces that were there last year, and the year before that, and indeed for every year of the last four decades during which the pattern of the light kept shifting, while the country beneath it stayed exactly where it was.

A kaleidoscope is a most wondrous thing to look into, but it is a terrible thing to mistake for reality. And we have allowed ourselves to be dazzled by this one for too long.

Subscribe now

Two weeks ago, I delivered a talk for the European Space Agency that was quite controversial. Surprising, I know…

In short, I presented that while SpaceX is an extraordinarily advanced company that has done wondrous things, the existence of SpaceX is not the existence of a space economy. And that the two things — a company and a market — are not the same; at least when it comes to the economics of space.

First, let’s take a quick look at some of SpaceX’s numerous achievements:

• It achieved a 20× reduction in the cost of reaching orbit

• It conducted 165 orbital launches in 2025 (more than twice China’s entire program!)

• It launched a Tesla into space (did you forget about that?)

• The chopsticks? C’mon, that’s insanely cool

And yet, despite SpaceX paving the way, there is still zero functioning lunar economy segments, no in-orbit servicing markets with repeat customers, and no priced resource-extraction transactions from the moon or further afield (indeed, one of the mission designs I worked on for NASA and Jet Propulsion Lab was asteroid mining).

And let’s not forget, as investors remind us constantly, that the cost of launching something to space has collapsed.

But still! The space economy did not appear!

Why not?

Because, as I’ve said many times before, markets don’t form from good technology alone. They form when three architectures co-evolve:

1. Technical (can the hardware do the thing?),

2. Market (can you buy and sell it repeatedly at predictable prices?),

3. Institutional (are there standards, liability frameworks, and infrastructure that make it investable?).

In space, by my (imperfect) guestimates, technical architecture scores very highly, at around 87 out of 100. But market architecture scores lowly at 28, as demonstrated by a lack of learning curves in the space economy. Institutional architectures scores even lower still, at 12.

That gap between the technology and the “binding constraint” of institutional architecture — 0.67 on a normalized scale — is well beyond any plausible threshold that could create market viability. The sector is not “early” in that it needs time for technology to mature; it is structurally premature (i.e. it cannot ever, in this state, mature).

And so yes, here’s the part that will upset some people: SpaceX’s response to this problem was to vertically integrate past this problem of there being “no space market”.

How did it do this? By building Starlink in order to manufacture its own demand! Something that I wrote about for the Financial Times a while ago.

Look at the fact that 89 of its 139 Falcon missions in 2024 carried its own payloads. Its launch price is not, then, a market price — it’s a transfer price set by a vertically integrated company whose largest customer is… itself.

Thus, competitors aren’t benchmarking against a market, they’re benchmarking against a monopoly’s internal accounting, which is what Peter Beck, CEO of Rocket Lab, has whispered carefully about before.

That’s an extraordinary private workaround. Alas, it is not a model for a space economy. A European launch startup cannot, for example, look at what SpaceX has done and determine that there is a viable set of customers to sell launch services to.

This is largely because SpaceX has not closed the architecture gap for anyone else, which is what would ordinarily happen in a functioning market, and is the basis for the theory around “first and second mover advantages”.

As such, no other firm can replicate SpaceX’s cadence advantage, meaning that a supply chain cannot be formed around what is essentially a transfer (not market) price for launch.

While SpaceX’s vertical integration in this frontier sector was once considered strategic prowess, it was the only business model that can exist in an industry that didn’t really exist when SpaceX started, and doesn’t really exist at any scale today.

So what actually needs to happen?

The investment priorities in this weird space industry are inverted!

• Governments and investors keep funding more launch vehicles and more upstream technology, which is the wrong layer to finance.

• This is because the “binding constraint” is not the cost of launch, it’s the absence of the market and institutional architectures without which economic activity cannot form

• These things include the boring aspects of new industries, such as standards and interface specifications, resource rights frameworks, anchor demand programs, and priced surface infrastructure.

They’re not as sexy as investing in rockets that blow up periodically, or get caught in chopsticks the size of Big Ben, but they are the structural prerequisites without which the space economy will remain what it is today: technologically extraordinary, commercially premature, and dominated by one company that found a private solution to a public architecture problem.

Read the paper → Why SpaceX Didn’t Create a Space Economy

This paper draws on two working papers: “Institutions as Coordination Architectures” and “Market Formation as a Systems Engineering Problem.” Full papers available on request: s@sinead.co

In my last piece, I introduced the concept of the Failure Premium: the grotesquely high cost incurred when a state outsources its own responsibilities because it never made the upfront investment in building the institutions to deliver them.

(By the way, the signup to meet in person next week is here, as many of you keep asking me for the link!).

Subscribe now

Today I want to look at immigration, because it is the area where the Failure Premium becomes most visible, most measurable, and most consequential.

This is because every other Failure Premium in Ireland accumulated so slowly that people adapted, emigrated, or bought their way out privately. The housing crisis didn’t arrive in a single year, which has impacted how we deal with it (à la frog boiling in water). But immigration isn’t like these other crises; instead, it arrived at scale and speed, into the same institutional vacuum that had been already failing everyone else for decades. It is the most visible and most undeniable demonstration of what happens when a state that builds nothing meets a demand it cannot defer, delay, or disguise. Yes, you can hide a housing crisis behind HAP payments and Help to Buy schemes, but no, you cannot hide 33,000 people in hotel rooms.

First, a short personal word. Immigration is a difficult topic to discuss, and as such most people have shied away from having this difficult discussion. I don’t want to do that, because it is vital we talk about immigration. But I recognize that there are people who will, regardless of what I write, willingly and happily misinterpret my meaning and intentions. Where ambiguity arises in this post (as it nearly certainly will when discussing something as complex as immigration), I would ask that the interpretation you lean to is the one where my meaning is of compassion and care. This was not written for any one group at the expense of another. The human cost of failed immigration policy is never abstract. Everywhere in the world where a government has gotten this wrong, the result has been human catastrophe, for the people who move and for the people who receive them. Ireland is no exception.

Therefore, I want to be clear about what this essay is doing. It is attempting to show that the Irish government’s approach to immigration produced cruelty, systematically, in every direction simultaneously, to immigrants and to locals, to Ukrainians and to Nigerians, and to working classes and indeed soon to middle classes. Further, that the cruelty was entirely predictable, entirely preventable, and produced by the same institutional absence that defines every other area of Irish public failure: health, transport, housing and more.

Immigration policy is one of the most consequential any state can get right, because the stakes are searingly high on both sides: for the people arriving, it determines whether they build a life worth living or are warehoused and discarded; and for the communities receiving them, it determines whether community growth is experienced as enrichment or as competition for survival.

Sadly, Ireland got it catastrophically wrong, in every direction, for everyone.

N is for Non-Existent Strategies

It seems like a good idea to start with a basic question that almost nobody in Irish public life can answer clearly: what, exactly, is the stated immigration policy of the Irish state?

As we all know, Ireland is an island that is outside of the Schengen Zone. What is less well known is that, for this reason, it also has opt-outs from EU asylum directives that most member states do not have. Additionally, it is not in NATO and not in the EU common defence framework, meaning that it has more sovereign control over who enters the country than almost any state in Europe, which is exactly the kind of envious situation that most countries would regard as a strategic asset. And yet, Ireland chose systematically and deliberately, not to use this strategic asset.

The stated policy, to the extent one even exists, is that Ireland is an open economy that needs workers because its population is ageing, and that we just don’t have enough local workers to fulfil the basics of staffing a health system, a construction sector, a care economy, and the numerous tech companies that throw us their corporation tax revenue.

I want to be explicit and clear here. The economic case for immigration is very real and it remains real! Also that immigration has been, and continues to be, a net positive for every country that manages it through institutional architecture designed for the purpose! (While this is economically true, I also say this as someone who spent most of their working-life thus far trying to be a positive-impact immigrant in various countries).

And yet, despite the endless positivity that can come from a well-designed immigration policy, what happened in practice in Ireland is something for which no policy document existed or no institutional framework was ever built. I mean, there was no plan that failed, simply because there was no plan at all.

Let’s go back slightly.

Before the immigration surge happened, Ireland was already deep in a housing crisis, a healthcare crisis, and an infrastructure crisis that was entirely of its own making. The country had among the lowest housing stock per capita of any wealthy nation in Europe; a social housing rate in the single digits while the Netherlands was at 33%, and rents that had risen 98% in a decade, the steepest increase in the entire EU. It had 43% fewer hospital beds than the EU average. Over 75% of GP practices had closed their lists to new patients. There was no public transport outside Dublin worthy of being called as such, and the housing waiting list was measured in years, not months.

The institutional infrastructure of the state had been built for a population of 3.6 million in the 1990s and had never been meaningfully expanded since, even as the population grew to five million.

So this was the baseline. This was the country that already couldn’t house its nurses, staff its hospitals, process a planning application, or build a metro line. And into this, without any capacity assessment, or integration strategy, or community engagement, and without adjusting a single service to accommodate what was coming, the government opened the door to the largest per capita immigration intake in the European Union:

• Ireland added over half a million people through immigration in the space of a few years

• It had three consecutive years of over 100,000 arrivals, a per capita intake three times the EU average; the highest rate of any large EU member state.

• By 2024, 23% of the population was foreign-born and 75% of all population growth was accounted for by immigration alone.

This is not an argument against those people coming, and I’ll keep repeating this as often as I have to. Many of them were fleeing war and persecution, and many others were filling genuine labour shortages in healthcare, construction, and technology. There was a smorgasbord of viable reasons as to why people came to Ireland, and the economic case for immigration remains real.

But… This same economic case for immigration assumes that the receiving country has the institutional capacity to absorb the people who arrive, and that there are houses for them to live in, GPs for them to register with, schools for their children, transport to get them to work, and an integration pathway that converts a person arrival in Ireland for the first time, into a participant in democratic and civic life.

This is worth pausing on, because the absence of institutional architecture in Ireland to correspond with even a single immigrant arriving is so total that it can be hard to grasp unless you understand what the basic setup looks like in countries that take immigration (or any form of governing) seriously!

The Netherlands runs its entire reception operation through a single dedicated agency (COA) which manages state-owned and state-leased centres at €13.50 per person per night. But housing is only the beginning!

Every refugee with an asylum residence permit between the ages of 18 and 67 is legally required to complete a civic integration program called inburgering: Dutch language instruction to high levels, civic orientation covering the legal system, Dutch history, the practicalities of daily life, and a structured pathway to employment, all managed at the municipal level under the 2021 Civic Integration Act. There are even three tailored learning routes depending on the individual’s background and capabilities. Newcomers have three years to complete the program, must sign a declaration of solidarity with Dutch values, and must pass a formal exam to obtain a civic integration diploma, without which they cannot apply for permanent residence or citizenship. The program can even be started while the person is still abroad, ideally before they arrive.

Clearly, the Dutch system is not perfect, and it has been criticized plenty for placing too much financial burden on refugees themselves, while the EU has questioned whether fining people who fail the exam is compatible with EU law. But the institutional architecture in the Netherlands exists, it is funded, it is mandatory, and it was built before the refugees arrived, because the Dutch understood that absorbing people is an institutional undertaking and that, as such, the institutions need to be in place before the first person shows up.

This feels pretty damn common-sensical, right?

Yes. Indeed, Denmark does the same. Austria, France, Germany, the same. Across the pond in the other direction, Canada sets annual immigration targets based on modeled absorption capacity across housing, health, education, and the labor market, and adjusts the number of immigrants it takes in each year depending on what the institutions can handle. Meaning that if the state’s ability to absorb people falls, the immigration target falls with it.

I don’t know how to say this clearly enough. These are not exceptional achievements by exceptional countries. This is pretty much the minimum institutional process that any serious state builds before the first person arrives.

So, what does Ireland have?

None of this.

No integration agency. No mandatory language program at scale. No civic orientation. No state-owned reception infrastructure in practice, 900 beds in a country that needed 33,000. No absorption modeling. No intake targets tied to capacity. No community engagement framework. No exit pathway from emergency accommodation into independent living.

And the reason is not that Ireland couldn’t afford these things; because by now we’ve read enough of what I’ve written to know that this is a country with a €23 billion surplus and the highest GDP per capita in Europe! The reason is that the state chose to write cheques and give subsidies instead of building institutions, which is the same choice it has made in housing, in health, in energy, and in every other sector where the Failure Premium now runs to billions of euros per year.

T is for Two-Tier

What Ireland had instead of a policy was two completely different responses to two groups of people, both arriving into the same institutional vacuum, yet both needing the same housing, healthcare, education, a way to get a job, but receiving radically different treatment based on which war they were fleeing and how useful that war was to Ireland’s diplomatic positioning.

For the more than 100,000 Ukrainians, the response was immediate and generous. This group were given the right to work from day one, with full social welfare, medical cards, school places for over 15,000 children, and €800 a month tax-free to families who hosted them through the Accommodation Recognition Payment scheme (which at its peak was supporting 42,000 people at an annual cost exceeding €141 million).

Ireland went three times beyond the EU per capita minimum. This was not because Brussels required it (Ireland had opt-outs it could have exercised and could have met its obligations through financial contributions alone, and not taking a single person!), but out of an instinct rooted deep in our national story. As we’re fully aware, Ireland is a country that was colonized for centuries and later exported its people for two more. The Famine, the coffin ships, and the generations who left because the country couldn’t sustain them. This history created a genuine impulse to open the door to immigrants, because we know what it feels like when we’re on the other side. And that impulse is honorable. But an impulse is not a policy.

The government leaned on the emigrant identity to justify decisions that felt right emotionally but were never backed by any of the practical infrastructure that compassion actually requires. We opened the door, but then what happened next? We did nothing for the people who walked through it, because the warm-and-fuzzy feeling of opening the door was the entire point.

That was the Ukrainian experience. The experience of everyone else was worse.

For the more than 30,000 asylum seekers from Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, Afghanistan, Jordan, and elsewhere, there was no Famine memory invoked and therefore no emigrant solidarity extended. Our response to them was actively hostile by design: only €38.80 a week, a six-month work ban, being placed in requisitioned hotels with no services, years-long processing during which their lives withered away, an eventual 70% rejection rate, and in 2023, people being forced to sleep rough because the state ran out of hotel rooms. That is, until the High Court ruled the failure unlawful.

The legal distinction between the two groups (of Ukrainians and non-Ukrainians) is real. The EU Temporary Protection Directive was activated collectively for Ukraine, the first time the mechanism had been used since 2001, while asylum seekers go through individual case assessment. But this legal difference does not explain why Ireland chose to treat the two groups so differently, as other countries faced the same legal framework and didn’t.

Germany, the Netherlands, and the Nordics all activated temporary protection for Ukrainians and also run functional asylum systems that treat refugees from other conflicts with comparable basic dignity, treating them with reception centres, language training, integration programs, and structured pathways to work and housing. The legal categories differ between the two groups, but the basic institutional treatment of them by our European peers is recognizably human in both cases.

Ireland created something else entirely, and I’ll cut through the noise here. What now exists is a two-tier immigration system so extreme in its disparity that it is difficult to describe as anything other than horrifying. The only variable that meaningfully distinguishes who got warmth and who got hostility is where they came from and what they look like, because both groups arrived into the same country, both needed the same things, and both got the same institutional vacuum. Only one got generous workarounds. This was not an EU requirement. This was an Irish choice, made in Dublin, by Irish politicians, and it underscores everything about why we actually opened the door in the first place.

Because this was not moral leadership, it was a cosplay of moral leadership, performed for applause at European summits.

Genuine moral leadership would have looked completely different. It would have meant treating all refugees with comparable basic dignity regardless of which war they were fleeing, and setting an intake target tied to what the country could actually absorb, so that the commitment matched the capacity.Instead, Ireland committed to three times the EU average during the worst infrastructure crisis in the state’s history, and built nothing to absorb them. The cost of that performance was borne entirely by the people who could not opt out of its consequences, which included the immigrants who were warehoused and abandoned, and the communities that were never prepared and never resourced.

Subscribe now

C is for Cruelty

The cruelty of this system runs in every single direction, and it is important to trace it properly, because understanding who it hurts and how is the only way to have this conversation without descending into the tribal screaming match that the government has wholly relied on to avoid accountability.

I’ll start with the cruelty to the people who arrived, because it begins with them.

More than half a million people have arrived into a country with no integration infrastructure, reception capacity, or no institutional framework for absorbing them. Ireland’s IPAS system spent €129 million in 2019 housing roughly 7,500 people. By 2025 it was spending €1.2 billion housing 33,000, at an average cost of €99 per person per night, with over 90% of the money flowing to commercial operators because the state only had 900 beds of its own.

(The Netherlands houses comparable numbers in state-built centres at €13.50 a night. Over seven years, the cumulative Failure Premium on IPAS alone was approximately €3 billion: the measurable, quantifiable cost of not having built a reception system.)

But behind those numbers are human beings who were promised safety and given limbo. Asylum seekers warehoused in hotel rooms for years, forbidden from working for six months, given no language support, no mental health services, no way to contribute or build anything resembling a life, and then after years of waiting, years of their lives spent staring at the walls of a requisitioned hotel in a town where they knew nobody and nobody knew them, all they had was a 70% chance of being told no, to start again somewhere else, in another country entirely.

Ukrainians were were housed in spare rooms and hotels for four years while their children put down roots in Irish schools, learned English, made friends, joined GAA clubs, only to be told in April 2026 that they have three months to find somewhere to live in a rental market with a sub-1% vacancy rate.

The state invited these people, human beings with dreams and talents and children and plans for their lives, and absorbed them into communities, let only some of their children integrate while letting some of them start to believe that the worst was behind them, and is now pulling the floor out from underneath them because it still, after four years and billions of euros, never built a single unit of permanent accommodation for any of them, nor a strategy for how any of this might end. This is not a policy failing, it is cruelty administered in slow motion, bookmarked at the beginning with a standing ovation in Brussels and at the end with an eviction notice.

And then there is the cruelty to the communities that received them, which is where the political class’s cowardice becomes most visible.

No community in Ireland was properly engaged before an IPAS centre was placed in it. Just as no additional GP capacity was commissioned, no school places were added, no community liaison officers were appointed, and no language classes were organized. The government simply requisitioned the hotel and dusted off their hands as they left, ensuring the local communities dealt with the enormity of this human transition alone.

Hotels were removed from tourism, and the ecosystem around them began to die. In Roscrea, the only hotel in the town was converted to an IPAS centre, as the town lost its only venue for weddings and tourist accommodation overnight, with no replacement. The tourism economies around these hotels, built over decades by people who had nothing to do with immigration policy, were hollowed out in months.The Accommodation Recognition Payment, at €800 a month tax-free, was a more profitable income in rural places than renting to an Irish tenant was, meaning that the government once more inflated the same housing market that its HAP payments claimed to be fixing. That is, until it said “oopsie”, reduced the payment and admitted the “unintended impact on the private rental sector.”

Into this institutional nothingness, a horrific zero-sum competition emerged that should never have existed, yet persists relentlessly to this day.

Now, the professional class has, thus far, mostly experienced immigration as something that has enriched their lives. Think about the new restaurants, the diverse classrooms for the kids, and the interesting colleagues who bring mithai into the office after their trips back home. Why a feeling of enrichment over resentment? Simply because this same professional class has already exited every public system where the competition for resources occurs.

I wrote about this in Mind the Gap, and here it is again: private insurance meant GP capacity was irrelevant, while home ownership meant housing and expensive rent was someone else’s problem. Indeed this class experiences immigration through the lens of choice; immigrants appear as an addition to a life that already had everything it needed.

Leo Varadkar recently said on a podcast that he lives in a majority-immigrant community in Dublin and he loves it. I have no doubt he is telling the truth, and I think it’s important to acknowledge that his experience is likely very genuine! But his positive experience is purchased by his exit from every system where the competition actually occurs. He does not need a GP from a closed list. He does not need social housing or rely on a bus route. I doubt he has ever competed for a school place or a housing list position with anyone, immigrant or Irish, in his life. This is not a personal failing, it is a structural condition: the people who make and defend immigration policy in Ireland interact with an entirely different version of the state than the people who bear its consequences.

For the family in Finglas on the GP waiting list, for the single mother in emergency accommodation (I have had several email me in the last week alone!), or for the young couple priced out after five years of saving, immigration is experienced as direct competition for resources the state had already failed to provide.

Even before the war in Ukraine, the state had not built enough; and this is especially true now. So every housing unit allocated to a new arrival was visibly taken from the existing pool of people who have been waiting. Emergency accommodation was granted to asylum seekers while Irish families remained on housing lists for a decade. Medical cards were given for refugees while Irish workers paid €60 per GP visit. School places were allocated to new arrivals while local children were waitlisted.

Again, this is not a moral argument (although there certainly is one to be made). Rather, I am making a structural argument. You simply cannot meet humanitarian obligations by reallocating from a pool that was already empty.

This is what happens when a state forces its most vulnerable people to play musical chairs. There are ten people and two chairs, and instead of building more chairs, the government decides to add three more people to the game, before acting bewildered when everyone starts fighting.

Simply put, you do not need a PhD in rocket science to figure out that you cannot get “something” from “nothing”.

When you house refugees in hotels while Irish families sleep in their cars, you have not solved a problem, you have created severe competition, and competition for scarce resources between vulnerable populations is one of the most dangerous things a government can produce.

And when those communities said so; when the people who had been failed by the state for decades pointed at the hotel and said “this isn’t working”, they were called racist. By politicians with private healthcare, by commentators who owned their homes, and by an establishment class that had likely experienced precisely zero competition for any public resource in their entire lives.

Now, some of the objection was racist, and I want to acknowledge that honestly, because some of it was ugly and violent and targeted at individuals who had done nothing except arrive in a country that had seemingly invited them warmly. Sixteen arson attacks were carried out at sites housing refugees in 2023, and that is disgusting and criminal, full stop.

But the bulk of what happened in communities across Ireland was not racism. It was people doing the basic arithmetic that should have existed in long-term planning and strategy policies. People who had watched the state fail them for decades, who had never been able to exit the public system that was crushing their lives, who had no private insurance and no savings and no second option, watching the state suddenly find resources for someone else that it had never found for them.

The real bait-and-switch here, of course, is that the resources weren’t ever real; not for the immigrants or for those needing them long before the immigrants arrived. They were just hotel rooms, borrowed at a premium of €99 a night. But the perception was real, and the perception was correct: the state was prioritizing emergency provision for new arrivals over chronic deprivation for its own citizens, because the infrastructure emergency was visible before an influx of immigration, and that same deprivation had become invisible through decades of normalization.

However, dismissing that as racism is how you actually guarantee it eventually becomes racism, because you have told people that the only language available to express a legitimate grievance is the language of the far right. The leaders of the far right almost always offer the wrong explanation. But the question they are answering is the right one, and it is arguably the most important question in contemporary Irish public life: why is everything getting harder when we are told the country has never been richer?

The government’s failure to answer that question honestly, and to engage with it as a legitimate expression of lived experience rather than dismissing it as bigotry, is precisely how you will end up with Tommy Robinson on O’Connell Bridge. You don’t get far-right populism because people are stupid. You get it because the people with the right answers (or indeed any inclination to think about the question at all) refuse to show up.

The cruelty here is not that the political class disagrees with the working class about immigration. The cruelty is that the political class built itself a private Ireland, with private health, private housing, private transport, and private schools, and then told the people stuck in public Ireland that their experience of decline was a moral failing.

M is for Middle Class

Everything I have described so far happened primarily to the working class and to the most vulnerable communities in Ireland. The middle and professional class were largely insulated, as I have discussed before, because they had exited the public systems where the competition occurred. They had private insurance, owned homes, and drove cars. The negative consequences of immigration were something that happened to other people in other towns.

Well, that insulation is about to end.

The EU-India Free Trade Agreement, signed in January 2026 and described by both sides as the “mother of all deals,” creates the world’s largest free trade zone encompassing two billion people and includes provisions that make it dramatically easier for skilled Indian workers to move to EU countries for employment, the most generous terms of this kind that the EU has ever offered to any trading partner.

The Taoiseach called it “a breakthrough” and “a positive opportunity.” Fianna Fáil MEPs called it “a big win for Ireland.” Ministers flew to New Delhi to talk about selling Irish goods and services to the Indian market. Yet… Nobody in government mentioned what might come the other direction? There is, after all, no such thing as a free lunch.

The EU agreed to this because Europe’s working-age population is shrinking and there are genuine shortages in tech, healthcare, and engineering that local workers cannot fill. On the other hand, India has the largest surplus of young, educated, English-speaking professionals on earth, and the provisions for these people to be allowed to move into the EU was India’s central demand in return for the EU being able to access a new market of 1.4 billion consumers.

This may make strategic sense for the EU as a bloc, and it may make sense for Germany, which has 84 million people, a functioning integration system, and a desperate need for engineers. It makes considerably less sense for Ireland, a country of five million people with no integration infrastructure, no housing capacity, and a tech sector that is actively shedding jobs. But Ireland doesn’t get its own version of the deal. Brussels negotiates for all 27 states, and Ireland receives the same terms as everyone else.

Thus, the Indian professionals who take advantage of these new terms will move to whichever EU country is easiest to get to, find work in, and build a life in. And every factor points at Ireland: English-speaking, common law, Google, Apple, Meta and Intel already operational, work permits processed in 7 to 15 days, residency after two years, citizenship after five. Indeed, even before this monumental deal, Ireland is approving nearly 40,000 work permits a year, with every major Indian immigration consultancy now featuring Ireland as a top destination. The pipeline of Indian tech talent is already open; this deal just makes it faster, at precisely the moment when the US is making H-1B visas harder to get, turning Europe into the obvious alternative and Ireland into the front door.

Now, suffice to say that Ireland is not powerless here. Work permits, visa policy, salary thresholds, and occupation lists are all controlled by Dublin, not Brussels. Ireland could tighten the eligible occupations list, raise salary thresholds, cap the number of permits, or slow down processing at any time. It has every tool it needs to manage what is coming. But then, it had every tool it needed to manage the last half a million arrivals too, and chose not to use a single one of them.

Further, now consider the economics of this situation, because this is where the deal we were handed by the EU becomes brutal for the Irish professional class. The tech sector in Ireland has been laying off staff since 2022. The government’s pitch is that Indian professionals will fill skills shortages, but multinationals do not think in terms of skills shortages. They think in terms of cost.

A company that can hire an Indian engineer on a Critical Skills permit at €44,000 (who is tied to that employer for the first twelve months, whose residency depends on the job, and who will work evenings and weekends without pushback because their visa status requires continued employment), has very little reason to pay €75,000 to an Irish graduate who has options, leverage, and the freedom to walk to a competitor.

The result is not that Irish professionals will be fired overnight, but that the floor will drop out gradually as salaries flatten and the ability of Irish workers to negotiate erodes. This means that the roles that used to go to Irish and EU graduates will increasingly go to Indian professionals who are equally qualified, often more experienced, and willing to accept conditions that someone with a mortgage and a permanent right to remain in Ireland would not! And as tech companies continue to cut costs in the post-pandemic, AI-riddled economic correction, the incentive to replace expensive local hires with cheaper, visa-dependent international ones will only grow. We have seen this time and time again, geography after geography.

Ok, cut to the chase. What am I trying to say here?

Well, in short, it’s that the middle class is about to experience what the working class has experienced for years: brutal competition for their livelihood in a system designed by employers, enthusiastically endorsed by the Irish state, and built without any institutional framework to manage the consequences.

Unlike the asylum seekers in Cahersiveen, these high skilled workers will directly compete at the middle class’s price point, for the same apartments in Ranelagh, the same crèche places in Sandymount, and the same GP practices in Dún Laoghaire that are already closed to new patients. And the state has built nothing for these professional classes in a bid to absorb what is coming, just as it built nothing for anybody else.

But there’s more! Because when the middle class loses in this game, they don’t disappear. They move down. The professional who can no longer afford Ranelagh moves to Finglas, and now competes for the same housing, services, and school places as the working class who were already there.

The state is creating a second game of musical chairs on top of the first one, and the losers from the new game get added to the existing one, intensifying the competition for people who were already losing.

Look, this is not about Irish people versus Indian people. An Irish child might lose a school place to another Irish child whose family was pushed out of a more expensive area by competition that originated somewhere else entirely. The damage doesn’t flow neatly along national or racial lines. It flows along class lines, downwards (always downwards), because that is the direction that pressure travels in a system with no institutional capacity to absorb it. The point is not about the skin color or nationality of who is competing. The point is that the competition exists at all, that it was entirely avoidable, and that the state created it by refusing to build anything.

The working class was told to be quiet about immigration because it was good for the economy. The middle class is about to discover what that actually means, and they are going to discover it in their rent, their salary negotiations, their children’s school places, and their career prospects, in a country that cannot house the people it already has and whose government just celebrated the deal that will accelerate everything I have described.

G is for Gaslighting

And so we arrive at the present moment, where the government has finally begun to realize that it has created a disaster, and its response to that realization has been to keep telling us the economy has never been stronger and our lives have never been better, and to treat anyone who questions that narrative as ungrateful, uninformed, or worse.

In April 2026, the government announced a phased six-month plan to end state-provided accommodation for 16,000 Ukrainians who arrived before March 2024. Only those deemed “highly vulnerable” will continue to qualify. The hotels will be returned to tourism or the rental market, or alternative uses. The Accommodation Recognition Payment, which supports around 42,000 people in hosted arrangements, will be wound down and fully terminated by March 2027.

Consider what this means in human terms. These people were invited and were housed in hotels and spare rooms for four years, with no plan for what came next, because the government never built the strategy or institutions that would provide a next step. Their children that are enrolled in Irish schools learned English, made friends, and joined sports clubs. Some of the parents of these kids found jobs and became meaningful parts of Irish communities. They built lives for themselves. And now, after four years and billions of euros, the government is telling 16,000 of them that they have three months to find somewhere to live in a rental market where a two-bed in Dublin costs €2,241 a month, properties are taken within an hour of being listed, and the vacancy rate is below one percent.

Where exactly are they supposed to go?

The answer, for many of them, is nowhere. Which means homelessness. Which also means the Irish state will have invited 113,000 people into the country, housed them for four years at enormous cost, allowed their children to integrate into Irish schools and communities, and then pushed them out because it still, after all that time and all that money, had not built a single unit of permanent accommodation for any of them, despite being fully aware of the fact that they do, indeed, exist.

And now the Minister for Justice is considering paying Ukrainians to return to a country that is still at war, because after four years and billions of euros, paying people to leave is still cheaper than building somewhere for them to live. The Failure Premium has reached its final form, in that the state is writing cheques to undo the consequences of the cheques it wrote before.

And so we enter the gaslighting phase.

The government knows it has created a problem which is overwhelmingly complex and not easily fixable. It knows, because I assume at least some of them have read my previous articles, that the institutional vacuum is the cause. And rather than filling the vacuum, which would require building things, and which the state has demonstrated over decades that it cannot or will not do, it is trying to make the problem disappear by telling the people it invited that they are now on their own.

That brave compassion which was performed at EU summits has been quickly withdrawn and replaced by a three-month eviction notice in Tralee.

Meanwhile, the IPAS population of tens of thousands of residents across hundreds of centres including thousands of children, remains warehoused with no exit pathway, no integration infrastructure, and a processing system that rejected an overwhelming number of applications. The asylum seekers, the ones who were met with grave suspicion rather than the solidarity the Ukrainians were met with, who were given €38.80 a week rather than €800 a month, and who were housed in hotels with fences rather than spare rooms with families, are still exactly where the state put them, in the same institutional limbo, years later, waiting.

Labour calls the Ukrainian withdrawal “immoral and unethical,” which is interesting coming from a party that was in government when social housing construction was at historic lows. The Greens accuse the government of “pandering to anti-immigration sentiment,”; from a party that was in coalition when IPAS spend went from €183m to over €1 billion with zero institutional capacity built. The Social Democrats warn it will intensify pressure on the rental market, the same rental market that was in crisis before a single refugee arrived because the state never built housing.

And now the gaslighting is complete. The entire political class has moved from performing compassion to performing outrage at the consequences, while having actively created the very conditions that produced the crisis.

This is what the absence of institutional capacity ultimately produces: a state that cannot solve problems, but only defer them, and that when the deferral finally becomes untenable, abandons the people it was supposed to help while blaming them for the mess it has, itself, made.

What I think is an accurate description of our immigration process to date, is the following:

1. The government performed solidarity when it was cheap and popular

2. …. while outsourcing the cost to communities that were never supported

3. … in turn allowing a small class of asset holders to profit enormously from the arrangement.

4. … before ever-so-discreetly trying to reverse the whole thing because the political cost has finally exceeded the diplomatic benefit that has long been forgotten about.

More than half a million people have already arrived, and there was nowhere to put them. The next half a million are coming, and there is still nowhere to put them. At what point do we stop calling this a policy failure and start calling it what it is: a humanitarian crisis, produced by a wealthy state on its own people and on the people it invited in equal measure, because it refused to build?

A state that builds institutions absorbs the cost once. Ireland never built them, and has shown no indication that it intends to start. Yet until it does, every future arrival will land in the same nothingness, and every person already here will pay the same price for it.

There are no winners in this story, because there sadly never were. There were only people who realized they were losing and were told to shut up about it, and people who still don’t realize that they’re likely next.

And in the meantime, the vacuum has done exactly what vacuums do. It has turned everyone on each other. The entire country is now fighting over scraps of a system that was never built, while the political class that created the conditions for all of it watches from Leinster House, now performing a new role: the reasonable adult in a room full of people they drove mad.

Subscribe now

In any case, pissing off the right people is probably an indication that I’m getting close to something important, in which case… Onwards!

(A quick note to say a massive thank you to the hundreds of people who reached out to me since, with support, questions, anger at what is happening, differing perspectives. It’s a writer’s dream to have a conversation at that scale, and I’ve been overwhelmed by the size of it. To that point, I am going to be in Ireland next month and would love to meet up to discuss this topic! Here’s more info if you want to get together!).

Subscribe now

Today, I want to dig a little deeper into the problem of “why are we so rich on paper, but so poor in real life?”.

This, by the way, is not because I want to complain, because I’m inherently grumpy (although I have not yet finished my first cup of tea of the day), or that I want to punch down on Ireland. Many of Official Ireland that have subsequently reached out to me have come with the ask: Ok, if you’re so smart, then what are the solutions!

Indeed, I have plenty of thoughts about solutions, especially as for many years I’ve researched and written about this exact issue in other contexts before. The solutions will come, and I will talk about them in due course!

But it’s absolutely critical that we take time now, before we jump ten steps ahead to “fixing” anything, to actually understand the problem at hand. In my experience, 90% of the value is in the diagnosis. If you get the diagnosis right, the solutions will become obvious. But get it wrong and you spend forty years treating symptoms of problems, which is essentially what Ireland has done thus far.

This is somewhat reflected in the national conversation since the last piece (which has been encouraging, as people are engaging rather seriously). Much of that discussion has landed on explanations that we’ve regurgitated endlessly before: it’s our philosophy, it’s gombeen-ism, it’s laziness, it’s corruption. These are all symptoms of the problem, but they are not the problem.

So it’s worth spending more time looking at the actual mechanism of Ireland’s failure. Why we simply cannot convert our €126 billion in public revenue, of wealth, into a country that houses its nurses, processes a planning application in under eighteen months, and finishes a children’s hospital. A country that is, right now, seriously debating whether its young people should live in sheds in their parents’ gardens.

That mechanism has a name, which I call the Failure Premium.

One of the most frequently asked questions after my last piece was: where the hell is the money going? Which is a good question! Because elementary maths is at play here:

Big money goes in → Big nothing comes out.

This is what I previously called the gap, and I described how it feels to different types of people in their everyday lives. But I want to get more precise now, and describe how it actually works, because there’s a lot happening in that “nothing”.

I’ll start by reflecting on the fact that this week, the FT ran a piece describing the way that the UK is poor, but spends like it is rich. In Ireland, we have the exact opposite problem! We are rich, but spend like we are poor. And that gap between what we have and how we behave is where the cost lives and money seems to dissipate. There is nothing, nothing, as expensive as being poor. Or indeed acting like you are.

Anyone who has ever been poor knows this intimately. You can’t afford the upfront cost of good shoes, so you buy cheap ones that fall apart in six months, buying them again and again, while over five years you’ve spent three times what the good shoes cost. You can’t afford a deposit on an apartment, so you rent week to week at a higher rate. You can’t afford to fix the car properly, so you patch it short-term, and the next repair costs more than the original fix.

Being poor means paying more for worse outcomes, forever, because you can never afford the upfront investment that would make things cheaper in the long run.

Ireland, as a state, behaves exactly like this. The Failure Premium is the national version of the poverty trap; the grotesquely high cost incurred when a state outsources its own responsibilities because it never made the upfront investment in building the institutions to deliver them.

It is the extravagant cost of outsourcing to private developers, hotel owners, recruitment agencies, asset fund managers, quangos, and increasingly, even to individual citizens themselves. When a government doesn’t build the institutions to deliver a service, the service doesn’t stop being needed, it just gets delivered by someone else, at a higher price, with the difference captured by whoever steps into the gap.

And like poverty itself, it compounds: every euro spent on the expensive short-term fix is a euro not spent on the investment that would have made the fix unnecessary. But it’s worse than that, because every euro not spent on the investment doesn’t just maintain the problem, it deepens it. The longer you don’t build, the more money you spend on not-building, and the less you can afford to build. The Failure Premium is a failure trap.

The difference, bizarrely, is that Ireland is not actually poor, it is one of the wealthiest countries on earth. It just chooses to behave this way!

This Failure Premium is directly measurable. It can be calculated, euro for euro, in almost every sector. It runs many layers deep through the system and shows up in nearly every headline, every story, every person’s daily life.

Today, I want to explain the three most basic layers, because by the end of this piece I want you to be able to see this cost in your own life! In your rent, your commute, the bad architecture of your street, the price of your sandwich, the lack of healthcare. I really want you to be able to look at a headline and realize: Ah, that’s a Tier 2 Failure Premium in disguise.

Because seeing and understanding the depth of the Failure Premium is the prerequisite to understanding the actual nature of the problem. And understanding the actual nature of the problem is the prerequisite to solving it.

Tier 1: The Direct Premium

Definition: The state writes a cheque, and the asset holder captures it.

I’ll start with the simplest version. When I moved back to Ireland, I rented a house. Within the first year, my landlord raised the rent unlawfully, as the Rental Tenancy Board eventually decided, after over a year of negotiations. The curious thing though was the amount of the increase itself, which was exactly the same as the HAP payment, to the cent! The landlord wasn’t pricing to the market, he was pricing to the subsidy.

This is how the Housing Assistance Payment actually works and is the best example I have of a Tier 1 Failure Premium.

Say you’re paying €1,800 a month in rent. The government’s HAP scheme will pay your landlord up to €1,000 a month on your behalf. Great! That should bring your cost down to €800, right? Except it doesn’t. Because your landlord knows the subsidy exists. So your rent is increased to €2,300. You’re still paying €1,300 out of your own pocket, and the government is paying €1,000 on top. The subsidy didn’t reduce your cost, it just increased the landlord’s income by the amount of the subsidy, funded by your taxes.

This is the clearest example I can think of to illustrate a Direct Failure Premium.

I wasn’t eligible for HAP when I lived in Ireland, so when my landlord raised the rent by the exact amount of the HAP payment, I paid the full increase myself, absorbing a rent hike that existed because of a government program I wasn’t eligible for. Even worse, I was paying the Failure Premium twice over: once through my taxes, which funded the HAP system that inflated rents across the entire market, and again through my own rent, which rose because the landlord was pricing to a subsidy I didn’t receive.

And this is the thing about the Failure Premium; everybody pays it; the only question is how many times. The HAP recipient pays through their taxes, while others, like me, might pay twice, through the taxes that fund the subsidy, and additionally through the rent increase the subsidy created, without receiving a cent of the assistance.

And the truly perverse part? That every euro of HAP flowing to a landlord increases the landlord’s wealth, inflates the rental market, pushes purchase prices higher, and makes it harder for you, the person who funded the subsidy!, to ever own the asset yourself. The state is using your money to widen the gap between you and the person who already holds what you need. That’s not assisting you, that’s assisting wealth concentration, funded by the people it concentrates against.

Since 2014, the state has spent €4 billion on HAP. How many housing units were built with that money? Zero. How many does the state own? Zero. What did €4 billion buy? Short-term tenancies, not long-term assets. The state rented the housing it refused to build, and every euro went to the person who held the asset. Meanwhile, rents rose 89% over the same period, and HAP costs rose with them automatically, because the state is a price-taker in a market it refused to supply!

That is the Failure Premium in its purest form: public money transferred directly to an asset holder, with no ownership retained, no capacity built, and compounding annually.

The same mechanism operates in health. The HSE can’t recruit nurses permanently, mostly because it can’t offer affordable housing near the hospitals, process applications through its own bureaucracy fast enough, or compete on contracts. So it hires through agencies at two to three times the cost of a permanent staff member. The nurse gets roughly the same take-home pay either way, but the agency captures the margin while the state (us!) pays double or triple for the same pair of hands. The institution that would eliminate the premium (again, a functioning workforce planning and recruitment system), simply doesn’t exist. It’s not that the system is broken, as per the UK a lot of the time. It’s that it’s absent.

Now look at what happens when you trace the Failure Premium through the entire cost of building a house. And please, if you’re not already sitting down for this, you may want to.

A three-bedroom home in the Greater Dublin Area costs approximately €460,000 when delivered through a government-backed private developer (firms like Ardstone, Avenue Capital, Pearl, or Summix), all funded with sovereign wealth capital from the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, paid for by public money. The same house, delivered through the Land Development Agency’s affordable purchase scheme, costs roughly €340,000. The same house (same materials, same labour, same BER rating) delivered by Ó Cualann, a not-for-profit housing cooperative in Ballymun, costs approximately €250,000.

The hard construction cost (meaning the bricks, concrete, the plumbing, labour, etc) is roughly the same across all three models: somewhere around €220,000 to €245,000. So that’s the irreducible cost of actually building a house.

But everything above that? Pure extraction of public money, by the government, for asset holders!

• Land cost is inflated by planning scarcity (€75,000 in the private model versus €1,000 in the co-op model)

• Development levies (€30,000 versus zero),

• Developer margin (€40,000 versus €8,000),

• Fund management fees, financing costs, VAT

The Failure Premium on a single house is €210,000, a whopping 84% more for the same physical product!

And the state is present at every layer, paying out the Failure Premium. It provides capital through the ISIF fund; the land through local authorities and the LDA; subsidies through the First Home Scheme, Help to Buy, and affordable purchase equity stakes. But again, at every stage, a private actor captures the margin. And that margin comes from the taxpayer! The public pays three times over and owns nothing at the end.

But here is the mechanism that makes all of this a wealth transfer rather than mere overpayment… The subsidies are priced in. You see, every subsidy the state introduces to make things “affordable” gets captured by the asset holder before the benefits reach the citizen.

The HAP guarantees landlords a rent level, so landlords price to the HAP threshold. The subsidy doesn’t make housing affordable, it just sets the floor for what landlords can charge. Help to Buy gives first-time buyers up to €30,000 toward a deposit, so the developer prices it in and a house suddenly costs €30,000 more than it would without the scheme. The buyer is no better off; the €30,000 is just moved from the public purse to the developer’s margin. The First Home Scheme takes a state ownership slice to bridge the “affordability gap”, but the gap exists because the state’s own institution has… inflated the price! Which is an incredible own goal!

Always, the citizen pays twice. Once as a taxpayer funding the subsidy, then once more as a consumer paying the price the subsidy inflated. Meanwhile, the asset holder sits back and receives both payments.

HAP assists, but only the landlord. Help to Buy helps, but only the developer. The energy credit goes straight to Bord Gáis. The National Treatment Purchase Fund clears public waiting lists by paying private hospitals. The childcare subsidy flows to private creche operators charging €1,200 a month. The IPAS contract goes to the hotel owner at €99 a night. The restaurant VAT reduction goes to the commercial landlord at the next rent review. The agency nurse premium goes to the recruitment firm. The affordable housing equity stake compensates the buyer for a price that… the state itself inflated!

Tier 1 Failure Premiums operate in a sadly straight line:

Public money in → Asset holder captures money → Zero infrastructure out.

The money isn’t lost and it’s not wasted in some vague bureaucratic sense. Much worse, it is being transferred, program by program, subsidy by subsidy, cheque by cheque, from the public to the private, and from the many to the few.

Ireland allocates roughly 85% to opening the gap, and only 15% to closing it. That ratio tells you everything about what kind of state Ireland chose to be.

A poor one.

Tier 2: The Adaptation Premium

Definition: The system reshapes itself around the gap, meaning that standards lower, dignity erodes and the place degrades.

Patrick Collison’s funded think tank called Progress Ireland, a policy group backed by a billionaire who lives in San Francisco, recently proposed enabling modular homes in back gardens, claiming it could “unlock 350,000 units.”

Consider what is being proposed here! A country with a €23 billion surplus and the highest GDP per capita in Europe is debating whether its young people should live in sheds in their parents’ gardens.

Now. Given that I immensely like and admire Sean Keyes, founder of Progress Ireland, I need to state upfront that my objection is not that Sean and Patrick are involved, as Ireland needs more people who are willing to act, not fewer. My objection is that the solutions they propose (e.g. deregulate, enable market supply, build modular units in gardens) are solutions that make perfect sense within a worldview where the problem is too much government in the way. And if that were the problem, they'd be right. But that is not the problem. The problem here is too little government. Too little institutional capacity and infrastructure, too little of the basic coordination architecture that every functioning peer country built decades ago. The Collison worldview treats the state as an obstacle to be routed around, which may be true in the US. But my Failure Premium analysis shows that in Ireland, the state's absence is the obstacle, and routing around it is exactly how the Failure Premium gets worse.

Consider that the ferocious debate about this policy has followed a typical binary discussion: (1) It’s an outrageous idea, we’re not sheep, we should not be in sheds!, and (2) Some housing is better than no housing!

However I want to reframe this discussion, and move us away from “good” versus “bad”.

Progress Ireland’s policy is not a housing policy. Rather, it is a Tier 2 Adaptation Premium: nothing more than the system adapting to the gap rather than closing it.

The Tier 1 Failure Premium that I’ve just outlined (HAP, ISIF-backed housing, planning scarcity) has been running for long enough that the market has adjusted, and in fact so much so that new actors are simply building business models on top of the state’s absence and inability to fix anything.

As with the new “sheds in gardens” approach, the modular housing company isn’t solving the housing crisis, it’s simply monetizing our societal adaptation to it. Meaning the reason a young person will pay €100,000 to live in someone’s garden isn’t because the country can’t afford to build properly (of course it can), but because the institutions that build properly were never created in the first place.

But here’s the kicker. A wealthy country is one that does not have to choose between dignity and utility as a binary trade-off. Post-war Vienna built social housing at scale that is still dignified even a century later. Singapore builds fast and well. Denmark’s social housing is everywhere and beautiful. These countries didn’t choose between getting people housed and housing them with dignity, they built the institutions that deliver both simultaneously!

When the best idea on the table is garden sheds, when “affordable” means €340,000, or when the national conversation shifts from “how do we build well?” to “how do we build at all?”... something fundamental has changed. You are no longer operating as a wealthy country, you are operating as a poor country with a large bank balance, which is a very different thing.

Because poverty, in its essence, is not about how much money you have, but about being trapped into long-term, expensive tradeoffs. Conversely, being wealthy is the opposite. Wealth is freedom from tradeoffs! A wealthy country doesn’t choose between housing people and housing them with dignity; or between scaling indigenous business and attracting multinationals. It builds the institutions that deliver all of these simultaneously, because it can afford to. And of course because institutions, once built, make everything cheaper forever.

The danger of Tier 2 Adaptation Premiums is that they sadly stick. Once you legalize the sheds, the sheds become the baseline and are permanently priced into the market (see Tier 1!). Once you accept that young professionals live with their parents into their thirties, it becomes a cultural norm. The expectation that housing implies dignity, or that a wealthy society provides its citizens with a home that is warm, well-built, and theirs, recedes permanently. The gap doesn’t close, it becomes the new floor.

Subscribe now

This is how a rich country teaches itself to accept poor-country outcomes, and why I felt angry when I left Ireland, when apparently nobody else did. It is never through a single dramatic failure, but instead a death by a thousand cuts, each one lowering the bar, meaning our societal dignity, by a fraction.

Again, look at Dublin’s Stephen’s Green. A major new building on the city’s most important public square, and people hate the design. (I’ve written often about Ireland’s architecture for the Irish Times.)

Beautiful cities require iteration: thousands of small decisions made well over decades, each one correcting the last, informed by a feedback mechanism that says this worked, this didn’t, do more of this. Ireland’s planning system doesn’t do this, because it has no mechanism to demand quality, only to check compliance. And when someone does object to a design, the system can only do one thing: delay. It cannot say “come back with something better”, it can only say “come back later with the same thing.” So Ireland’s planning system offers a choice between fast mediocrity and slow mediocrity. Quality is not even on the menu!

The developer knows this, so the brief becomes “what can we get past planning at minimum cost”, not “what is worthy of Stephen’s Green.” And the market doesn’t penalize mediocrity because supply is so low, meaning that someone will pay top-quartile rents for any old building with a roof and an Eircode. But that building will be there for a century, on Dublin’s most important square. And there is nothing anyone can do about it now.

This is the Tier 2 Failure Premium in a nutshell: we accept false binaries. We are so desperate for something that we will accept anything. And the person who objects and who says this isn’t good enough, who insists that a wealthy country should build things that are worthy of its best locations, is vilified for holding up progress. For being difficult. For wanting too much, from a country with a €23 billion surplus. Because wanting a beautiful building on Stephen’s Green is apparently an excessive demand!

This is what even the most economically comfortable person feels despite their bank account saying that everything is fine. Ugly streetscapes, dead town centers with boarded-up buildings in parishes that have housing crises, no civic infrastructure, long commutes, portakabins-as-schools, no design culture, and no public realm worth the name. It is the absence of anything that feels curated, because curation is an institutional function, and the institution simply doesn’t exist! The Tier 2 Failure Premium here isn’t measured in euros, it’s measured in the undignified adaptation to a lower quality of life. It is what you feel when you walk down an ugly street, mostly boarded up, on your way home to the shed in a landlord’s garden.

The place itself becomes the Adaptation Premium, paid in ugliness, joylessness, and in the low-level daily friction of living somewhere that was never designed to be lived in.

Tier 3: The Cascade Premium

Definition: The failure premium starts eroding even the things that were actually working.

I will write about this in more detail later (yes, many of you have asked!). But for now, consider that Ireland spent approximately €1.2 billion in 2025 housing 33,000 asylum seekers in hotels, at roughly €99 per night. Comparatively, the Netherlands runs purpose-built state reception centers at €13.50 per night. Why are we so much more expensive than our peers?

This is a Tier 1 Direct Premium, and you’re seeing it in the raw euro difference because the state only had 900 beds of its own capacity when the crisis arrived. So it requisitioned hotels. (Again, a direct transfer of money from taxpayers to hotel owners for capacity the state should have built).

Tier 2 is what you feel when you visit these towns. The hotel looks the same from outside but it’s not a hotel anymore, it’s a government facility with a big fence. The town centre feels different and emptier, and the welcome that defined these places for decades has been decimated, because the infrastructure that supported that vibrance has a new owner. The Tier 2 Adaptation Premium is the loss of place; the feeling of a town that took generations to build, eroded in a couple of years by a policy that nobody in the town was consulted on. You can’t put a euro figure on it, but everyone who lives there can feel it, and is (rightfully) very angry about it.

But let’s look beyond that to Tier 3, which is harder to see, and nearly impossible for people to cost directly back to its source. Which is exactly what makes it the most destructive of the premiums.

By 2024, 28% of Ireland’s registered tourism bed stock was contracted to the state for IPAS. Hotel prices for actual tourists rose 27% above 2019 levels. And then the ecosystem around the hotels began to die. The pub that had served tourists for thirty years lost its customer base because there were no beds for them, the restaurant closed, the activity providers folded, and the music venue dropped sessions from four nights a week to one (at a stretch).

Each of these used to be a functioning business, and each was embedded in a local community. None of them had anything to do with asylum policy, but they were destroyed by a cascade of Failure Premiums originating in a completely different sector. And the cascade continues: tourism revenue falls, the local authority collects less in commercial rates, county services decline, the place becomes less attractive, and fewer tourists come even when beds eventually free up because the ecosystem that made it worth visiting has been hollowed out.

The musicians moved to London, the chefs went to Melbourne, and people are realizing that you can’t rebuild an ecosystem just by releasing hotel rooms back to the market. Ecosystems are made of people. Of relationships, skills, and traditions that accumulated over decades. Sadly, they can be destroyed all too easily in three years by a cascade that nobody can easily trace back to its origin.

The Cascade Premium is the tier where the Failure Premium is no longer a quantified budget line in the revenue reports, but about the existential viability of communities. Consider the indigenous economy. As I wrote in the Irish Times, when Leo Varadkar was asked about Irish agriculture, his answer was effectively that the sector no longer served Ireland’s strategic interests, and that the future lay with multinational tax revenue.

Thus, the state never built coordination architecture for our indigenous industry! No food processing infrastructure at national scale, no rail freight, no cold chain logistics, no export marketing institution comparable to what Denmark or the Netherlands built decades ago. Rural towns are in decline because the indigenous economy can’t sustain them, and so young people leave. The town loses its school, its GP, its pub, its post office. The Tier 3 Cascade Premium is the parish with no football team for the under-14s.

Worse still, the system is recursive. Which is a fancy way of saying the following: housing failure means nurses can’t afford to live near hospitals, which means agency staff at two to three times the cost, which means health budgets are consumed by staffing premiums, which means waiting lists grow, which means the National Treatment Purchase Fund pays private hospitals to clear them, which increases the prices, which costs taxpayers more and defunds other urgent things, such as special needs education.

This is where Failure Premium complexity explodes, because now you have another Tier 1 Direct Premium (pay more money to hospital owners), caused by a Tier 3 Cascade Premium from a completely different sector (immigrant housing)! The end result is a chain of Failure Premiums so long that nobody in the Department of Health would ever think to blame the Department of Housing!

And that’s just one chain, but there are hundreds. Each failure produces the conditions for the next, and they interweave and compound and tangle until the entire system is a knot of interdependent premiums, each one feeding the others, each one making the others more expensive.

This is where the true danger of the Failure Premium reveals itself. It doesn’t just cost more, it creates systemic fragility. When everything depends on everything else through chains of emergency workarounds (when housing props up health which props up staffing which props up waiting lists which props up private hospitals) then nothing can fail independently. And similarly, nothing can be fixed independently, with one-off policies. A shock in one sector cascades through every connected sector simultaneously. We’ve seen this before in the 2008 financial crisis; a system of interdependencies so complex, layered, and opaque that nobody could see how a housing problem in Arizona could collapse a bank in Dublin.

The Cascade Premium is building the same kind of fragility into the Irish state itself, in the basic machinery of public services, destroying economies and societies.

It’s why Ireland has the lowest number of entrepreneurs in the EU, alongside communities that are dying slow deaths. It impacts the things that took generations to build, that nobody designed but that functioned beautifully, and that can’t be rebuilt by any single policy announcement. The pubs, the parishes, the resilience.

Eventually, the country.

Mind The Transfer

So the system is complex, and the Failure Premiums cascade while being tangled. The interdependencies are opaque, and it can feel impossible to understand any of this while you’re standing in the middle of it, wondering why the fuck nothing ever works.

But strip it all back! Beyond the failure tiers, the cascades, the recursive loops, and the underlying problem is actually very simple. Frustratingly simple, actually, because it’s much harder to solve than it is to describe:

The state doesn’t build things.

And when the state doesn’t build things, whoever holds the existing stock of assets captures a premium on everything the state has to rent, outsource, or subsidize instead. That’s it. That’s where the money goes. Not into waste, and not into bureaucratic inefficiency, but into the pockets of asset holders; structurally, automatically, without anyone needing to break a single law.

This is critical to understand: the mechanism behind the gap is not corruption, even if the system is corrupt. Nobody is rigging any auction, and nobody needs to bribe a minister (although I can guarantee that this is happening regardless). This is not a matter of a lack of vision, although there happens to be none. Or the wrong philosophy, although this also happens to be true. It is simpler than all of that: the state refuses to create institutions that can build, so whoever already owns the thing the state needs, can set the price. The state pays it, every single time, in every sector, forever.

And the scale is staggering for a country of five million people. €4 billion in HAP. Billions in IPAS hotel contracts. €1.5 billion in ISIF housing deployed through private fund structures with management fees, carried interest, and developer margins extracted at every layer. Agency staffing costs across the entire HSE. NTPF payments to private hospitals. Energy subsidies captured by providers. The Failure Premium has a price per unit in every sector: €210,000 on a house, €85 per night on an asylum seeker, two to three times the salary cost on a nurse, €195,000 per year on a child in private residential care.

Make no mistake, this is one of the largest sustained transfers of wealth from a general population to a concentrated asset-holding class anywhere in the developed world. And if you’re not angry about this, then you should be!

This capital reallocation flows in one direction, which is upwards, while it compounds. Every euro spent on the emergency workaround is a euro not spent building the institution that would make the workaround unnecessary. It also cascades across industries, as one sector’s institutional absence destroys functioning systems in entirely unrelated sectors. And it is shaped, reinforced, and perpetuated by the very people who benefit from it, through the structural mechanics of a system that rewards whoever happens to stand where the money lands.

In short, Ireland is taking a once-in-a-generation windfall of €28 billion a year in multinational tax receipts, and routing it through a system that guarantees no outcome other than poverty:

Societal poverty, where communities hollow out and civic life disappears. Fiscal poverty, where €126 billion in revenue produces less infrastructure per capita than countries with half the budget. Governance poverty, where the state cannot perform basic functions that every peer country takes for granted. And poverty of expectation, perhaps the most damaging of all, where an entire generation learns to accept garden sheds, €340,000 “affordable” homes and boarded-up town centers as “just the way things are” in Ireland.

So where is the money going? The windfall isn’t building a country, it’s funding the Failure Premium. And the Failure Premium is ensuring that no matter how much money comes in, the country becomes poorer in every way that the money was supposed to fix.

Subscribe now

A few years ago, I become obsessed with (and did a mini podcast series on) art and culture forgery and thievery. Fake wine, forged art, replica watches, and more. Now, being a writer with my own IP in the cultural space, I have once again become obsessed with the impact of LLMs and AI on the value of IP, and subsequently contract law, which eventually feeds into industrial strategy!

This paper contributes to research I’m doing with Alex Fleetwood on cultural institutions and new models of industrial strategy in the Intelligence Age.

In short, the institutions that governed creative economies for three centuries, such as copyright law, collecting societies, arts councils, and public broadcasters, were designed for a world of (1) discrete works, (2) identifiable copies, and (3) traceable distribution.

But… AI training dissolves all three! And still, nobody has built what comes next…!

Consider that two decades of creative work across every language, every tradition, every medium that has touched the open web, have been absorbed into AI models and been reproduced via “model training weights”.

Is this theft? No, because theft implies goods that could be returned.

I argue that this is something slightly different; enclosure: a structural transformation after which the prior arrangement is no longer available. A book hasn’t been copied by AI in the traditional sense, but it has been dissolved.

Additionally, think about this: copyright protects copies; but with AI, there is no copy. Moral rights protect attribution; but with AI there is no attributable act. The Suno/RIAA cases, the Authors Guild suits, the EU’s collapsed text-and-data-mining consultations… These are all surface-layer expressions of the same structural problem: the institutional architecture was designed for a mechanics of culture that no longer exists.

Simply put, the conditions that cultural institutions and laws were designed for just don’t exist any more.

The framework in this paper explains why institutions are coordination architectures. What matters is not whether they’re “good” institutions, but how fast they can change, also knows as their adaptive bandwidth:

• Copyright law revises on legislative timescales: decades.

• Collecting societies and museums update on administrative timescales: years.

• AI capability is changing on a timescale of months.

As we see with institutions outside of culture as well, you cannot have both high stability and high bandwidth; and every major cultural institution was optimized for stability. Thus, the architecture gap is widening, and culture is in the premature regime: it has been technically transformed by AI, but institutionally abandoned as museums, writers and the law cannot keep up.

The paper here applies the architecture gap framework to the domain where the coordination failure is most acute and least addressed. It identifies seven domains any institutional response must span (memory, perception, production, economics, distribution, judgment, and rights) and explains why solving any one in isolation changes the problem in the others.

Why does this matter? In short, it’s because industrial policy for the intelligence age is currently building on a foundation that is actively being dissolved in real time.

Read the full paper here paper →

This article applies the architecture-lag and coordination-architecture frameworks developed formally in two companion papers by me, Sinéad O’Sullivan: “Institutions as Coordination Architectures” and “Market Formation as a Systems Engineering Problem.” Available on request: s@sinead.co

Yesterday, on Sunday morning, I posted a graph on Twitter. And by Sunday evening I was watching Steve Bannon’s WarRoom podcast discuss the data after it had gone viral. A very strange day, indeed.

My inbox has been full of people arguing about the methodology, the axis labels, whether I should have used GDP or GNI*, and whether the composite index is “makey upey.” Good, I suppose! It’s hard to get people to care about data!

But instead of individually messaging and emailing all the people who have asked (there are too many), I am writing this post which gives everything (data, sources, the construction). But more importantly, I want to dig a little deeper into what this graph actually shows: that Ireland is not an entirely functioning state… Just a rich one!

But first. Why did a graph go viral? I’ve been hanging around data for a while and chart plots don’t normally do that.

I suspect this one did though because it showed people something they feel every day and placed it next to something they keep being told.

They feel: the three-hour commute in traffic, the closed GP list, the €2,200 rent, the fourteen-month wait for an MRI, the buses that don’t come, the trains that don’t exist, the schools with no places, the pubs that close before midnight, the €12 sandwiches.

And they keep being told: Ireland is the second richest country in Europe with a €23 billion surplus, record employment, and even if you’re not happy with this, just shut up and put up.

The distance between those two experiences is the distance between Ireland and every other dot on that graph! People looked at it and recognized that their own lives exist exactly in the gap. Fuel just happened to be the thing that broke the surface this week, but that gap has been there for a decade, and is indeed growing.

What kind of rich is Ireland?

A lot of why the gap in my graph exists has to do with the nature of the wealth itself. Ireland’s prosperity is not generated, it is extracted. But the extraction runs in an unusual direction.

The classical colonial model was geographic, in that a colonial power occupied a territory, extracted its resources, and shipped the value home. Britain did this to Ireland for centuries as we’re well aware with land, labour, food, leaving behind famine and underdevelopment.

Then the next post-colonial model got rid of the occupation (no boots on the ground in the colony) but kept the structure. In this model, the power outsourced the extraction to corporations. And in this way, the British Empire became British Petroleum, just as the Dutch East India Company became Royal Dutch Shell; the value still flowed back to the colonizer but it was through contracts, concessions, and transfer pricing rather than garrisons. The colonized country gave away its resources while wearing the environmental and social costs of this program.

Each colonial iteration has required less of the colonizer. The first model required armies, occupation, and physical control of territory. The second required corporations and contracts, as well as physical oil pipelines and ships carrying physical commodities.

Today, Ireland represents the third and latest model: extraction without even leaving the country! No armies, no pipelines, no ships, and nothing physical crossing a border at all. In fact, hilariously, Ireland does not go to the wealth; the wealth comes to Ireland!

Why? Because Ireland offers the one thing a globalized digital economy values above all else: a favorable tax jurisdiction. The resource being extracted is not copper or oil, it is a tax base. And the extraction is so clean and frictionless that the countries being extracted from (the US, France, Germany, every country where the products are actually designed, built, and sold) barely notice it happening at all. Or, as we are seeing… they are starting to realize it, but simply cannot stop it.

But there’s another big difference in Ireland’s model that’s fascinating.

In the classical model, the colony was exploited and the colonizer enriched. In the Irish model, everyone is exploited except the corporation that is giving up its resources (tax money). Today, the US and the countries where products are sold lose tax revenue. And Ireland itself also loses out, because despite collecting €28 billion in corporation tax, it has not converted the proceeds into functioning public infrastructure.

This is largely because the money was never connected to domestic economic activity in the first place. It was just handed to the state without requiring anything of the Irish economy: no workforce development, no supply chain construction, no infrastructure investment, no institutional capacity. Once it arrived, it was immediately distributed to Irish citizens as wealth transfers (e.g. heating subsidies! the HAP!), and the gap between what Ireland could afford and what it could actually do grew wider every year.

Ireland is not a colonizer, of course. But it is a node in an extraction system that siphons tax base from every country where real economic activity occurs.

A country might justify that position if it used the proceeds to build something (anything!) like world-class public services, extraordinary infrastructure, or a society so well-functioning that the trade-off had a visible return. Ireland did… None of this. It extracted from others and failed to build anything for itself. That is the uniquely disgraceful aspect of the Irish model; not the extraction alone, but the total nothingness that followed it. The nothingness we live in.

In short, Ireland found a way to be rich without ever needing to develop itself, believing that “tax revenue” meant “prosperity”. The farmers on O’Connell Bridge and the nurse emigrating to Melbourne are both living inside the consequences.

What do you actually get?

Let’s go back to the chart quickly.

The y-axis is a composite of five metrics that measure, in different ways, what a state actually delivers to its citizens in physical infrastructure and public services. I chose these five simply because they are available across all EU member states from the same credible sources, making the comparison consistent. They span health, transport, and public investment.

The data is publicly available here. Go knock yourself out playing with it!

A note on methodology: nobody is funding this research. This is not the output of a multi-year PhD program or a commissioned report. I built this graph because I was curious, and I used these five metrics because their data was publicly available, easily comparable, and could be collected in a reasonable amount of time by one person with far too many other things to do. If I were doing this with a team and a budget, I would use more metrics, weight them with greater sophistication, and subject the composite to formal sensitivity analysis. All I had was a question and a few hours on a late evening after work.

This graph is an honest first approximation, not a definitive index. But as the response has shown, the pattern it reveals (that Ireland is an extreme outlier among wealthy European states) is one that people recognize immediately from their own experience. A more sophisticated construction would not move Ireland out of the bottom-right quadrant, it would just measure more precisely how far into it Ireland sits!

I’ve got a summary of the data I used at the end of this post, so as not to bore those who don’t care!

Does the weighting matter?

No. And here is why: Ireland scores badly on every single component, not on one metric. And not on two. On all four. You could weight hospital beds at 50% and everything else at 12.5% each and Ireland is still in the bottom-right quadrant. You could drop rail electrification entirely and Ireland is still in the bottom-right. You could substitute entirely different metrics (housing completions per capita, broadband speeds, emergency response times) and Ireland would still be in the bottom-right quadrant, because Ireland is not marginally behind its peers on one or two dimensions. It is dramatically behind on all of them simultaneously. That is the finding. The composite construction is secondary to the pattern, and the pattern is robust to any reasonable specification.

I have not used some magical, PhD-level maths (although I could if I wanted to get fancy). I am not trying to trick anybody to prove a point. The fact of the matter is that whatever statistical treatment you give this, Ireland is still… considerably shitter at most things than our EU peers.

What people got right and what they got wrong

Several people pointed out that some countries with few hospital beds (e.g. Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands) have strong primary care systems that reduce hospital dependency. This is correct, and these countries made a deliberate policy choice to invest in GPs, community care, and preventive medicine so that fewer people need hospital admission. Ireland has not made this choice. Ireland has both few hospital beds and weak primary care. 75% of GP lists are closed, while hospital bed occupancy is at 95%... the highest in the OECD. Ireland has the worst of both models.

Others argued, correctly, that Ireland does not tax its own citizens at Nordic levels. Brigid Laffan noted that 38% of Irish workers pay no income tax, that employer PRSI is among the lowest in Europe, and that the domestic tax base is narrow. This is all true, and it is central to my argument rather than a rebuttal of it. Ireland’s total tax revenue was €126 billion in 2024. (it doubled in a decade!). But the revenue comes disproportionately from multinational corporation tax, not from broad domestic taxation. This is the rentier structure: the state has Nordic-level money without a Nordic-level social contract. The Nordics tax everyone and everyone expects services in return. Ireland taxes almost nobody domestically and funds the gap with corporation tax from three American companies.

But… here’s the kicker. Irish middle-income workers are not lightly taxed. Marginal rates above €40,000 are among the highest in Europe when you combine income tax, USC, and PRSI! These workers pay high taxes and receive poor services. And the gap between what they contribute and what they experience is filled by revenue from Apple, Microsoft, and Eli Lilly.

That is the worst of all worlds; having heavily taxed workers receiving poor services in a country running a €23 billion surplus funded by companies it doesn’t control. That is the graph that you’re looking at.

The hierarchy of coping

Now to get onto what that graph represents.

A large section of the Irish public watched the fuel protests with distaste, calling the protestors selfish and only out for themselves; holding the country hostage for their own interests. This reaction was genuine and widely shared. But also, it deserves serious examination!

Ireland has a long tradition of protest, yes, but a very specific kind. We march for Gaza, we march for Repeal, we march for marriage equality, we hold vigils for asylum seekers, etc etc. These are protests on behalf of others, or for abstract principles, or against injustices happening somewhere else. They are deemed acceptable because they are selfless, and occur in a way such that nobody’s daily life is disrupted while nobody loses out. In effect: these protests require no skin in the game. The traditional Irish protest is a demonstration of values, not an exercise of power.

A normal Irish protest is not felt as threatening to the state because a typical Irish protest does not usually ask the state to do anything it doesn’t want to do!

The fuel protests were different. They were disruptive, self-interested, and they were farmers and hauliers and contractors fighting for their own livelihoods, not for a cause that could be applauded from a distance. These protestors had real skin in the game. And the public reaction (“they’re selfish, thuggish, not like a real protest!”) tells you everything about how Ireland distinguishes between acceptable and unacceptable dissent.

• Acceptable dissent = symbolic.

• Unacceptable dissent = effective.

But here is the thing no politician wants to say, so I’ll go right ahead and say it for them. In a state where access to services, infrastructure, and basic economic viability is shrinking, everybody is acting in self-interest, whether they admit it or not! The Irish economy, despite the massive wealth, has become zero-sum for most. So out of necessity, everybody must be selfish. The only question is the form of selfishness that people take:

The haulier who blockades a fuel depot is protecting his livelihood in the cheapest way available to him. It is disruptive, visible, and widely condemned.

The middle-class professional who buys private health insurance, drives because there is no public transport, and says nothing about any of it is protecting herself in the cheapest way available to her. It is invisible, silent, and highly respectable.

The young graduate who emigrates to Melbourne is protecting his future in the cheapest way available to him. It is culturally sanctioned and even celebrated as “personal growth”.

The elite insider who secures a planning favor, a board appointment, or a contract through connections is protecting his position in the cheapest way available to him. It is invisible and deniable.

Each of these is a rational response to the same collective failure: a state that does not provide anything that its people needs, so get those provisions elsewhere! The only difference is that some forms of self-preservation are socially acceptable while others are not.

For example: The middle-class family paying €3,000 a year for health insurance they shouldn’t need is engaged in exactly the same act as the farmer blocking a fuel depot. Both are trying to secure for themselves what the state should provide for everyone. One does it quietly and the other does it with a tractor. The quiet version has simply been assigned a higher social value.

And here is the part I struggle with enormously in this conversation, and that nobody wants to hear; that the quiet opt-out of the middle class and the young emigrants is arguably more damaging than the tractor protests!

Why?

Well, when half the population buys private health insurance, it removes the political pressure to fix the public system, because the people with the loudest voices have already exited. It creates a two-tier system in which public patients wait 22 weeks for an MRI while private patients wait five days; meaning the public system is actively deprioritized because the people who would demand better have bought their way out. And it redirects medical resources (consultants, beds, theaters, equipment) toward paying patients, which directly degrades the service available to everyone else.

The farmer who blockades Whitegate causes three days of disruption and it is front-page news. But the middle-class exodus to private healthcare has been degrading the public system for 30 years and nobody writes a headline about it, because it happens silently, one VHI renewal at a time.

The protesters were blamed this week for cancer patients missing appointments, for carers unable to reach vulnerable people, and for children with disabilities losing home care services. These are real and serious consequences. But they are consequences that the health system produces on its own, every single day, without anyone blockading anything!

The hospital waiting list is over 900,000 people. Emergency departments had 14,000 patients on trolleys in January alone. Cancer patients miss appointments in Ireland every week which have nothing to do with tractors on O’Connell Bridge, as there aren’t enough consultants or beds! The fuel protests made the failures visible and immediate; while the health system makes them invisible and chronic. Only one of these gets blamed.

The same logic applies everywhere. Every parent who pays for private education reduces the pressure on the state to fund public schools properly. Every commuter who buys a second car reduces the demand for public transport. Every young professional who emigrates removes one more voice that might have demanded affordable housing. Each decision is rational, obviously. But collectively they are catastrophic, because they hollow out the constituency for public provision.

The disgust directed at the fuel protesters is not really about their methods, it is about the discomfort of watching people do loudly and disruptively what the rest of the country does quietly and continuously: opt out of a system that doesn’t work and try to protect themselves by whatever means are cheapest.

Amazingly, despite the long-held feelings of discontent with Irish life, the fuel protesters are the only people this week who actually demanded something from the state. Everyone else has already accepted that the state won’t provide anything and made private arrangements; arrangements which hauliers cannot afford. The protesters are condemned for being disruptive, while the rest are rewarded for being compliant. However the compliant ones are the ones who ensure nothing ever changes, because their silence is the permission the Irish state needs to continue.

And continue it does, one FF and one FG vote at a time.

The gap in real time

The week itself was the gap in the graph playing out live. Ireland did not just lack the infrastructure to manage a fuel crisis; Ireland is lacking so fucking much that it lacked the infrastructure to have a conversation about the fuel crisis.

Every question the country argued about this week is a question that France, the Netherlands, and Spain answered years ago by building institutions and protocols and mechanisms:

• Are the protesters legitimate?

• Should the government talk to them?

• Can we send the army?

• Is this far right?

These are procedural questions, and in a state with functioning institutional architecture they are already settled. There’s no need for debate at all.

A persistent claim this week has been that the protests are illegal and therefore the state’s response was justified. This deserves scrutiny, because it reveals how poorly the government in Ireland understands its own legal obligations.

Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Article 12 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights protect the right to peaceful assembly. This is not a concession from the state, it is a fundamental right the state is obligated to protect and facilitate. The European Parliament’s 2019 Resolution on the Right to Peaceful Protest goes further: it explicitly recognizes that peaceful civil disobedience (the deliberate, nonviolent breaking of the law for reasons of conscience) is… protected! Amnesty International’s 2024 report on 21 European countries confirms that disruption should generally be tolerated as inherent to protest.

Disruption is not an illegal outcome of a protest, as the state itself suggested this week; according to international law, it IS the protest!

And yes, before you get angry with me, I don’t disagree: road blockades, sit-ins, and slow-moving convoys are disruptive and annoying, especially when the M50 on a good day is just attrocious. But they are not violent, and therefore protected.

Infrastructure obstruction (e.g. blocking a refinery or fuel depot) is more serious, and the state has legitimate grounds to act. But under European Court of Human Rights case law, any restriction on protest must satisfy three tests: legality, necessity, and proportionality. Is there a clear legal basis? Is the restriction necessary in a democratic society? And critically: is the response the least restrictive means available? Deploying the military is not the least restrictive means when negotiation, court injunctions, and specialist police units have not been tried. And as we saw, the state refused to negotiate.

And here a remarkable procedural failure emerged that went almost entirely unremarked…

It was the Minister for Justice who invoked military deployment. In every comparable European democracy, the line between justice and defence is a constitutional red line. The justice ministry controls policing, and the defence ministry controls the military. The two are kept separate precisely because the circumstances under which you deploy police against citizens and the circumstances under which you deploy soldiers against citizens are fundamentally different and require different authorizing authorities, different legal frameworks, and different accountability mechanisms.

As I’ve written about here via Security Ireland, in Germany, the Basic Law constitutionally prohibits the use of military forces for police duties. In France, military deployment requires a formal legal requisition through the defence chain, decided by the President via the National Security Council. In Ireland this week, a justice minister activated the military as though it were an extension of the Gardaí — because in the absence of any framework distinguishing the two, it effectively is.

Not even anybody in government appeared to recognize that this line even existed, let alone that they had crossed it.

This is totally fucking bewildering.

What Ireland needed this week was not the army, it was proportional policing; a concept so basic that every EU member state except Ireland has institutionalized it.

Proportional policing means matching the response to the activity: facilitate peaceful assembly, manage civil disobedience through dialogue and agreed timeframes, address infrastructure obstruction through negotiation, court orders, and specialist units, and reserve enforcement powers for actual violence. Each level of protest gets a different response because each level presents a different challenge.

Yet Ireland treated a farmer on O’Connell Street, a tractor convoy on the M50, and a blockade at Whitegate as the same thing requiring the same response. They are not the same thing. The failure to distinguish between them is not a policy choice, it is an institutional absence. Yet another gap. The tools for proportional response do not exist, so disproportionate response (which is illegal in many countries) is the only option available.

Ireland had no graduated response available because no gradations exist. No gendarmerie. No specialist public order units. No civil protection agency. No crisis management authority. No negotiation mechanism for engaging with protest movements outside the licensed social partnership structures.

The government could not identify who to talk to and decided the problem was that the protesters lacked legitimacy, when the person in charge wasn’t to their liking or from a pre-approved lobby group.

But here’s the thing… The opinions we all held this week are almost… irrelevant?

And in fact, the real issue is that we were forced to have these arguments at all!

In every comparable European state, the institutional architecture settles the procedural questions in advance so that the political conversation can focus on the substance of:

• Should the fuel tax be reduced?

• What concessions are appropriate?

• How do you balance fiscal policy against popular anger?

Instead, Ireland spent the entire week on the procedural questions and never reached the substance, because it has no procedures or protocols.

And here is perhaps the most absurd dimension of all: the Irish public just did the government’s job for it. For a week, us lowly citizens (unpaid, untrained, between school runs and commutes) conducted the institutional analysis that the state should have had on file. We debated legal thresholds, European precedent, the distinction between civil disobedience and criminal conduct, the appropriateness of military deployment. We did this on our lunch breaks, in group chats, on radio phone-ins.

The government, lacking its own understanding of the situation, then took its cues from that debate (Who is angry? What is the popular opinion?), reacting to public mood rather than leading from an existing institutional framework. This is governance by Liveline. The blind leading the blind; a population with no framework for assessing proportionality feeding its conclusions to a government with no framework for delivering it.

The entire discourse of the last week? Wow, it’s the damn gap again!

That this emotional labor was necessary at all is itself a tax on us; an invisible, unacknowledged tax on the time, energy, and goodwill of a population that is already paying some of the highest marginal income tax rates in Europe for services that don’t function.

The state collects €126 billion a year in revenue and it employs tens of thousands of civil servants; but when the first serious domestic crisis in a generation arrived, the institutional thinking was outsourced to people on their phones.

Legitimacy

The question that circulated all week: are these protesters using the Trump playbook? As in, are they copying the tactics, borrowing the strategy, playing us? The question sounds sophisticated but it misunderstands what happened entirely. They are not using the Trump playbook. They are the Trump playbook. And sadly, weather we like it or not, so are we.

The “Trump” or “Brexit” playbook is not a set of tactics that someone imports from abroad. It is what happens automatically, organically, inevitably, when a state fails to engage with legitimate grievance and an institutional vacuum opens up.

(Again, the pesky gap….)

Trump didn’t invent a strategy and export it. He stepped into a vacuum that American institutions created by failing to address deindustrialization, the opioid crisis, the hollowing out of rural communities. Similarly, Brexit wasn’t a Russian plot, it was simply what happened when Westminster ignored the north of England for 40 years. The Gilets Jaunes weren’t astroturfed, they were what happened when Parisian technocrats imposed a fuel tax on people who had no alternative to driving.

The pattern is always the same:

institutional failure to recognize legitimate grievance → vacuum is created → someone fills it. The person who fills it is never the one we would have wanted to fill it. But they are not the cause, they are the symptom.

Which brings us to the question underneath all of this: what is legitimacy, and who gets to grant it?

The liberal democratic assumption is that legitimacy flows downward: from elections, constitutions, institutions. And that if the system hasn’t recognized your demand, then your demand has no standing. This is why middle-class Ireland felt entitled to judge the protesters this week- because the middle class has proximity to those institutions. They work in the civil service, in the professions, in the organizations that interact with the government daily. Their legitimacy is pre-approved. And importantly, their complaints travel through recognized channels: union negotiations, professional bodies, well written letters to TDs, the pages of the Irish Times. When they suffer, it is understandable to the establishment.

But when a haulier in Kildare suffers, it is not understandable. That is, until he parks a tractor on a bridge, and translates the grievance into the language we all understand: traffic times, fuel prices, appointments. At which point he is condemned for using the only channel the system left him.

Dan Mulhall, Ireland’s former ambassador to the US, tweeted this week that there is a need for calm discussion but that it ‘cannot happen while the country is being brought to a halt and the law being broken.’ This is the precise formulation Ireland told Britain was wrong for thirty years. The Good Friday Agreement did not happen because the IRA stopped first. It happened because enough people recognized that the legitimacy of the grievance did not depend on the respectability of its expression!

The IRA were taken seriously because of their actions; not because of their inactions.

A country whose diplomats once brokered that insight on behalf of the IRA yet cannot apply it to a dispute over diesel has not learned from its own history. And I’ll use the word for a second time: this is bewildering.

Because there is more than one way to gain legitimacy. It can also be earned laterally, and not in the presence of a Minister or institution, but by the tens of thousands of people who share your grievance, who join the same WhatsApp groups, who drive their tractors to the same bridge, who recognize their own experience in yours. When that happens, it doesn’t matter whether the system recognizes it or not, it is real. The legitimacy is already established by the people who conferred it.

The idea that a government official would not speak to these people in an attempt to avoid legitimizing them fails to understand the mechanics of power or strategy. To which I would say to the Ministers: they are already legitimate. Just not by you.

These protesters were granted legitimacy by their size and the leverage they created, just as Trump voters’ grievances were legitimate, just as the Brexiteers’ were, just as the Gilets Jaunes’ were. In every case, ignoring that legitimacy did not make it disappear. It simply meant the people holding it went looking for someone who would recognize it. That is how you get Trump. That is how you get Farage. That is why Tommy Robinson was in Dublin this week… because the government created a vacuum by refusing to engage, and someone else filled it.

Pointing to the person who filled the vacuum as proof that the movement was illegitimate is not an analysis, it is the final stage of the cycle that produced the crisis in the first place.

The premature state

Ireland is what I have come to call a premature state: a country where wealth, sovereignty, and EU membership arrived before the institutional architecture required to make use of them was built.

Corporation tax grew from €4.6 billion to €28.1 billion in a decade, and 46% of it comes from three American companies. The revenue flooded in, but none of it was used to build the institutional capacity that every comparable European state maintains as standard. It was distributed to all of us: energy credits, landlord subsidies, double child benefit, Christmas bonuses, one-off payments calibrated to electoral cycles. 85% of government spending goes to current transfers. 15% goes to building things.

Think of it this way: every other wealthy European country treats its budget like a household that earns well and invests: it puts money into the house, the pension, the kids’ education, and the things that compound over time. Ireland treats its budget like a household that earns well and spends it all at the pub, every month until it’s gone, with nothing put aside and nothing being built. And then when the boiler breaks, there’s no savings and no plumber, so you hand everyone in the family €450 and tell them to buy a space heater.

The gap on the graph, this distance between Ireland and every other wealthy European country, is what I call the architecture gap: the distance between what this country can fiscally afford and what its institutions can actually deliver.

It is the widest in Western Europe, and it is not closing. In fact, it is widening. And this week showed what happens when it is tested: no gas storage, no energy strategy, no crisis agency, no graduated response, no negotiation capacity, and a government whose only tools were a €250 million cheque and calling in the army loaders.

And at a certain point, even the cash stops helping. You can give every household a €450 energy credit but you cannot write a cheque that fixes a three-hour commute; you cannot direct-debit someone a GP appointment that doesn’t exist; you cannot transfer a hospital bed into a system running at 95% occupancy; you cannot deposit a train line. The machinery upon which the Irish government was built from which to distribute tax from revenues earned elsewhere, was also built for problems that only money solves.

Increasingly, Ireland’s problems are ones that only institutions, not money, can solve; and the institutions were never built.

This crisis will pass and the fuel will eventually flow. The tractors will leave O’Connell Bridge and the government will announce more packages. But the gap will still be there; between what Ireland can afford and what it can do, between the state it pays for and the state it has. And until the architecture for a real state is built, every future crisis will arrive in the same vacuum and produce the same response: cheques, soldiers, blame, and nothing learned.

Subscribe now

Hospital beds per 100,000 population.
Source: Eurostat, 2022. Ireland has 291 beds per 100,000 people. The EU average is 516. That places Ireland 43% below the average and fifth lowest in the EU. Germany has 766. Austria has 690. France has 571.

Rail network density.
Source: European Commission and UNECE transport statistics. Ireland has approximately 1,950 kilometres of rail for 5.4 million people. The network has halved since its 1920 peak of 5,600 kilometres. Rail accounts for 3.1% of journeys in Ireland, compared to the EU average of 7.9%. Meanwhile Ireland’s motorway network per capita is three times the UK’s.

Rail electrification.
Source: European Commission. Ireland has approximately 38 kilometres of electrified rail — the DART line. That is effectively 2% of the network. The Netherlands has 76% electrification. Germany has 62%. France has 55%.

GP density and access.
Source: OECD Health at a Glance. Ireland is significantly below the OECD average for practising GPs per capita. Over 75% of GP practices have closed their lists to new patients. Nearly 30% of GPs are due to retire within five years. Public patients wait 22 weeks for an MRI and 55 weeks for a CT scan. Private patients wait five days and six days respectively.

Public capital investment as a share of national income.
Infrastructure outcomes relative to fiscal capacity. Source: IMF 2025. The IMF found that Ireland faces a physical infrastructure gap of 32% relative to competitor economies, with a quality gap of 27%. Despite record government revenues, spending is not translating into comparable infrastructure outcomes.

Last night, NASA launched four astronauts toward the Moon; the first crewed lunar mission since 1972, fifty-three years. If all goes well, Victor Glover will become the first Black astronaut to travel beyond low Earth orbit and Christina Koch the first woman. They are out there right now, coasting through deep space, further from Earth than any human beings since Apollo 17.

The crew played cards before boarding, which got a little coverage. The launch aired on NASA+, Amazon Prime, and YouTube. Donald Trump congratulated them on Truth Social and moved on to the war in Iran, and the astronauts said it was an amazing opportunity.

And… yeah. So what?

Subscribe now

I’ve been trying to understand why I don’t care, because I work in the space industry. I’ve spent my career in and around lunar missions — I’ve even designed one. I know how hard it is to do what those four people did last night, what it costs in money, in years, in the institutional willpower required to keep a program alive through budget cuts and technical failures and political administrations that each have different opinions about whether any of this is worth doing. I know it is extraordinary.

And yet…

A few months ago, a friend who covers space for the Wall Street Journal sent me an episode of How Long Gone, a podcast by two guys in Los Angeles who talk about culture. One of them said, offhandedly, that space is boring and that Neil deGrasse Tyson content puts him to sleep. The other agreed immediately. So did I.

I do TV interviews on space for SkyNews, and when I was in the studio earlier this week to cover the Artemis launch, I was dreading the inevitable question, because I’m a terrible liar with no poker face: “What will the impact of this launch be for kids and generations to come?”

Little to none.

The Colosseum Problem

I was thinking about this when I was in Rome last fall for a space economics seminar.

The morning before it started, I went to the Colosseum. I stood in front of it for less than two minutes and felt very little other than being overwhelmed by what had become a social media backdrop for people in haute couture. I took a photo because it felt like something I should do, and immediately left to escape the tackiness of it all.

The next morning, my friend and I drove past it on the way to a wine bar (yes, morning). She was holding a box of famous pastries we had traveled far to find, and I took a photo of her with the pastries and the Colosseum slightly out of focus behind her. This is my fond memory of the Colosseum.

The first photo has the Colosseum in sharp focus and means nothing to me. The second one has it as an accidental backdrop to a moment about friendship and food and being in Rome with someone you like.

In fact, space has exactly the same problem. We’ve been positioned as tourists; as consumers of far-away-galaxies-as-screensavers; audiences for other people’s (celebrity?) three-minute-zero-gravity missions. You cannot change those vibes by making the screensavers higher resolution.

Going back to the Colosseum for a moment. The building only means something when it connects to a story you’re already inside. If, say, you’ve studied Roman history, or if you understand what it meant that fifty thousand people gathered in that building to watch other people die, or you’re really into Paul Mescal in leather. Then yes, standing there does something to you. The ruins are evidence of something you already care about.

But most of us don’t have that relationship with Rome anymore. And almost none of us have it with space.

Artemis II launched last night and I could not identify anything in my life that will be different when it splashes down on April 10th. And that’s considering that I even work in the space industry, I spent time on NASA’s Mars architecture studies, and I know what went into putting those four people on that rocket! Sure, the mission will test systems for the wider Artemis program, and if it succeeds, the next test flight becomes possible, and eventually, years from now, maybe a landing. Somewhere in that chain there is presumably something that matters to someone, but I cannot find where it connects to the world I actually live in.

Incidentally, this is not how I feel about AI. Actually, I don’t even have to try to care about AI, because it’s a technology with an in-built warning siren: it is coming for my industry, my students’ careers, and all of our assumptions about what expertise is worth. It is unpredictable in ways that keep smart people up at night. I am unsettled by it, absorbed by it, unable to look away from it. It is the opposite of Artemis II.

You see, space is complicated but not complex. It’s an enormous engineering challenge with largely knowable parameters, and when it succeeds, the world is more or less the same world it was before.

Fuck, I’m more curious about deep ocean mapping than about a lunar flyby, which has at least the possibility of new species, unknown chemistries, and ecosystems that have never seen sunlight. These things tell me something about life on the planet I actually inhabit. Artemis II will tell me whether Orion’s life support system performs as designed. And yes, I hope it does, but I can’t make myself care that it did.

What Meaning Actually Looked Like

To understand how space lost a narrative that anybody cared about, you have to see what it looked like when it had one. Now is an appropriate time in an article on spaceflight to travel back in time…

In 1944, a painting of Saturn appeared in Life magazine. The planet rose above a jagged landscape on Titan, and its rings stretched across the sky in a pale arc. The ground in the foreground looked rough and cold; a place where a person might one day stand and look up.

The now infamous painting was by Chesley Bonestell, and what set it apart was that it was built from calculations. You see, Bonestell had trained as an architect before moving to astronomical illustration, and he had a dogged commitment to getting the physics right: the angle of Saturn’s rings as seen from Titan, the color of the light, the geometry of the horizon, all of these he calculated himself and were correct. In doing so, his paintings became actual places! Places that existed, that waited for us, and that could (in principle) be reached.

What made Bonestell’s work important wasn’t the beauty alone, because lots of people can paint stunning depictions of our solar system. Rather, it was who these paintings were talking to. The perspective was a human being standing on a distant surface and looking outward is different from a telescope image, a satellite visualization, or a God’s-eye view from nowhere. A person, standing somewhere, looking at something, says: this place exists, it is reachable, and you (yes, YOU!) are part of the species that will reach it. You will go here.

Importantly, it did not say: you will watch someone else go here.

But a destination without a plan, however beautifully painted, is just a poster.

That’s where Fred Freeman came in. Freeman was an illustrator who worked with the infamous aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun on a series of articles in Collier’s magazine in the early 1950s in an attempt to answer, in public, the question Bonestell’s paintings raised: how would you actually get there?

Freeman’s images looked nothing like Bonestell’s, as there were no dramatic skies or alien horizons. Instead he drew rockets opened up in cross-section so you could see the fuel tanks and engine bells and structural frames, orbital mechanics laid out as sequences of diagrams, the interior of a capsule with wiring exposed and pressure vessels labeled. He drew astronauts performing tasks with tools that looked like actual tools, in conditions that looked like actual conditions.

A reader could trace the path through Freeman’s pages: Earth to orbit, orbit to translunar trajectory, translunar trajectory to the lunar surface. Step by step, system by system. It wasn’t a promise that any of this would actually happen, obviously, because only the US government could make that promise, but it showed people that arriving there was physically possible. That someone who understood the problem had thought it through, and that the numbers worked.

Together, Bonestell and Freeman’s importance in inspiring the Apollo era grew because of one key thing: they were published side by side. In the same magazines, the same articles, aimed at the same reader. You couldn’t look at Bonestell’s gorgeous destination without also seeing Freeman’s engineering; the ugly, specific, credible work of how you’d actually get there. And you couldn’t look at Freeman’s engineering without seeing what it was for, depicted by Bonestell.

The person telling you what to visit in space and the person showing you how to get there were collaborating, and neither one could get away with bullshitting because the other one’s work was right there on the next page.

That combination, of ambition checked by engineering, and engineering motivated by ambition, were both answerable to the same audience. And this is what made mid-century space culture feel like it meant something. It wasn’t the paintings alone, of course, but that the paintings came attached to real plans, and the plans came attached to real reasons with government financing, and all of it was addressed to you as someone who would eventually be involved.

The great science fiction writers, incidentally publishing around the same time, worked the same way: Arthur C. Clarke was a radar technician, and Isaac Asimov had a PhD in biochemistry. They could reason about what was physically possible because they had the authority to do that. The fiction was downstream of that reasoning, and the stories felt real because the people writing them knew what “real” entailed.

Today?

Compare that to a Midjourney render of a Mars city. Or a SpaceX CGI flythrough. Or a Blue Origin promotional video. The AI generating the render doesn’t know whether the pressure vessel is sized correctly for the atmospheric conditions, whether the habitat makes structural sense, or whether the landing pad is oriented correctly relative to prevailing winds. It knows what looks plausible to a human eye trained on prior images of space.

A CGI Mars city looks like a Mars city that has been drawn. It does not look like a Mars city someone has worked out from any engineering sense. And there is nobody standing next to the person who made the render saying, actually, that’s wrong, the atmospheric pressure on Mars is 0.6% of Earth’s and your windows would implode. The engineering check is gone. The ambition floats free from any commitment to actually making anything happen.

(In fact, the closest to a Freeman today that I’ve come across is a Space Architect called Jeffrey Montes, with whom I worked on a project at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on an asteroid mission. While he is not an “artist” per se, his work is excellent).

Indeed, two years ago, Christie’s auctioned Bonestell and Freeman originals for significant sums. Myself and Alex MacDonald, NASA’s Chief Economist and a consistent agitator on my Substack articles, threw our hats into the ring in an attempt to acquire the works (Alex is a huge collector of space art and went after the Bonestells, while I preferred the Freemans).

The pieces eventually moved from one private collection to another, and sadly to neither Alex’s or mine. But it’s probably worth mentioning that the painting that once said “you, citizen, will go here!” now says “this is worth $180,000 and belongs to a venture capitalist”.

A Bonestell being sold at Christie’s feels like little more than a failed prophecy with a shocking price tag. The future Bonestell depicted sadly never arrived.

Subscribe now

The Five Eras

But how did this happen? How did “let’s go to space” end with “let’s pump and dump space stock”?

Think briefly about what Bonestell and Freeman were actually doing in those now-vintage Collier’s magazine pages, because every era of spaceflight since then can be understood as a different answer to the same question:

Are the people explaining the what about us going to space and the people figuring out how to get there still working together, still accountable to each other, still talking to the public as if the public is part of the plan?

For each Space Exploration Era, there is an answer to this.

The Romantic Era (~1903–1957). Tsiolkovsky doing the mathematics of spaceflight alone in a provincial Russian town, Goddard launching a spindly rocket from a farm in New Mexico, Oberth and the German amateurs testing small rockets on a disused ammunition dump outside Berlin. There were no institutions, almost no money, and these people were frequently mocked. I mean, the New York Times published an editorial explaining that rockets couldn’t work in a vacuum. The researchers kept going because they believed the species was meant to leave Earth, and that belief was sufficient to keep the hope alive. The visionaries and the engineers were the same people; a handful of obsessives who could describe the future and do the math. But a handful of obsessives can’t get to space on their own. They had coherence in imagination, but no power.

The Heroic Era (1957–1972). Sputnik to the last Moon landing. The era the space industry has been trying to recreate ever since, and the one it least understands. What made it work wasn’t the money, although there was plenty. It was that the visionaries and the engineers were inside the same institution, reporting to the same leadership, working toward the same goal on the same deadline. The goal was the Moon. The date was the end of the decade. The people at NASA who told the public why this mattered were down the hall from the people figuring out how to do it, and both groups could call each other out. A grand promise that couldn’t be engineered got killed. A piece of engineering that didn’t serve the mission got questioned and eventually dropped. That mutual accountability is what produced Apollo.

The Institutional Era (1972–~2004). The Shuttle, the contractor model, the slow migration of actual engineering work outward to Boeing and Lockheed while NASA kept the budgets, the public face, and the speeches. The people explaining why space mattered and the people building the hardware gradually ended up in different organizations with different incentives. NASA made the case for space while the contractors built the machines, and because they answered to different bosses, neither group could effectively check the other. The speeches stayed grand while the engineering started cutting corners (private equity, woo!). The Challenger is the defining moment: Feynman’s O-ring in a glass of ice water at a press conference, proving in thirty seconds what the agency had spent years not confronting. The engineers at Morton Thiokol had said the O-rings were a problem, but NASA management launched anyway, because the people who knew how the hardware actually worked had lost the ability to overrule the people managing the story. Seven people died.

The Commercial Era (~2004–2018). It deserves credit before I criticize it. SpaceX arrived with the correct diagnosis (that the problem holding US spaceflight back was institutional, not technical) and for a while it genuinely put the visionaries and the engineers back in the same room! Musk in the early years could describe the Mars civilization with real intensity on Monday and identify a manufacturing defect in a turbopump on Tuesday, and the people around him knew both things were real. The ambition was checked by the engineering, and the engineering was motivated by the ambition, and they were accountable to each other because they reported to the same guy. The first propulsive landing of an orbital booster in December 2015 produced a feeling spaceflight hadn’t generated since Apollo. I watched it, and like many of my colleagues, I felt it.

The Grifting Era (~2018–present). Hmmm. What the Commercial Era accidentally proved is that grand visions of space are worth a lot of money on their own: they attract investors, recruits, media attention, regulatory goodwill, and they are much cheaper to produce than actual rockets. A Mars city render costs less than a working engine just as a founder’s TED talk about the multiplanetary future costs less than a successful orbital launch. And once the market figured this out, the business model became obvious: sell the vision, pocket the money, let the engineering fall behind (because we’re never actually going to these places, and by the schmucks figure that out, I’ll have passed the hot potato to someone else!).

Virgin Galactic announced suborbital tourism in 2004 and flew Richard Branson to the edge of space in 2021 — seventeen years later! — for thirty seconds of weightlessness in a vehicle that will have no measurable effect on human civilization. The SPAC era produced dozens of variations on this theme, most since fallen 80 to 95 percent from their peaks, with the retail investors who bought the vision holding the loss.

And then there’s SpaceX, the visionary company I just praised two paragraphs ago; the one that actually built the rockets, that made you feel something when the booster landed, that for a decade really did have the visionaries and the engineers in the same room checking each other’s work.

Here is what that company looks like now: Musk has quietly deprioritized Mars, the entire stated reason for the company’s existence, at the same time that he announced the company’s IPO, something he had long said he would never do. That IPO was confirmed yesterday, on the same day as the Artemis II launch, at a valuation of a trillion dollars. Meanwhile, NASDAQ has proposed narrowing the holding window for S&P 500 inclusion from 365 days to five, which would mean SpaceX stock gets absorbed into index funds and effectively backstopped by pension money almost immediately after going public.

This matters beyond the obvious obscenity of it, because it means we will probably never find out whether space is a commercially viable enterprise. The question of whether you can build a real business getting things and people off this planet (a question that deserves a serious answer) will be buried under the same toxic retail investment slop that ate meme stocks and crypto. SpaceX’s value will be set by index-fund mechanics and momentum trading, not by whether Starship actually works or whether anyone is willing to pay to go to Mars. The company’s fundamentals will be as irrelevant as its mission statement to regular people. Plus the fact that SpaceX has merged with xAI, folding in X, Musk’s failing social media company, so that the whole enterprise is now a conglomerate whose relationship to getting humans to Mars is, at best, performative. The guy who identified the turbopump defect on Tuesday is now buying social media companies while high on ketamine, valued at a trillion dollars on the strength of a Mars mission he has deprioritized.

This is about as far from the original promise of spaceflight (a public mission, collectively owned, addressed to everyone) as it is possible to get. Even where the engineering is real, and even at SpaceX, the dream has become a financial instrument. The mission is the story you tell to support the valuation.

So yeah… There have certainly been better and more inspirational Space Eras than the one we’re currently trudging through.

Three Visions, None of Them for You

But wait, it gets worse.

Because beyond the actual companies, there’s the small the matter of why.

Space currently has three dominant visions and, sadly, none of them include you. I don’t mean that unkindly, but I do mean it structurally: none of them address an ordinary person as a future participant the way Bonestell’s paintings did, and all three position you as an audience. Back to the Colosseum.

Jeff Bezos has been passionate about space since he was five, and he says so openly, so I don’t doubt it. But I want to ask a question nobody in this industry seems willing to ask: why haven’t your dreams changed? You are one of the wealthiest people in human history, you’ve watched the world transform beyond recognition through the internet, smartphones, genomics, climate change, and AI, and the dream is still the one you had before you could read? Bezos’s vision is an expensive nostalgia project. It is little more than a childhood dream that was never required to update itself, because the person who had it became rich enough to never have to.

Musk is a different and stranger case. His philosophical underpinning is what’s sometimes called TESCREAL, a bundle of tech-optimist philosophies including transhumanism, cosmism, and longtermism… frames humanity as pre-programmed to die unless it escapes Earth. The Mars vision isn’t humanity expanding into the cosmos in any recognizable sense that, I dunno, normal people might think about. It’s quite literally a backup drive (or an in-orbit data center) for civilization, populated eventually by what Musk has suggested could be trillions of AI beings.

This is not a vision that includes you. It’s a vision that replaces you. The people who hold this worldview share something important: they do not particularly like life on Earth, which they consider to be a fragile rock we need to escape before it fails us. Musk’s vision is not about going somewhere, it is about leaving somewhere. You can feel it in the renders, the speeches, the consistent framing of Earth as a lackluster origin point rather than a civilizational home.

And… Why would you follow someone somewhere they only ended up because they couldn’t stay?

NASA is the third and most sympathetic case because it is genuinely trying to do science, and some of that science is extraordinary. The Webb telescope has returned images of the early universe no human has ever seen (more screensavers, woo!). The planetary science divisions (Voyager, Cassini, Curiosity) do specific, publicly accountable work where the people explaining the mission and the people building the instruments still overlap, still check each other, still produce things that are real.

But NASA as a whole has become so disconnected from civilian life that its missions carry no narrative weight outside the community already invested.

Artemis II launched last night and nothing in your life will change when it lands. People, including me, forget that this wasn’t always the case! I mean Apollo mattered to ordinary Americans and it wasn’t because they were more patriotic or more interested in science in pre-social media days. It was because whether the US or the Soviet Union dominated space had real consequences for the kind of world they’d live in. The Cold War was not a metaphor; people understood, at a gut level, that the geopolitical contest playing out above their heads would shape the political order they’d inhabit on the ground, in the same way that people in the Middle East right now understand that the outcome of the war around them will determine what their daily lives look like for decades. That’s skin in the game. And nobody watching Artemis II has skin in the game. If it succeeds, your life is the same. If it fails, your life is the same. The mission is disconnected from any contest whose outcome you’d personally feel, and that is the consequence of fifty years of the people who talk about space and the people who build for space drifting into separate worlds.

So sadly, none of these three visions talk to you the way Bonestell’s paintings did. None of them say you will go here, because all of them say watch this content, you tourist. Bonestell could paint from the human vantage point because the space program’s promise was genuinely collective, and that promise has been replaced by something much smaller: this is what extremely rich men are doing with their childhood dreams and their exit philosophies, and you are welcome to watch, and buy stock in the vision, but certainly never complain about it.

And I think the reason the visions are so small despite the vast wealth, despite the engineering talent and the rockets that actually work, is that the people behind them are not very… interesting.

This sounds like a petty observation but I mean it very seriously! Bezos and Musk are men whose imaginative lives were shaped almost entirely by a handful of science fiction novels read before adolescence. Asimov, Heinlein, Tolkien, the usual. And who never moved past them. They are not readers, they are not curious about Earth’s own strangeness, its history, its literature, the depth of what’s already here. They find this planet boring, which is why they want to leave it, and that boredom shows in everything they build. Their visions of space are thin because their experience of life is thin.

You cannot paint a compelling future for humanity if you are not particularly interested in humanity, and you cannot ask people to follow you somewhere new if your entire reason for going is that you found where you were tedious. The collective imagination that made Bonestell’s paintings work; the sense that the future was a shared human project — required people who actually gave a damn about the species as it currently exists, on the planet it currently inhabits. What we have instead are men who read the same five books at twelve and have been cosplaying the protagonists ever since, and the futures they imagine have exactly the depth you’d expect from that.

STEM: Someday They’ll Explain the Mission

The institutional response to the whole “oh no, space is boring!” is STEM outreach: robotics competitions, coding camps, maker spaces, the whole apparatus of yelling at young people that science is exciting, and pointing them at careers in the space industry.

For the obvious reason that I am female, I am constantly asked to do STEM related talks, conferences, mentoring, etc etc. And I always say no for the exact reason that I always really hope nobody on live TV will me about the multi-generational impact of Katy Perry floating in a sky capsule for three minutes: I’m bad at lying and I’m even worse at pretending that any of this matters.

(FWIW, I was actually asked this question about Katy Perry on live TV after they played her long monologue about just how “connected to love” she felt after her quick trip, and was actually speechless. The news anchor had to prompt me twice for a response).

But back to STEM. All it actually does is train people to build rockets and then point them at an industry that has no credible answer to the question of what the rockets are for. STEM produces technically capable people and puts them into organizations whose dominant visions don’t include them, and whose cultural signatures of SPACs, retail investors holding losses, seventeen years of Virgin Galactic promises, is increasingly recognizable to the public as grand language used to move money.

You can train engineers without a mission, but you can’t make them feel the mission means something when no institution is willing to commit to one.

And indeed, when executives and space agency folk realize that STEM isn’t working either, the industry’s next response is always the same: find better storytellers, better photos of a milky way, a more compelling narrative, a founder who can communicate.

But better storytelling doesn’t fix this because storytelling isn’t the problem. The Webb telescope has produced more beautiful and more technically accurate galactic photos than anything Bonestell ever painted, and they feel like endlessly boring content that you may find stuck to the roof of your dentist as the drill comes out. So the problem is not what photos to show, it’s that no one is standing behind them with a credible plan, saying: this is what we’re doing, this is how we’ll get there, and you are part of it.

Bonestell’s paintings worked because they were accurate, and the accuracy was verifiable, and someone was standing right next to them. Freeman, von Braun, eventually NASA itself saying: yes, this is real, here’s the engineering, here’s the timeline. That required the people with the ambition and the people with the expertise to be in the same room, answerable to each other and to the public, and when that arrangement exists the storytelling means something. When it doesn’t, you get content.

The question nobody in this industry is asking is not how to tell a better story. It’s how to rebuild the arrangement, with real skin in the game, where the story and the engineering are accountable to each other — where the people explaining why we should go and the people figuring out how to get there work together closely enough that neither can bullshit, and both of them talk to ordinary people as future participants rather than spectators.

That is not a communications problem. It is a political and institutional one, and it is exactly the kind of question that gets crowded out when the people who own the narrative of space are a man who has had the same dream since he was five, a man whose dream involves you not existing, and an agency whose budget is being cut by the administration that briefly congratulated its astronauts last night before moving on to the war.

This week Marc Andreessen sat down on the Founders podcast and said two things:

The first: “I aim for zero introspection. Move forward. Go.”

The second: that Elon Musk is “maybe the greatest manager of our era.”

For people with even minimal intelligence, these two things (no introspection and Musk’s celebrated management) are clearly related. And Marc’s second claim just so happens to be what this paper is about.

In short: the Silicon Valley management gospel (cult?) has a specific epistemology: first-principles thinking beats domain expertise, and the founder who acts without overthinking will outperform the institution that pauses to evaluate. Andreessen actually said the seldom-discussed part out loud: introspection is the enemy; don’t question the model. Just… go forth, wreck havoc, and let someone else deal with the fallout later.

The problem with Silicon Valley’s epistemology, though, is that it is correct in exactly one environment, and catastrophically wrong in every other.

Why? Well…

The infamous first-principles thinking is a cognitive tool optimized for complicated systems: things with many parts but knowable, stable relationships. Like, for example, a rocket engine or a battery cell. Or anything where physics stays constant while you think about it.

But most of the systems that matter, like manufacturing at scale, platform governance, government, healthcare, regulation? These are are complex: their relationships are dynamic, emergent, and change in response to your intervention. You cannot break these things down without destroying the thing you are trying to understand.

This paper introduces a formal model, called the correction window, that explains why the same Elon Musk management playbook produces self-correction at SpaceX, brand erosion at Tesla, false vindication at Twitter, and institutional collapse through DOGE.

As you’ll see, the variable throughout these examples is not leadership quality, but in fact the feedback loop and architecture of the system being managed.

Every organization has two clocks that matter:

1. The first measures how long it takes to find out a decision was wrong.

2. The second measures how long before the damage from that decision becomes permanent.

At SpaceX, the first clock is fast: a rocket fails, and you know within days. And the second clock is slow: engineering knowledge is well-documented, you can rehire, you can rebuild a team. There’s a wide window between discovering the mistake and losing the ability to fix it.

At the US federal government, though, the clocks are reversed. It takes years to discover that firing mine safety inspectors or drug approval staff was a mistake. But the institutional knowledge those people carried disperses within months: they find new jobs, the relationships dissolve, the system reorganizes around their absence. By the time the damage shows up, the window to fix it has already closed.

The gap between those two clocks is the correction window. When it’s wide, you can afford to move fast and break things. When it’s narrow or negative (when the damage becomes permanent before you even detect it) the same approach doesn’t produce bold leadership but irreversible institutional failure.

The federal government lost 317,000 workers in 2025, while spending went up by $248 billion. In this case, thanks to the Musk Management Ideology, the correction window was negative before the first person was fired!

To conclude, Andreessen’s “zero introspection” is not a personality quirk. Very sadly, it is the anti-intellectual foundation of a management method that has now been exported from rockets to government. The paper makes the case that this export is not bold; it is a structural error with a formal mathematical proof.

Read the full paper here →

This article draws on two working papers: “Institutions as Coordination Architectures: Adaptive Bandwidth” and “Market Formation as a Systems Engineering Problem.” Both develop the formal models and cross-domain evidence summarized here. Available on request: s@sinead.co

Subscribe now

In Parts I and II, I argued that culinary history is an economic story of crisis and response, as most economic stories are. More specifically, that chefs emerge when something upstream of dining breaks, whether it’s supply chains, labor markets, institutions, or meaning; and that their real job is to diagnose and repair whatever the prevailing economic system has become most broken about eating.

Subscribe now

I traced this pattern of culinary history through feudal banquets, Escoffier’s industrial kitchen, postwar austerity, nouvelle cuisine, molecular gastronomy, and the current Western exhaustion with Michelin (which is very, very real). And I ended Part II with the claim that the current structural problem is existential: we have more food options than any civilization in history, everything tastes good, and the thing that’s broken is meaning itself.

(Apologies to the people who told me this was the most depressing thing they had ever read).

So now, Japan. Because the Japanese food system has been solving this exact problem, of how to create meaning under abundance for centuries. And the way it got there illuminates everything about where Western dining is headed next, which is really what I want to figure out!

How Japan Got Here

Meaning First

The Western culinary arc I traced in Parts I and II followed a consistent pattern that a structural crisis appears, and that a chef responds. The solution to the crisis is what creates new institutions, which will eventually calcify, break, and produce the next crisis. The whole history is a sequence of being broken and being fixed, much like our “regular” economy.

Interesting, however, Japan’s culinary history does not follow this pattern.

Because where the Western arc is defined by breaks, the Japanese arc is defined by continuity, and this difference is genuinely structural. It is the reason the two systems produce such different relationships between food and meaning; a difference that is so enormous that even someone without an interest in the culinary economy will feel it after a day or two in Tokyo!

Ok so let’s start with the origin point:

The Western restaurant emerged from urbanization; as industrialization pulled people into cities, household kitchens shrank, and a new institution was needed to solve an entirely practical problem: how do you feed a rapidly growing population of urban strangers, reliably, outside the home? The restaurant answered this question. And as I discussed in Part I, the restaurant immediately created a second-order problem (that of coordination) which Escoffier’s brigade system then solved by industrializing the kitchen.

Now consider that Japan’s high culinary tradition emerged from a completely different place. Kaiseki, the formal multi-course cuisine that sits at the top of Japan’s culinary hierarchy, grew out of the tea ceremony, which is itself a ritual technology for producing attention and presence. The tea ceremony was not trying to solve a logistics problem, it was trying to solve a spiritual one: how do you create a bounded space in which every gesture, every object, every flavor is saturated with deliberate meaning?

The “meal” which ensued was an extension of that project. As in, food existed in service of consciousness! Not the other way around; whereby in the West we have tried endlessly to retrofit consciousness onto food.

This means that Japan’s culinary tradition began from meaning and worked backward toward formal techniques, while the West began from logistics and has spent four centuries slowly arriving at meaning. The two systems are converging on the same point, but from opposite directions, and… clearly, Japan got there first!

The Shokunin

The figure who embodies this tradition is the shokunin, the master craftsman, who is the Japanese counterpart to the Western chef-celebrity. And actually, you could probably say that the shokunin is very nearly the inversion of a Western celebrity.

A concept of a shokunin is the antithesis of what we do in the West; they might spend ten years learning to make rice, or fifteen years cutting fish. In fact, an entire career dedicated to a single preparation! Consider that the word itself carries connotations that “chef” does not: duty, spiritual discipline, the moral obligation to pursue mastery regardless of recognition.

There is a famous Japanese concept, shokunin kishitsu, which roughly translates as “the craftsman’s spirit” and describes the obsessive, almost religious commitment to perfecting a single form over a lifetime.

The interesting question now asks what institutional conditions produced this model, which is so different from ours, because it didn’t emerge from some mysterious Japanese reverence for craft. As always, these things emerge from specific economic structures and incentives that made this an entirely rational strategy.

I’ll start with the za, Japan’s medieval guild system. (I should add, by the way, that a lot of my pre-Japan history around this came from this excellent podcast, Isaac Meyer’s History of Japan).

The za were monopoly organizations that controlled production and trade in specific crafts, granting exclusive rights to designated artisan groups in exchange for obligations to powerful patrons, including temples, shrines, feudal lords. So if you belonged to a za, your livelihood depended on maintaining your position within a defined domain. Meaning that you simply didn’t diversify, and you certainly didn’t innovate laterally, but rather you deepened your mastery within the boundaries that the guild had drawn for you, because those boundaries were the source of your economic protection.

This further intensified under the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868), which imposed a rigid four-tier social hierarchy: (1) samurai, (2) farmers, (3) artisans, and (4) merchants. And since mobility between classes was largely impossible, this meant that if you were born into an artisan family, the outcome of your economic life was fixed; you could thankfully not move down to become a merchant, but nor could you move up to become a samurai.

In fact, the only vector for advancement and the only way to accumulate social capital, reputation, and economic security, was to go deeper within your inherited craft, given that breadth was structurally not possible. Depth was the only option.

And so this is the political economy of the shokunin: a labor model produced by closed markets and impossibly rigid class structures, in which mastery of a single form was the rational response to a system that punished deviation while simultaneously rewarding fidelity.

Thus, the shokunin ethic is an adaptation to a constraint that was subsequently culturally kept even long after the original constraints were lifted. Obviously, the Tokugawa class system was abolished a long time ago in the Meiji Restoration of 1868, but the craft culture it produced and the structural worship and reverence for depth (plus a suspicion of novelty!), had by then become so deeply embedded in Japanese institutional life, and connected to moral standing, that it continued.

Now, that was the ideology. But how did this filter through society?

The transmission mechanism was the ie, known as the household system, which kind of designated this craft knowledge as an intergenerational inheritance, so to speak (and we kind of see this in the West as well, with intergenerational family businesses).

But the ie shouldn’t be confused with “a family”, as it was more of an economic unit in which the business, the techniques, the reputation, and the social identity were all inherited as a single package. Today, obviously, we’d call this “corporate synergies and brand values” and something Brooklyn Beckham recently had a lot to say about lolz.

So, this means that the sushi master’s counter is not his personal achievement, but the ie‘s productive asset, held in trust across generations. The apprentice does not aspire to open a competing restaurant with a different vision; the aspiration is to become the master, to inherit the counter, to reproduce the form with greater fidelity than the generation before. It is a reproductive model much more than a competitive one.

Compare this with the Western chef’s path, which Escoffier’s brigade system made feasible. In the Western kitchen, you start as a commis at a junior station (vegetables, cold prep), work your way through the stations, and if you’re good enough you eventually reach saucier, which is the most prestigious position before sous chef and chef de cuisine. Once you’ve peaked at a restaurant, you leave, open your own place, develop a personal style, and build a brand. The incentive structure rewards ambition, movement, differentiation, and eventually individual expression.

The whole trajectory is a competitive career ladder that terminates in self-prominence.

The Japanese system has no equivalent ladder! There is no moment of liberation, no break from the inherited form, and absolutely no assertion of individual voice against the institution.

And this maps onto broader structural differences between Japanese and Western capitalism: the keiretsu networks that emphasize long-term institutional relationships over market competition; the relative absence of hostile takeovers and disruptive entrepreneurship in traditional industries; the cultural suspicion of the founder-hero narrative that dominates Western business (which, honestly, we should probably all find suspicious by now).

The shokunin and the Western chef-celebrity are both products of their respective economic systems, and those systems reward fundamentally different things.

This is why the shokunin’s excellence through repetition is genuinely structural, and why you will find no signature dish, no personal brand, and no deviation. The ego and the culinary form are the same, which feels non-differentiated, and the only thing that remains is the form of culinary technique itself, executed with a precision that only decades of repetition can produce.

Actually, you could even go further to say that the shokunin is actually liberated by constraint (!). And that the inherited form is the freedom, because it eliminates the entire burden of originality and replaces it with depth!

And this is enormously relevant for understanding the generational crisis I’ll discuss later, because what is at risk today, in Japan, is not simply the loss of skilled individuals, but the collapse of the ie as a transmission mechanism.

Because when a young person declines to enter a ten-year apprenticeship, they are not just choosing a different career. They are breaking the institutional chain that produced the shokunin model in the first place. You are not losing a chef, you are losing the economic structure that made that kind of chef possible. And as I saw in Japan myself, this is a very, very, very real problem.

Seventy-Two Seasons

If the shokunin provides the labor model, and kaiseki provides the template from which all of this was derived, the thing that binds the entire Japanese food system together is a relationship to time that has no real Western equivalent.

(And yes, I am sober as I write this…)

As if the world is not already complicated enough, the Japanese calendar traditionally recognizes seventy-two micro-seasons, called shichijūni kō. This is not some kind of marketing language that you might expect from a weekly menu change at Noma or the French Laundry. It is a very real calendrical technology, rooted in Shinto and Chinese naturalist traditions, that pre-determines what can be cooked, when, and why.

So: each micro-season basically lasts roughly five days and describes a specific natural phenomenon: “East winds melt the ice.” “Hibernating insects open their doors.” “Paulownia trees produce seeds.”

(In fact, maybe French Laundry should steal some of this)

Meaning that a kaiseki menu in early March is structurally different from a kaiseki menu in late March, because March has moved. The cherry blossom that appears on a plate in the first week would be completely, embarrassingly erroneous in the third week. And the fish that defines this five-day window will be replaced by a different fish in the next one. The menu is a function of time itself. It is time. The menu is a technology in the same way that a watch is a technology.

So, I was in Japan during the last week of January and the first week of February, which turns out to sit on one of the most significant hinges in the entire calendar! The micro-seasons I ate through were:

• “Ice thickens on the streams,”

• “Hens begin to lay eggs” (the final micro-season before the calendar year turns),

• “East wind melts the ice,” which marks Risshun, the official beginning of spring on February 4th.

The plates reflected this: In late January I was in deep winter: fatty kanburi (cold-season yellowtail, at its richest because the fish have fattened migrating south through cold water), fugu, winter tuna, daikon, yuzu.

By early February, the first butterbur sprouts had started appearing, signaling that the calendar had moved. The menu in the first week of February could not have been the menu I ate in the last week of January, because January and February are different worlds.

This produces something that the Western culinary system has struggled to achieve: genuine non-repeatability!

Every meal is temporally indexed because it belongs to this moment and cannot be reproduced next month, because the season will have shifted, the ingredients will have changed, and the entire framework that structured the meal will have moved on. The non-repeatability I identified in Part II as the new luxury (experiences that cannot be replicated or repurchased) is, in Japan, simply the default condition of cooking well.

The Western Michelin system, by contrast, rewards exactly the opposite: consistency!

A starred restaurant must deliver the same level of excellence every time an anonymous inspector arrives, which means the ideal Michelin dish is time-invariant. In other words, it should be as good in June as in October, and for many multi-starred Michelins, this involves having many of the same dishes to perfection.

Japanese Smallness

One more piece of institutional inheritance matters for understanding where Japan is today, and it’s the one that strikes every Western visitor most immediately: the restaurants are tiny.

Six seats. Or eight seats. The chef works in front of you, often alone, and there is one service per evening where there is one “menu” which tells you that you will eat what you are given.

This is typically discussed as an aesthetic choice; as an expression of Japanese minimalism or cultural preference, but it is actually an economic structure, with very old roots.

The Japanese tradition of counter dining evolved from yatai (street food stalls) and kappo (chef-driven cooking performed in front of guests), both of which predate the Western restaurant concept. These formats never needed to solve the concurrency problem that defined Western dining, as there was no moment equivalent to European urbanization where a sudden population boom required feeding hundreds of strangers simultaneously.

The problem that produced Escoffier’s brigade system (“how do you serve many diners, ordering differently, all expecting the same result”) simply did not arise in this way.

So the kitchen never industrialized, and the chef never needed Escoffier’s brigade. The management apparatus that defined Western fine dining for a century was totally unnecessary in Japan because the structural decision, passed across generations, was to serve fewer people.

This smallness also meant that the relationship between chef and diner remained personal in a way that the Western system very sadly abandoned early. At a six-seat counter, the chef knows who is eating and the meal can be adjusted in real time. (Those of you reading this with kids, particularly picky ones, will know this).

The experience is conversational and there is no front-of-house team mediating between kitchen and table, no choreography of service, and no separation between production and consumption, which is where the hierarchy between chef and patron is entirely created in the West.

Where Japan Is Today

Toyosu at 5am

On one of my first mornings in Tokyo, after trying and failing to beat jet lag, I decided at 3am to get up and go meet some fishermen. Eventually, I found myself in the Toyosu fish market at 5am watching the tuna auction, feeling overwhelmed by the smell of fish, raw and cooked, being served up to those finishing their night shifts.

In a literal sense, Toyosu is a wholesale fish market where Bluefin tuna are laid out in rows, with chefs and buyers inspecting tail cuts with flashlights, as an auctioneer moves through the lot at a dizzying speed.

But what struck me was how little the scene resembled a commodity market in any Western sense. There was no negotiation or haggling, and the prices that morning encoded something that Western commodity markets do not: this tuna was caught this morning, in this water, at this temperature, at this point in the season. Tomorrow’s tuna will be a different animal, literally and economically. The same cut from the same species will cost wildly different amounts next month, because it will be a different month.

Subscribe now

The first bonito of the season (please forgive me for saying this, but bonito = dried tuna flakes that are put as often as salt and pepper into Japanese food, and is indistinguishable in taste for me from fishfood) carries enormous cultural and economic value precisely because it is the first, and because it marks a temporal threshold that the entire food system recognizes.

When the season for a particular fish ends, it ends. The supply chain does not route around this fact. There is no FedEx workaround as with many global Michelin restaurants. The constraint is as absolute as time (because the menu, again, is time!).

The Toyosu auction is, in other words, the seventy-two-season system seen as market infrastructure. Prices, menus, commodities, and time are all the same thing here, viewed through different lenses!

The tuna is expensive because it is January, and it is on the menu because it is expensive, and it is expensive because this particular fish exists only in this particular five-day window of cold water and migration patterns. Remove any one of these variables and the others collapse. This is very much the opposite of the globalized Western supply chain, which is organized to defeat entirely the natural seasons and ensure that nothing is ever unavailable. In the West, this means that price is a function of logistics costs; and menus are a function of customer preference. Time is, very strangely if you think about it, irrelevant to both.

Adding quickly to this as a sub-note, I also spent some attempting to understand Japanese wine while I was there, which is genuinely interesting (and unfortunately tastes as good as you suspect it might taste…). Japan obviously has no natural advantage in winemaking and produces wine anyway, at small scale, with obsessive local specificity. It would be cheaper and objectively easier to import. But I suppose Japan is a culture that defaults to locality and temporality even when efficiency argues against it!

What The Experience Actually Feels Like

Right. So… describing the inherited system is one thing. Sitting inside it is another beast entirely.

At a great omakase (“to entrust”) counter in Tokyo, the experience is roughly this: you arrive, you sit, there is no menu or choices, and the chef places a piece of fish in front of you. You eat it, and he places the next one. The pacing is entirely his, just as the sequencing is entirely his. The peak of the meal (the moment of greatest intensity) arrives when he decides it arrives, not when you are ready for it.

This is the movie-director model I discussed in Part II, pushed to its limit. The chef controls timing, sequence, pacing, and emotional arc with total authority. The diner’s role is to receive. And the act of surrender; to give up the very human instinct of choice and preference, turns out to be inseparable from the pleasure.

This solves the attention problem I identified in Part II with an almost embarrassing directness. I argued that the modern Western diner is cognitively overwhelmed, that everything competes with a feed, and that dining must justify three hours of full presence against the entire internet. At a six-seat counter where the chef is working eighteen inches from your face, this problem vanishes entirely! You cannot scroll your phone when someone is personally slicing fish for you while making eye contact. The architecture forbids distraction; and anyway, the restaurant’s physical design produces the presence that Western restaurants are increasingly desperate to manufacture through theatrical interventions, phone-locking pouches, and elaborate multi-sensory experiences.

The status dynamic is different too, considering that the scarcity at a six-seat restaurant is genuine because, well… there are literally six seats. You cannot buy your way past this constraint by knowing the manager (who is the server and also the chef). This is scarcity as a byproduct of craft, and it is completely different from the manufactured scarcity of a members’ club!

Where It Breaks

It would be easy to romanticize all of this into a narrative where Japan represents some kind of culinary paradise untouched by modernity’s problems. That would be wrong. Japan’s food system has its own crises, and they are genuinely serious.

The first is what I would call Michelin-ification. When the Michelin Guide arrived in Tokyo in 2007, it awarded the city more stars than Paris, which caused a brief and delightful Franco-Japanese diplomatic incident.

Of course, (French) critics questioned whether Michelin was being too generous to gain acceptance with Japanese customers and help its parent company sell tyres in Japan. (How dare you equate yakitori grills with grand Parisian establishments like La Tour d’Argent!!).

But the deeper problem was structural. Consider that the Michelin framework is designed to evaluate restaurants that optimize for consistency, legibility, and reproducibility. Japanese restaurants that optimize for intimacy, temporal specificity, and the disappearance of the chef’s ego into tradition do not map cleanly onto this framework. The star actually does little more than create a different kind of pressure: unwanted international visibility, tourist demand, and reservation scalping.

Some restaurateurs actually asked Michelin to revoke their stars because of this! And in fact, I experienced this myself first hand. When I found myself in a remote part of Japan’s north island close to Russia, many restaurants there were extremely unwilling to let me in; at one stage even pretending to think that I was trying to buy the dining table when I pointed at it at dinner time, instead of acknowledging that I wanted to be fed, and just saying no!!

The second crisis is generational. The shokunin model obviously depends on apprenticeship pipelines that are disappearing. The economics are brutal: a young person must commit to a decade or more of low-paid, physically demanding work, mastering a single form, in an economy that offers vastly more comfortable alternatives.

The number of young Japanese willing to spend ten years learning to make rice is declining! And this is an existential threat to the entire system, because the economics of smallness depend on a labor supply of people willing to accept the terms of craft mastery. Verifying this, the chefs I worked with in a European 2* that had worked in similar Tokyo establishments, spoke of twenty-hour days of never-endingly brutal labor to… make rice.

This rice, by the way, is entirely impossible for us mere Westerners to properly even taste; I would consider myself to have a very strong palate given my adventures in food and wine, and it all tasted identical to me (again, sorry!).

The third crisis is the Uniqlo problem, which I teased in Part I. Uniqlo solved a version of the same question that has defined Western culinary history: how do you make quality accessible at scale? The answer was to strip away everything that didn’t contribute to function, standardize production, and distribute globally. This produced genuinely excellent basics at democratic prices, which is a remarkable achievement.

Applied to food, this logic produces conveyor-belt sushi! It is good, it is everywhere, and it coexists with the six-seat counter where the chef has been cutting tuna for thirty years, in the same way that Uniqlo coexists with a Kyoto tailor who makes three kimonos a month by hand.

The question is whether the small-scale system can survive alongside the industrialized one indefinitely (especially when people like me can’t taste the difference?); or whether the economic logic of scale will eventually consume it.

Japan’s food culture is, in this sense, a live experiment in whether craft and mass production can coexist within the same economic system without one cannibalizing the other. The vibe on the ground suggested, unfortunately, that perhaps not.

What the West Is Borrowing

The most interesting Western restaurants I discussed in Part II (Ultraviolet, Freixa, Gohar, Tuna Fight Club) are all independently reinventing pieces of the Japanese model:

• Smallness

• Sequencing

• Non-repeatability

• Meaning through constraint.

They are arriving at these solutions through intuition and experimentation, often without explicit reference to Japanese precedent.

Freixa seats a handful of strangers at one table; the entire restaurant is a dinner party. Tuna Fight Club fits thirty people in a basement with one fish; this was essentially restaurant standard practice in Japan. Ultraviolet has ten seats and sequences the room itself around the diner. These are conscious design choices made by chefs who have independently arrived at solutions that Japan embedded in its restaurant architecture generations ago.

Incidentally, my neighbor in London has been trying to get us tickets for Tuna Fight Club (which, again, is around the corner from us), for quite some time. Could I now feel OK with paying $450 for one meal, that I had every day in Japan for $15? I’m not so sure…

But the institutional need beneath these experiments is fundamentally different, and this difference will ultimately determine how far the convergence can go.

Japan’s culinary meaning is embedded in deep cultural infrastructure that has been borne from the Shinto’s seasonality as a temporal framework. The Buddhist ideology, too, lends everything a philosophical orientation toward impermanence and absolute restraint. And of course, centuries of craft lineage provide the labor model. Then, the tea ceremony provides the original template that led to all of this.

The meaning, therefore, comes from outside the restaurant, from a long-standing civilizational context that the meal draws upon and expresses inherently, and often implicitly.

The West does not have this infrastructure. Western culture is optimized for scale, novelty, content production, and individual expression. (Yes, if ever you thought we sounded like dumb Americans, this is it). A Western chef who wants to create a meaningful dining experience must build the entire meaning architecture from scratch, inside the restaurant, in a culture that will immediately try to content-ify it, scale it, and strip it for parts before selling it to Private Equity.

While Japan’s challenge is sustaining an inherited system of meaning under the pressures of modernity; the West’s challenge is constructing one without any inherited infrastructure to build on.

The Netflix Problem

Which brings me to something I have been thinking about since I started writing this series, and which connects to a much larger observation about Western life.

The West has built a food system that mirrors Netflix, with infinite options, frictionless access, and algorithmically surfaced recommendations. The billion-dollar industry of restaurant reviews, ratings, rankings, lists. You can eat anything, anywhere, at any time. The supply chain is global, while the information is both total and totalitarian. The dominant experience, the one that defines how most people interact with this abundance, is paralysis.

You scroll, you compare, you read the reviews. You look at the photos and you check the price. And finally, after all of the above, you second-guess the entire meal away about whether the other place would have been better. This is the decision-fatigue problem applied to eating, and it is identical in structure to what seemingly happens these days in dating, which has undergone an identical structural transformation.

The apps provide infinite choice, frictionless matching, and total information. And the dominant experience, as my friends who use them tell me, is complete exhaustion. Endless scrolling through human beings, comparing options, keeping alternatives open, wondering whether someone better is one more swipe away.

What people actually want, visibly and desperately, is to be chosen. They want omakase in their lives; to be decisively told: “Here. I choose you, and only you!” and for the scroll to stop. People want the omakase to surrender their preferences to someone who is serious about the craft of paying attention, and to sit back and trust the sequencing.

Because, you see, endless choice turns out to be a surprisingly effective mechanism for destroying enjoyment.

Japan’s food system is the structural opposite of Netflix. It is closer to someone handing you a single film and saying: this is what we’re watching tonight, because it is March, and this is what March means, and you’ll do it without your phone or any other distraction, beginning to end. The constraint is the product. And the relief of not choosing is itself the luxury.

What I Could Not Read

I should be honest about something, though, because the experience I just described; this constraint as a luxury, is the experience of someone who can read the system.

I… Could not.

What I actually found in Japan was, embarrassingly, paralysis. I walked into restaurants and could not tell if they were extraordinary or ordinary, because they all looked the same to me.

The menus, where menus existed, were indistinguishable. The meals were indistinguishable. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner frequently felt like the same plate of fish and rice served three times a day in three different rooms, and all I could taste was bonito (aka fishfood for people like me, the unlearned). I could not figure out if one sushi counter was better than another, because the differentiation that a Japanese diner reads effortlessly (e..g this chef’s rice is superior, or this particular piece of yellowtail is exceptional because of where it sits in the migration cycle) was something I simply could not perceive.

In short, I lacked the cultural literacy to decode any of it. And without that literacy, the entire system collapsed into sameness and boringness. I went the whole way to Japan, and felt starved of the excitement of a culinary explosion I was anticipating!

This turns out to be the most important thing I learned in Japan, because it proves the argument from the other direction!

The meaning in Japanese dining is not in the food itself; it is in the cultural infrastructure that surrounds the food: the seasonal knowledge, the craft literacy, the ability to perceive micro-differences that only generations of embedded dining culture make legible. Strip that infrastructure away and you are left with a tourist (me) eating what appears to be an identical meal on repeat, unable to distinguish the extraordinary from the competent, completely paralyzed by the absence of all the Western differentiation signals. Different menus, different cuisines, different price points, different atmospheres… all the things that I have been trained my entire life to navigate by.

Thus, the Japanese system’s greatest strength is also its greatest barrier to entry.

“Meaning through constraint” only works if you can read the constraints. And this is exactly why Michelin’s arrival in Tokyo was so structurally disruptive: it offered to make Japanese restaurants legible to outsiders by imposing Western markers (stars, rankings, categories), and in doing so it began to erode the very qualities that made them work for insiders.

So yes, when the first Tokyo guide launched in 2007 as I mentioned, the system that was supposed to recognize excellence had, in practice, made excellence harder to sustain.

And perhaps this is the deeper point behind the entire series.

The chef’s job has always been to solve what the prevailing economic system has most recently broken about eating. And what is broken now, in the West, is the capacity to choose meaningfully from infinite abundance. In other words, we have more options than any civilization in history and less ability to commit to any of them (which is clearly not just a food problem!).

The Japanese food system suggests, however, that the answer is counterintuitive. They say: build structures that make choice unnecessary; create constraints so embedded in time and place and philosophy that the question of “what should I eat?” disappears before it is asked. The meal arrives, and it is exactly what this moment requires, because the chef, the season, and the architecture have already decided.

But those structures only work if you can read them. And most of us, trained by abundance, trained by Netflix, trained by the scroll, cannot. My pal, a movie critic, sent me a message a few days ago discussing the term “algorithmically trapped”; which is horrifying and, perhaps, for people like me, true.

The restaurants that will define the next era will be the ones that solve this from both directions. Japan and the West have converged on the same question, despite arriving from opposite sides: how do you build constraints understandable enough for outsiders like me to read, without destroying the depth that made them worth reading in the first place?

The future of dining, it seems to me, is therefore the end of the menu.

Subscribe now

Hello!

I’ve been quiet recently for several reasons (like a fractured back, a new war, the list goes on…). But also because I’ve been working on something new! Or, rather, something old.

Firstly:

It occurred to me when I had a meeting recently that none of my professional, academic or research work is posted anywhere. I’ve never really thought about it before, because who cares, right? But as I started recently to go through the many years worth of ideas, papers, consulting projects, frameworks, it seemed outrageous that I have not even attempted to archive some of this stuff even for myself!

Secondly:

Some of the people who have been reading this Substack (and I’m so grateful for that, thank you!), have asked me several times: what exactly is it that you work on?

The smorgasbord of topics I write about here aren't always the same ones I study formally, but I don't really have a switch between the two modes. The same frameworks and structures that have shaped my formal research work, and indeed shape how I think about everything else, means they end up in everything I write here too.

So I figured I may as well post some of that, too.

What is my research, anyway?

In short, I apply complex systems thinking to real-world problems around industries, economies and the financial markets. Most of what I do is research through a novel lens of “architecture”, or in more simple terms, understanding the interactions between systems or institutions, where “outcomes” are usually produced, be it technologies, industries, policies, financial returns.

I do this by creating mathematical models about how dynamical systems work; I then apply these models to problems that I find, most of which are in the space and defense domain, whether through industrial policy, finance, fiscal institutions or technology commercialization.

So this could be:

• Why can’t Europe convert its defense spending into military capability?

• What do multi-domain military economics mean for the future of warfare?

• Why do central bank rate decisions fail to transmit evenly through the real economy?

• Why do some countries industrialize and others, with similar endowments, don’t?

• Why does geopolitical realignment produce economic fragmentation faster than institutions can adapt?

So:

To that end, I have decided to archive and post my research and my day-to-day work on my Substack, under “Foundations”.

For most of my career, I have thought about how best to communicate academic ideas to the Real World™. I experienced first hand that in academia that you can write many papers on a topic and have zero Real World impact; and simultaneously change policy overnight with a single satire piece written for the Financial Times that included a cat meme.

I’m not saying these briefs will be entertaining enough to contain cat memes, but thankfully nor will I be posting 80-something pages of illegible nonsense either.

TL;DR, I’m really not sure what the best way to present formal work is, yet. However, with the goal of at least archiving my work for myself and not trying to entertain the masses with industrial dynamics, I have decided to do the following:

1. Translate my work into “mainstream” briefs of a few pages long (but removing confidential data and in some cases generalizing where I am/ have been under NDA).

2. Update the data, figures, thinking into today’s numbers and apply to relevant scenarios today.

3. Post and archive them here, in case anybody is interested in reading them (big “if”, I know).

4. Give people the optionality of emailing me for the full paper, including the formal math models, data, etc.

5. Find a better way to do this in the future, if I decide that it’s worth it!

And… that’s it! Please reach out if you see anything that you find compelling enough to want more information on, and I’d be only too happy to discuss it in more detail with you!

Subscribe now

If you have a mortgage in Ireland, it means that you either:

(1) Are incredibly (un)lucky that you have been able to buy one of the few, overpriced houses on the island, and (2) that your Irish mortgage is probably a “tracker mortgage”, in which case you already know what I’m about to write in your bones.

Between 2022 and 2023, the ECB raised interest rates by 4.5 % :

• An Irish household on a tracker mortgage saw their monthly repayment rise by over €600.

• A German household on a fixed-rate mortgage paid around €35 more.

Same central bank but radically different outcomes to households.

Most commentary on this framed it as an Irish problem; insert something about mortgage culture, boom-era recklessness, the failure to fix themselves. But that framing is wrong, because this is not just an Irish issue!

Last year, I did a deep dive into the Irish Central Bank’s institutional architecture, in terms of how it’s structured, what it can and can’t do, and where the real constraints on Irish monetary policy actually sit. What came out of that work was a much bigger question:

Why do some EU households absorb ECB rate decisions immediately, while others barely feel them at all?

The answer is structural, and incredibly important (even if a little boring).

Consider that Irish tracker mortgages transmit ECB rate decisions almost perfectly, meaning that Irish people feel the impact of interest rate changes with near-zero lag.

German fixed-rate mortgages, on the other hand, are sitting on some sort of bond infrastructure that dates to Prussian land finance law of 1769 (I know), which insulate households almost entirely.

So, while neither Germany nor Ireland chose this, both inherited the systems that are either very lucky, or very unlucky, depending on where you live.

And the unlucky part? It’s because, if you’re in Ireland, you’re actually redistributive. Meaning that Irish households pick up the cost of inflation such that other countries, like Germany, don’t have to.

In other words: Irish and Spanish households doing more demand-destruction work per basis point is part of what allows the ECB to stop raising rates sooner.

Indeed. German households get the benefit of lower inflation and a stable currency without their mortgage bills having moved! While the ECB’s work was done disproportionately by households in Dublin and Madrid. So while the reward of fighting inflation is shared across the EU, the cost is not.

This structural subsidy (from high-transmission to low-transmission economies) cannot be resolved by market forces, or by anything the Central Bank of Ireland has the power to do.

This paper explains why, and what it would take to fix it.

Read the full paper here →

The frameworks applied here, of architecture lag, premature markets, coordination architectures, are developed formally in two companion papers by Sinéad O’Sullivan. Available on request: s@sinead.co

Subscribe now

The NATO 5% spending target has consumed much attention since Trump appeared for Round Two of his Presidential Era. Given that pressure, Europe is spending more on defense than at any point since the Cold War.

But when the first real test came to deliver one million artillery shells to Ukraine by March 2024, Europe managed 520,000.

Turns out, Europe doesn’t have the industrial architecture to convert money into output. Ooops…

And that gap is the actual European defense problem, not the NATO 5% shenanigans.

In short, NATO’s GDP target measures financial inputs, not capability outputs. The assumption embedded in it is that if you spend enough money, military capabilities will follow. But this has *checks notes precisely zero empirical basis and substantial evidence.

You see, defense (or any!) capability emerges when three architectures co-evolve: technical (weapons systems, interoperability standards), industrial (production capacity, supply chains), and institutional (procurement governance, command integration). You cannot pour unlimited capital into an industrial market that doesn’t exist. (Or, you can, but this is egregiously bad fiscal policy!!)

So, the controversy:

Spain is being called a free-rider for refusing to commit to 5%, and actually last weekend at a dinner party this came up in conversation with my American counter-intel pal. Which means it’s both topical and a sore point.

But Spain's argument that more spending "would only reinforce our dependence" is… architecturally correct. For under the current procurement framework, hitting a higher target means buying faster, and buying faster means buying American.

So Spain's objection isn't to spending more, it's to spending more through a system that routes the money out of Europe. In short, that NATO GDP metric says nothing about where the money goes. And in its current system, the industrial dynamics mean that increased spending does the opposite of what Europeans need it to do (and what Trump says he wants it to do!).

So, today: 60-70% of European defense procurement currently flows to American contractors because European producers can’t deliver at scale, which is a result of fragmented procurement across 27 national systems. And this fragmentation persists because there’s no institutional architecture for European defense market integration.

The spending surge? It’s flowing straight into this trap, and creating another generational-cycle of dependency on American industrial policy.

The two papers below lay out the argument in full: why the metric is wrong, where the money is actually going, and what an architecture-first approach would require instead.

Read Part 1 → Why NATO’s Spending Target Measures the Wrong Thing

Read Part 2 → Europe’s Defense Buildup Is Reproducing the Problem It’s Trying to Solve

This series draws on two working papers: “Institutions as Coordination Architectures” and “Market Formation as a Systems Engineering Problem.” Available on request: s@sinead.co

Subscribe now

Ireland is rich!

It ran a €42 billion budget surplus between 2022 and 2024. But, it only spends a miserly 0.2% of GDP on defense, which is the lowest rate in the European Union. In fact, it’s lower than that tiny island of Malta, and even lower than Luxembourg which is not really even a place.

Ireland’s own military has formally stated, in its own documentation, that it is “not equipped, postured, or realistically prepared to conduct a meaningful defense of the State.” Womp, womp, womp.

It probabaly seems normal then, that the political debate about this situation is overwhelmingly a debate about neutrality:

Should Ireland abandon it?
Reform the Triple Lock?
Or even… gasp!… Join NATO?

These questions dominate the airtime, the op-eds, the Dáil (parliament) debates.

And yet… the country could resolve the neutrality question tomorrow and still wake up the next morning with no radar, no air defense, naval vessels with no functioning main armament, a military at a fifty-year personnel low, a fragmented intelligence architecture unique in Europe, and a secret dependency on the Royal Air Force that nobody in public life will name out loud!

So the standard framing, that this is an ideological problem and that if Ireland just sorted out its relationship with neutrality the defense capability would follow, is wrong.

And it’s wrong in a very specific way:

My research shows that the real constraint isn’t ideology, as always, it’s that Ireland’s entire institutional system has been built around the absence of military capability.

You see, neutrality isn’t a policy choice layered on top of an otherwise normal state apparatus; it’s the premise around which the state was designed. Because eery layer of the system reflects that design:

• Political architecture (no dedicated defense ministry, no national intelligence agency),

• Legal architecture (the Triple Lock, a president who is constitutionally Supreme Commander and yet publicly opposed to the military’s existence!),

• Cultural architecture (seventy-five percent public support for neutrality as an identity commitment, not just a policy preference),

• Personnel architecture (a private’s salary that can’t compete with Dublin tech salaries),

• Procurement architecture (a system designed for routine sustainment, never for building first-generation capabilities from scratch).

This is what I unsurprisingly call an architecture problem, and it’s categorically different from a spending problem or an ideological problem.

The short answer from my research is that capability (military or otherwise) requires the co-evolution of three distinct architectures:

1. Technical (the hardware and systems),

2. Market/Industrial (the procurement pipelines, supply chains, workforce), and

3. Institutional (the political, legal, and administrative frameworks that coordinate everything else)

When these don’t co-evolve because one is missing or misconfigured, money and political will don’t convert into outcomes. Ireland has the money, and it has (albeit in fits and starts), the political will. What it lacks is the institutional architecture to convert either into military capability. And that architecture gap is, if anything, widening.

The paper applies this framework to Ireland specifically: the LOA framework the Commission on Defense Forces developed, the EU Presidency security test coming in July 2026 (spoiler: Portugal’s military gendarmerie provided drone defense during Zelensky’s visit because Ireland couldn’t), and the question of whether Ireland could actually industrialize militarily, or whether confusing engineering talent with institutional readiness is exactly the mistake the framework is designed to prevent.

Read the full paper here →

This article draws on two working papers: “Institutions as Coordination Architectures: Adaptive Bandwidth” and “Market Formation as a Systems Engineering Problem.” Both develop the formal models and cross-domain evidence summarized here. Available on request: s@sinead.co

Companion articles in this series: “Power by Other Means,” “Europe’s Defense Problem Isn’t Spending,” “How Do You Pay for Rearmament?” and “The Chips Race Is a Systems Race.”

Subscribe now

Companies have never been better equipped to understand geopolitics. Today’s multinational corporation includes Chief Geopolitical Officers, political risk subscriptions, scenario planning workshops, blah blah. The corporate intelligence industry has exploded over the past decade.

I add to this that when I moved from MIT back to Harvard, the reason was to bring geopolitical expertise into the Institute for Strategy, because the demand for this new type of intel from CEOs and boards was overwhelming.

And yet… The strategies it informs keep failing. Friend-shoring stalled; the CHIPS Act fabs got announced but ecosystems may never materialize; European hydrogen strategies produce roadmaps but not markets (I mean, it is Europe…).

So the standard post-mortem blames bad forecasting or slow execution, usually in long-winded reports that never get read, by a team that has been fired. But, my research actually shows that this common diagnosis is wrong.

The problem isn’t misreading the political environment or moving too slowly, it’s trying to execute strategies that are actually really good into markets whose supporting architectures don’t yet exist! In other words, that technical readiness (the capability to actually produce the desired thing) has outrun both market readiness and institutional readiness. The gap between strategy and outcome is structural.

I’ve spent several years at Harvard working on exactly this problem: why breakthrough technologies fail to become industries, and what the missing piece usually is.

The short answer is that market formation requires the co-evolution of three distinct architectures:

1. Technical,

2. Market, and

3. Institutional

And importantly, when one races ahead of the others, you get what I call an architecture lag, wherein the technology works, but the surrounding economic system doesn’t yet exist to support that technology.

This piece applies that framework to industrial strategy; the geoeconomic strategies companies and governments are currently betting on (friend-shoring, the CHIPS Act, European hydrogen) and asks what governments, boards, and investors should actually do differently when the problem is architectural rather than informational.

Read the full paper here →

This article applies the architecture-lag and coordination-architecture frameworks developed formally in two companion papers: “Institutions as Coordination Architectures” and “Market Formation as a Systems Engineering Problem.” Available on request: s@sinead.co

Subscribe now

Every military briefing you’ve seen in the last five years says the same thing: multi-domain operations are the future. Air, land, sea, space, cyber, electromagnetic. More is more. Integrate everything, overwhelm the enemy across all dimensions simultaneously.

And this strategy is genuinely compelling because a military force that can see, decide, and strike across six domains at once should dominate one that operates in one dimension.

But… there are tradeoffs! And what few people seem to be asking, is:

What does that actually cost?

Not the price of the platforms, because the F-35 costs what the F-35 costs.

But what I have been researching for over a decade now is: what does it cost, technology-wise and fiscally, to make all of these systems actually talk to each other in real time, under fire, across national boundaries, with fifteen-second decision windows?

Because multi-domain integration isn’t free.

If you do the math, every domain you add doesn’t just add capability, it adds complexity. And that complexity multiplies far faster than the capabilities do! Simply because of the number of interfaces that must be synchronized:

• Two domains = one interface;

• But six domains = fifteen pairwise interfaces, each with its own data links, identification protocols, timing synchronization, and rules of engagement.

And then there’s the cost inversion that very few defense economics strategists are properly accounting for:

• The integrating force pays the full coordination cost across every interface.

• But the disruptor (the adversary with a $500 drone or a GPS jammer) only needs to find one interface that fails.

Ok, so a Shahed-136 drone costs roughly $30,000. The Patriot interceptor that kills it costs $4 million. That’s a 133:1 cost ratio… and importantly….

Before you account for the coordination architecture that made the intercept possible.

This last part, the coordination architecture cost, is overwhelmingly large, and nearly always dismissed in military planning and strategy.

This is the boring stuff; the architecture that connects the radar, the command node, the launcher, and the identification system across a multinational coalition. It is also where the real expense lives.

This paper does three things:

1. Puts real numbers on the cost exchange between attackers and defenders across seven engagement types, and shows the ratios are structurally catastrophic for the integrator

2. Traces how coordination load has increased monotonically across every major coalition air campaign since Desert Storm through more threat types, more domains, less decision time, while friendly-fire incidents track coordination complexity, not technology vintage

3. Shows that only 7% of defense budgets are explicitly allocated to the coordination architecture that determines whether multi-domain integration actually works or collapses into expensive fragmentation

The punchline: multi-domain superiority is real but it is not a platform property, it is an architecture property. And architecture has a cost curve that the current defense-economic framework does not adequately measure, manage, or even see.

Read the full paper here →

The frameworks applied here — coordination cost, architecture lag, adaptive bandwidth — are developed formally in two companion papers by Sinéad O’Sullivan. Available on request: s@sinead.co

Subscribe now

In case you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last year, Europe says it has committed €800 billion to defense. And most commentary around such large financial pledges have been geopolitical:

• Who (or what) is the threat?

• What weapons will be bought?

• Is this the end of the peace dividend?

• Will this mean the end of three-month-long European summer vacations?

However, almost no one is asking the extremely exciting (I kind of joke) operational question:

How does the money actually move?

Because between a Brussels communiqué and an actually delivered fighter jet sits an entire chain of slow, shitty, boring institutional plumbing that actually “does the work” of “defense financing”:

Political authorization → Legislative instrument → Bond issuance → Treasury allocation → Procurement contract → Industrial delivery

Money can flow from capital markets to treasuries in weeks, but turning that money into signed contracts takes months to years. And as many people know, turning contracts into delivered capability takes years to decades!

It is becoming increasing important, though, for policy-makers and financiers in the defense space to understand these mechanisms for precisely the following reason:

My research around large, governmental financing programs for space and defense, and particularly last year my work on European defense, shows that the binding constraint on European rearmament is not political will, nor a lack of technologies, it is procedural capacity.

So, if we can figure out and innovate on how “defense financing” actually happens, we can finance defense better and faster!

This paper traces the full chain end-to-end, using Germany as a worked example, and breaks down:

1. Where the €800B actually comes from

2. How sovereign bond markets absorb defense issuance

3. Why borrowing costs diverge across Europe

4. How EU-level instruments like SAFE are created

5. Why procurement, not finance, is the actual source of stasis in the system

Basically, I show that until Europe builds a unified defense finance architecture that pools risk and connects capital markets directly to continental procurement pipelines, the plumbing will determine the pace, not technological progress.

Essentially, my paper that I summarize here explains how rearmament is a capital markets event, not a geopolitical one!

Read the full paper here →

The frameworks applied here, of architecture lag, premature markets, coordination architectures, are developed formally in two companion papers by Sinéad O’Sullivan. Available on request: s@sinead.co

Subscribe now

India spends roughly eight times more on defence than Pakistan (about $86 billion to Pakistan’s $10 billion). On paper, that gap should settle almost any question about relative capability, right?

But the 2025 aerial exchange over Kashmir showed something more structurally interesting; that Pakistan was able to contest the air domain credibly despite chronic fiscal distress and repeated IMF bailouts!

How? Through its industrial architecture.

More broadly, Pakistan is part of a rising class of mid-tier defence producers (à la Turkey and South Korea), whose military systems are “good enough,” entirely sovereign, and economically… cheap?

These producers are obviously not competing at the technological frontier, but where they can compete extraordinarily well is on coordination, integration, and resilience.

I’ve spent about a year getting stuck deep into mid-tier defense production and capabilities, and this research on Pakistan’s JF-17 was an outcome of the time I spent with the Pakistan Air Force last year, mapping in great detail the Pakistani industrial strategy.

In short, the 2025 India-Pakistan episode did not overturn the regional balance of power. But… it did shift the analytical lens. Military capability is increasingly an industrial property; an emergent function of how institutions, suppliers, and doctrine align over time.

Read the full paper here →

This article applies the architecture-lag and coordination-architecture frameworks developed formally in two companion papers by me, Sinéad O’Sullivan: “Institutions as Coordination Architectures” and “Market Formation as a Systems Engineering Problem.” Available on request: s@sinead.co

Subscribe now

Europe is spending more on defense than at any point in decades, which is a very good thing. In fact, EU spending reached nearly €400 billion last year, a 63% increase since Trump and Covid and the Russians scared the shit out everybody a few years ago.

Additionally, the ReArm Europe plan aims to mobilize €800 billion by 2030. It’s all happening now! Germany alone has extraordinarily managed to unlock roughly €400 billion in additional borrowing capacity for defense.

So, the will to spend, and the need to do so, is very real. And yet the system receiving this money, the EU defense industry, is structurally incapable of converting the absolutely ginormous amounts of capital into defense capabilities.

Consider that Europe fields more than five times as many variants per weapon category as the United States, and has three separate European fighter programs that have together produced roughly 1,861 aircraft.

(Don’t tell the Europeans, but the US’s F-35 program alone has generated 3,556 aircraft).

So the issue here is not spending, which we know Europe can do no problem; it’s a dangerous level of fragmentation that is currently compounding in realtime across logistics chains, spare parts, training, maintenance, and ultimately cost.

If you are a European who thinks the US DoD takes the piss when it comes to the price of an defense-rated screw, please sit down, because I’ve got bad news for you…

You know that the founding raison d’être of Europe was to have a single market? For the purpose of military and peace? Well, defense is one of the only markets where this concept breaks down entirely: the EU’s defense market is actually is comprised of twenty-seven national procurement systems, which collectively fail to generate consolidated demand. And without aggregated orders, production and manufacturing of European defense hardware remains subscale. And you guessed it: without scale, unit costs remain high. Ultimately, without competitive pricing and delivery speed, governments default outward.

So €800 billion poured into Europe’s currently fragmented system will only buy one thing: more fragmentation. Thus, the binding constraint in Europe is not capital, which we’ve (somewhat) unlocked. It is whether twenty-seven nations can construct a single institutional architecture that can convert convert €800 billion into deterrence.

Read the full paper here →

The frameworks applied here, of architecture lag, premature markets, coordination architectures, are developed formally in two companion papers by Sinéad O’Sullivan. Available on request: s@sinead.co

Subscribe now