Kaleidoscopes

How the Irish state defends itself against being fixed.

“Orderly World II” by Nives Palmic

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.

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

“Matt Series 4” by Hollie Heller

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.