The David McWilliams Podcast

Ireland is now officially the worst country in Europe for young entrepreneurs. Just 5.1% of our 20-somethings are building their own businesses, less than half the rate in Slovakia. So what the hell happened? This week, we ask why young Irish people have stopped backing themselves, and why a country that looks rich on paper is quietly losing the very people who make economies dance. We get into the difference between wealth that's extracted (the multinationals) and wealth that's created (the Ryanairs), and why one is far more fragile than it looks. We bring in Schumpeter and Nassim Taleb, follow a hypothetical 27-year-old called Kiera as the numbers crush her before she's even begun, and ask whether Ireland has become a nation of doubters, quietly punishing anyone who dares to have a go. We float a fix: stop parking the multinational windfall in a pension fund our 25-year-olds will never see, and turn it into a startup fund they can actually use. Because without risk-takers, there's no return, and without return, there's no economy.

The global economy runs on one thing: the US dollar. What happens when trust in that system starts to crack? In this episode, we go deep into the mechanics of global finance, from dollar “swap lines” to shadow banking, to explain how the United States became the financial centre of the world, and why that dominance may now be under threat. At the heart of it all is a simple but unsettling reality: America doesn’t just produce goods, it produces money. The rest of the world needs dollars to trade, invest, and survive financial shocks. That gives the US enormous power, but also creates dangerous imbalances. We explore how decades of financialisation have concentrated wealth and influence in a small group of investors, reshaping both the American economy and global politics. Meanwhile, rising geopolitical tensions, particularly around Iran, raise a bigger question: could a single strategic misstep do to the US what the Suez Crisis did to Britain, quietly ending its era of dominance?

Ireland is one of the richest countries in Europe, so why does it feel like it isn’t? We sit down with economist and engineer Sinead O'Sullivan to unpack a deceptively simple but deeply uncomfortable idea: Ireland is a premature state. Despite extraordinary wealth on paper, everyday life tells a different story. Housing is broken, infrastructure lags behind, public services struggle to deliver. So where is all the money going? The answer, as Sinead argues, is structural. Ireland has become exceptionally good at spending money, but never properly learned how to build systems. For centuries, key functions of the state were outsourced, first to the British Empire, then the Church, then the EU, and now multinational corporations. The result is a country rich in resources, but lacking the institutional muscle to turn that wealth into a functioning society. We also take on the reaction to this kind of thinking; the “nitpickers” who focus on minor details to avoid confronting big, uncomfortable truths. If Ireland’s problem isn’t money, but capacity, then the implications are far more serious than any short-term fix.

Ireland has bought itself three months of peace, but at what cost? This week, we unpack the fallout from the recent fuel protests and what they reveal about the deeper fragility of the Irish system. A small, highly organised group of farmers and truckers managed to bring the country to a standstill, exposing just how vulnerable the state really is. So far, the response has been to just throw money at the problem. With subsidies set to expire in July, long summer nights, rising tensions, and the spotlight of the European presidency arriving, all the ingredients are in place for a perfect storm. Add in growing populism, rural frustration, and anti-immigration sentiment, and the question becomes unavoidable: has the government just incentivised the next crisis? At the heart of it all is a bigger issue, a state that increasingly relies on cash instead of control, short-term fixes instead of long-term thinking, and political optics over real strategy.

Ireland looks like a success story on paper: booming tax revenues, record public spending, and a global reputation as a modern, wealthy economy. Yet on the ground, something feels deeply off. In this episode, we step back from the noise of protests, strikes, and rising fuel costs to ask how can a country with so much money deliver so little? From housing and healthcare to transport and infrastructure, the pattern is the same, soaring budgets, missed targets, and no consequences. We explore the idea that this is an insidious system where incentives are broken, accountability is absent, and a permanent “Mandarin class” operates behind the scenes, untouched by elections or outcomes. The result is an economy where public spending fuels inflation, squeezes workers, and hollows out the productive sector. This has graduated from a left-versus-right story to a question of care versus contempt. Unless that changes, Ireland risks squandering a once-in-a-generation windfall while the cracks in the system grow wider.

After two episodes on how Ireland’s housing market became so brittle, we get to the only question that matters: how do you actually fix it? In this final part of our housing series with Ronan Lyons, we move from diagnosis to prescription. If the crisis was built over decades through bad incentives, bad planning, weak population forecasting, and a deep bias against density, what would it take to reverse it? We talk about viability, tax incentives, apartments, one-off housing, planning reform, and the hard truth that Ireland cannot solve this crisis with slogans, targets, or recycled talking points. It needs a system that matches the way people actually live now: smaller households, urban jobs, rising population, and huge pent-up demand. This is the finale of the series, so we pull the threads together. Not just what went wrong, but what a serious housing strategy would look like if the country finally decided to stop managing decline and start building for the future.

In this second episode with Ronan Lyons, we wonder how did a country that once struggled to keep its people end up unable to house them? The answer is a story of unintended consequences. Population booms that were visible but ignored, tax incentives that pushed homes into the wrong places, a planning system that feared apartments and subsidised sprawl and a country that urbanised its jobs, but never its housing. Along the way, we unpack the myth that the crisis began in 2008, that credit is the main culprit, that Ireland is uniquely obsessed with homeownership. Instead, what emerges is something more unsettling, a system shaped over decades by reasonable decisions that, taken together, produced something deeply dysfunctional. Across the Western world, housing markets are showing the same cracks. If you understand how the system was built, you realise just how hard it will be to fix.

Housing is the biggest expense most of us will ever face, and across Ireland and much of the Western world, the system simply isn’t working. Is this another housing bubble, or something more dangerous? In this first episode of a special three-part series on housing, we sit down with Trinity College economist Ronan Lyons to unpack what’s really happening beneath the headlines. Lyons argues the problem isn’t a speculative bubble like the 2000s. Instead, we’re living in a “brittle” housing system, one where pressure has quietly built for years because societies simply aren’t building the right homes in the right places for the way people live today. This means young people stuck living with parents, sharing overcrowded homes, or emigrating to start their lives elsewhere. We explore how focusing only on prices and rents misses the real issue, why housing shortages are now appearing across Europe and the English-speaking world, and how demographic change is colliding with planning systems designed for a different era. Part one asks the key question: Where are we now?

What does Muhammad Ali’s Rumble in the Jungle have to do with the next global recession? In this episode, we go back to the 1970s oil shocks, when a geopolitical crisis sent energy prices soaring, wealth flooding into oil states, and Western economies into deep recession. The pattern is striking: in 1973, 1979, 1990, and even before the 2008 crash, surging oil prices were followed by collapsing growth, falling trade, and rising unemployment. The numbers are brutal. Global growth fell from 6% to 1.4% in the mid-1970s. Trade swung from double-digit expansion to contraction. In Ireland, inflation hit over 20% and recovery took years. Each time, even when oil prices fell back, the damage stuck, factories closed, jobs disappeared, and economies never fully reset. Now it’s happening again. Another oil shock, another geopolitical crisis, and the same underlying vulnerability: we are still deeply dependent on fossil fuels. Ireland is now among the most energy-dependent countries in Europe, with some of the highest electricity costs in the EU. If every oil shock in modern history has triggered a recession, why would this time be any different? Who’s on the ropes now, and who’s about to take the hit?