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

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

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

If politics were a numbers game, the current Irish government — a coalition between the two traditional center-right parties, Fine Gael (led by the current prime minister, Simon Harris) and Fianna Fail, along with the Green Party — would be the surefire winner. A decade ago, there were around two million people at work in the Irish economy. Now the number seems to be rising inexorably