General Irish politics discussion thread

Most of the blame for this situation really should go to Fianna Fail. This all started long before Enda Kenny took office.

Yeah, there's a reason every lobby group in Ireland says "we only spend x% of our GDP on our pet project, which is below the EU average, blah blah" - well of course it is.

It works like this:

A country's GDP is a measure of total economic activity in the country. Ireland's GDP is distorted because it includes the activity of companies that are tax-resident here but whose economic activities are conducted largely or wholly outside Ireland, and whose shareholders also reside largely or wholly outside Ireland. The connection of these companies with Ireland is essentially a bookkeeping exercise.

(This is true to some extent for virtually every developed economy, but it's true to a huge extent for Ireland. This doesn't mean that Ireland'd GDP figure is meaningless, but it does mean that simple comparisons between Irish GDP and the GDP of other countries can mislead.)

So, then you have GNI (gross national income). This differs from GDP by excluding income that is received from abroad, and also income that is sent abroad.

But that still doesn't solve the problem. GNI, as the name suggests, looks at income but not at changes in the value of assets. Certain assets with very high depreciation are held in Ireland in large amounts by foreign companies — principally intellectual property (patents) and leased aircraft. These assets are not employed in production in Ireland or, if they are, the resultant income is sent abroad. Because GNI doesn't account for changes in the value of assets, Irish GNI is inflated by the location of these assets in Ireland.

So we have GNI*, or modified GNI. It's GNI, but adjusted by depreciating the value of those intellectual property and aircraft assets.

It's a bit more than that; there are a couple of other technical adjustments to exclude factors that are represented in GNI but that, in the Irish context, don't actually correspond to any real activity in the domestic economy Ireland.

In essence, GNI* is an attempt to measure real economic activity in Ireland. It essentially represents (a) all the compensation received by Irish workers, plus (b) the profits of Irish-owned enterprises, plus (c) taxes on products. It's not an exact equivalent to the GDP of other countries, but it's much closer to it than Irish GDP is.

I'm no fan of Bacik - but she's being very deliberately misrepresented here.

Only 2 days ago she was in the Dáil calling for the former Ballsbridge Hospital (which is less than 500m from St. Mary's Church) to be used to house migrants.

Her issue - albeit badly articulated - is that having the state wash their hand of the problem and instead rely on ad-hoc volunteers (such as a priest offering the church grounds) is a bad solution. She appears quite happy to have migrants housed in Ballsbridge, once it's in accommodation managed by the state.