US billionaire calls out Ireland as "no one wants to live here"

All I know is when I’m abroad (other than in the U.K.) I suddenly get a terrible longing for home made Indian food.

I think exotic depends on what you define as exotic and where you draw your limits on what is Irish cuisine. We really don’t have any sort of defined cuisine beyond a small handful of traditional dishes, which are hardly staples.

The weather is what you make of it though. While it can do grey skies, most of the time it’s just highly changeable and creates these very spectacular skies and windy, fresh weather that’s actually ideal for hiking as and outdoors stuff, as long as you’re aware that it could rain.

If you’re expecting an island in the North Atlantic to have the same weather as Southern California, you’re basialy deluded and I think both ourselves and the Brits spend far too much time moaning about the weather to the point that the reputation far exceeds the reality.

Do you hear people moaning about western Icelandic weather or western Norwegian weather? Nope! That’s because they have expectations when they arrive, or they have an expectation of extreme cold and actually get something more like the west of Ireland in reality and go off and enjoy the scenery.

Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England spend their lives bemoaning the weather.

For example, I had someone in the USA tell me that London was grey, wet and never stops raining. They’d never been there and it’s not true, but they had picked that up from the British moaning endlessly about their own weather.

It’s not going to be the same as Malaga, the Canaries or southern Italy, but as climates go, it’s about as temperate oceanic as it gets - you can either enjoy it or endlessly wonder why it’s not 38°C.

Also in non pandemic times, it’s a hop skip and a jump for very little money to a vast array of hotter climates and interesting destinations on the continent, which is more than can be said for some farther flung locations like Australia. You can go to Australia, or Australia unless you want to sink a few grand.

This Prince guy seems to be loving his time in Portugal. You can tell by the angry tweets to António Costa, the Portuguese PM.

https:// twitter.com /eastdakota/status/ 1323947883201142786?s=21

Remove the spaces. I can’t post urls yet.

I’d say one thing though, Ireland is very loud and accessible on social media because we speak English.
You see all the flaws and internal politics of countries whose languages you can read and interact with and those you can’t often seem more picture postcard perfect than they actually are.

A very quick google will give you Irish, British, Aussie, Canadian and New Zealand’s unpleasant sides, weird crimes, self critical articles about racism and so on, yet you won’t find those for Finland, Iceland, Norway or Poland etc unless you go digging with a translation tool.

I’ve seen that a few times where Americans in particular can end I up diving into a self flagellation article, very much aimed at a domestic audience or a thread of “only in Ireland” where we go on about how it’s a third world country or that we are the worst racists on the planet (which we definitely aren’t) when it blatantly couldn’t be more unlike one if it tried, but that’s all open to the world in a way that it isn’t for many smaller language places.

Imagine if we primarily communicated in Irish? The external impression of Ireland would be much more closed off beyond tourist snapshots and stereotypes.

Ireland tends to be hugely self critical and has very little bluster in its internal discourse.

If you compare us to the US, the politicians could be embezzling billions and turning towards fascism (which they are) yet they’ll still be very much all about projecting that image of “we’re number one”.

Ireland has a tendency to go into “woe is me” mode a lot.

It’s not a bad thing that we are self critical. It tends to genuinely bring about change and self analysis but there are times we can really go off the deepend, especially online. We can quite frequently lose the run of ourselves.

I mean even looking at politics here. We aren’t unwelcoming or xenophobic when you consider we’ve a highly open democracy, with extremely low bars to entry, no party lists or anything like that - get a few pages of signatures & a small deposit and you can run for office, yet we haven’t elected any far right or xenophobic parties at all, making us a definite outlier in Europe or North America by any standards. Other than a few loud trolls online, there is zero prospect of an Irish Trump, UKIP, Le Pen or anything like that on the horizon at all.

Around 20% of our population is abroad and mostly very well integrated. Our founding fathers include a the son of a Cuban / Spanish New Yorker (Dev), we’ve had openly gay, married Americans in cabinet and our recent, somewhat conservative prime minister is an openly gay man who’s father is Indian and we had a continuous 21 years with female presidents.

Most of that is yet to happen in the USA, yet apparently were the unwelcoming ones and closed to “outsiders”

(btw I’m not saying that women are outsiders or that we don’t have a long way to go on political representation, but 21 years with an elected female head of state is still, remarkably and sadly usual in this strange world we live in that thinks it’s open minded).

SmokyMo wrote: »

I think he meant from the point of attracting top talent in tech industry. It well established that if you want to earn proper money in Tech you have to leave Ireland. Salaries here are a fraction of what you can get in USA. Never mind other factors like weather, food, accommodation prices... Once again, from a point of view of non-irish person, these are BIG factors. Especially weather!

Nobody would want to move to Ireland unless they coming from less well off countries. From non-irish perspective, once you get here, especially if you work for a multi national that has offices in USA, your aim would be to get there as quick as possible. Ireland is used as stepping stone. It is a lot easier to get a job in US and to go there from Ireland than lets say Eastern Europe or India directly.

There is enormous money in Tech here.

[Deleted User] wrote: »

Not compared with the US which the poster was comparing. All the key senior managment executives are in California in the big tech firms.

That’s more about access to venture capital and the Silicon Valley bubble.

In Europe in general it’s just not as easy to access that level of investment as capital markets this side of the Atlantic are far, far more conservative and tend to be driven largely by big institutional investors, with startups far more likely to be dependent on bank financing and even state aid.

We’re changing towards loosening that, but it’s slow and it what will continue to keep the US tech bubble bigger, unless we can attract investment into startups in Ireland and Europe generally.

Until then, money in Europe follows boring investments and property markets with risk averse investors.

I’ve seen this in French vs American interactions in customer service:

If you go into say a shop, hotel or restaurant in France and are all smiles, call the person you’re dealing with Madame / Monsieur, make small talk, be polite, treat them like a human doing a job that you appreciate, listen to their advice and assume they know something and so on, you’ll get on brilliantly and will be breezing your way around Paris thinking everyone’s and life in general is marvellous.

If you go in with the customer is always right attitude, demanding attention & expecting the “staff” to jump to your every whim, your dinner will likely be served with a thud and you’ll get rude and grumpy responses, if you’re lucky. They absolutely will not chase tips or grovel.

Ireland is probably closer to the French model, as is most is Europe in my experience. You reap what you sow!

There’s a significant difference in culture in that area.

saabsaab wrote: »

I saw a pub in Killarney throw a group of Germans out for drinking too slow!

I’ve had that in Seattle too. Got fairly unceremoniously moved to an awful table next to the toilets because I had “only” ordered a coffee and a snack and was taking my time.