Gavan Reilly on the real politicians of Leinster House: ‘There's a culture of fake it till you make it'
Leinster House
is more than a place of work - it's a way of life for the politicians and other professionals who spend their days there.
Journalist and broadcaster
Gavan Reilly
has written a book about the inner-workings of our parliament building and its inhabitants.
He talks to Hugh Linehan about the steep learning curves and power dynamics faced by politicians arriving unprepared into this environment, often adopting a 'fake it til you make it' approach.
The Secret Life of Leinster House by Gavan Reilly is published by Gill.
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Irish Times
an hour ago
- Irish Times
The Irish economy grew by 22% over the past year. Yes, you read that right
Ireland's economic data was always going to be a bit special at the start of this year. But Thursday's figures were mind-bending. It is impossible to overstate the extent to which we now stand out in international comparisons. And this is not just a curiosity – it matters. The economy, as measured by gross domestic product (GDP) , was 22 per cent larger in the first quarter of 2025 than one year earlier, according to the latest estimates from the Central Statistics Office . Think about it. The figures suggest that for every €1 of activity last year, there was €1.22 in 2025. Even comparing GDP in the first quarter of this year with the last quarter of 2024, there is a rise of close to 10 per cent – this is roughly the extent of growth across the euro zone over the past decade. Of course this bonkers data is not real, in the sense that it does not reflect what is happening in the underlying economy in which we all live. How could it? As has been long discussed the headline economic data is entirely distorted by the activities and tax planning of a small number of very big US tech and pharma companies. From time to time, this has created huge distortions in the figures. A decade ago, top US economist Paul Krugman famously described a 26 per cent GDP growth rate reported for the Irish economy (later revised up to over 30 per cent) as 'leprechaun' economics . At the time the figures were distorted by massive tax-driven investments by the companies concerned, including Apple, essentially a manoeuvre by the companies involved to try to keep their tax bills down as international rules changed. READ MORE Now, as one observer put it, we are seeing another 'Krugman' moment. This time the reasons are different. Big pharma companies have been rushing product over to the US to try to get drugs and key ingredients into the market before Donald Trump announces tariffs on the sector. This has led to a surge in exports, feeding into the GDP data. Many of these are manufactured here – and some are made elsewhere but organised by Irish subsidiaries and so also show up in our figures. And so we see a massive surge in Irish GDP in the first quarter of this year. A big – temporary – decline in pharma exports in GDP will follow at some stage, as the firms involved must now have massive stocks jammed into every free warehouse in the US. Much will depend on how the tariffs story plays out. [ Welcome (back) to the era of Leprechaun economics Opens in new window ] Whether Krugman renews his leprechaun offensive or not, let's not pretend this won't be noticed. Ireland's GDP data is not some irrelevance in a quirky economic corner. The amounts of money being moved through Ireland are now enormous. Daniel Kral, chief economist at Oxford Economics , calculates that Ireland – which accounts for 4 per cent of the euro zone economy – accounted for half its total growth over the past year. Analysts have taken to looking at the figures 'excluding Ireland'. How do we pull back from all of this to judge the underlying health of the economy? Total demand in the domestic economy – adjusted by the CSO to remove the multinational factors - rose just 1 per cent over the year. But we need to look under the surface here, too. Consumer spending, a good measure of how we feel, was up by a decent 2.5 per cent. But the overall figure was dragged down by a fall in business investment, presumably reflecting the international uncertainty. So households continued to spend in the first part of the year, but businesses are taking a wait-and-see approach to big capital spending. This is likely to be reflected in the jobs market as the year goes on – and here AI is also changing the game in many sectors. Consumers may get more cautious too. Uncertainty is starting to slow the economy and this is a trend we need to watch as the year goes on. The piece of data that seemed a bit out of line this week was a 30 per cent fall in corporation tax in May compared with the same month last year. This was affected by the comparison with a strong May last year – which the Department of Finance suggests was boosted by once-off factors. Two of our biggest taxpayers, Pfizer and Microsoft – pay significant amounts of tax that month. But the key early indicator for most of the big companies is June – and what happens here will give a good pointer for the year as a whole. The figures do underline one point. It is our huge reliance on the opaque affairs of four or five massive companies – and our exposure to the sectors they operate in, their own performance and complex decisions on how their tax structures are set up. Our latest bout of data exceptionalism again puts Ireland in the spotlight, when it would have been better to keep the head down. It underlines the outsize take Ireland is getting from pharma and tech activity in the EU – both contentious points in the White House. Notably, the US added Ireland to an economic watch list this week, based on the size of our trade surplus. We are very much on the radar in Washington. Our corporate tax take and manufacturing base are looked on enviously not only from the US , but from elsewhere in Europe. [ 'No long-term commitments to anything' – Ireland's economy is experiencing a silent slowdown Opens in new window ] The advance shipping of products again focuses attention on the scale of activity and tax planning in Ireland by big pharma companies. And this causes a rollercoaster of cyclical activity. But what really counts is longer-term, structural issues. Will these pharma giants decide over time – and it would take years – to relocate some of their production to the US? Will their profits and thus tax payments here be hit by Trump's policies? Or will they – or some of the tech giants – alter their corporate structures so that they pay significantly less tax here? It comes down to whether Trump's policies change the way the economic and corporate world operates fundamentally, a fair bit or not much at all. As Ireland benefits from the current system so much, the more it changes, the more risks there are for us. The coming months will tell a lot.
Irish Times
2 hours ago
- Irish Times
The Baltics are rapidly becoming a cauldron of EU growth when other parts of Europe are stagnating
It's not every day you find yourself in the Orthodox church where Alexander Pushkin 's great-grandfather was baptised. There is something calming about these dark, ornate and often windowless churches. The great-grandfather of Pushkin – the man whom many regard as the epitome of Slavic genius – was from central Africa (modern day Cameroon), a fact that adds to Pushkin's image as a romantic outsider. His great-grandfather, captured as a child by the Ottomans and gifted to the Russian emperor, rose to the position of general in Peter the Great's all-conquering army and was baptised in an Orthodox church in the centre of Vilnius, Lithuania 's very Catholic capital city. As befits a country at the crossroads of Europe, through which Napoleon, Charles X of Sweden, Hitler's Wehrmacht and, of course, Stalin's Red Army trampled, Vilnius is a city of ghosts. Before the second World War, it was known as the Jerusalem of the North, home to 60,000 Jews, of whom fewer than 2,000 survived. Today it is the bustling capital of Lithuania, a country that was once the largest state in Europe when it was the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. Those halcyon days are evident in the baroque, rococo and the later neoclassical architecture beloved of the Imperial Russians. After all, if you name your top man the Tsar, a Russified version of Caesar, it's not surprising that you'd have a weakness for Roman columns. The Russians were in Lithuania for a long time and, but for a brief period of independence from 1920 to 1941 and Nazi occupation during the war, the Russification of Lithuania continued uninterrupted from 1790 until independence in 1990. Hence Pushkin senior being baptised in Vilnius, where Orthodox churches are common and, for the older generation brought up in the Soviet Union, Russian is the default language. Somehow the Lithuanian language survived; today it is thriving. Yet Russia's presence is palpable, and with the invasion of Ukraine the sense of insecurity is heightened – as it is all throughout the three Baltic Republics of Lithuania and its two northern neighbours, Latvia and Estonia . READ MORE These three small maritime countries face the sea and have been connected with western Europe for centuries. In contrast, Russia is a land power. The Hanseatic influence, tied to Lubeck, Hamburg, London and Amsterdam by the Baltic and North Seas, give the Baltic Republics their Scandinavian feel, not to mention their Catholic and Protestant religion, which distinguishes them from the Orthodox Russians. Economically, these three countries are by far the most successful of post-Soviet Republics, anchoring themselves politically, commercially and militarily to the West, via the EU and Nato . I've yet to meet a person here who doesn't see Nato as a positive. The average person appears to see Nato as an necessary insurance policy, a shield from Russian aggression that the invasion of Ukraine evidenced so dramatically. There is little sympathy for the Kremlin, even or maybe particularly in Latvia which has the largest ethnic Russian minority of the three republics. The war in Ukraine makes their orientation to the West appear – to those I have spoken to at least – all the more logical. What does this shift to western Europe mean for this region economically? There seems to be a different attitude to tech, as I observed on an airBaltic flight between Riga and Vilnius this week: Elon Musk 's Starlink internet was free to all throughout the flight. If there is a technological solution, the Baltics use it and Musk's Starlink is an obvious network. Their view is that if it is good enough for the military, it is good enough for their citizens. Over the past two decades, the standout success of the Baltics has been this embracing of technological possibilities, leading to the creation and fostering of tech companies. Ireland has become home to a significant Baltic diaspora since the early 2000s. These neighbours are not from some backward former Soviet region, but from one of the most dynamic parts of modern Europe Since the founding of Skype in Estonia nearly 20 years ago, the Baltics have been punching far above their weight in tech and entrepreneurship. Dubbed the Silicon Valley of Europe , Estonia now has 10 tech unicorns (including Wise, Bolt, Pipedrive, Playtech, Zego, Veriff and others) in a nation of just 1.3 million . Estonia alone has the highest per capita concentration of billion-dollar tech companies in Europe (and among the highest in the world). Latvia and Lithuania are also nurturing big start-ups. Latvia produced its first unicorn, Printful (print-on-demand ecommerce), in 2021, and has other notable start-ups like airBaltic (an innovation-oriented airline) and fintech platforms. Lithuania, as well as being home to the banking multinational disrupter Revolut, is now home to two unicorns: Vinted (Europe's largest online used-fashion marketplace) and Nord Security (creator of NordVPN). Vilnius has become a fintech hub (hosting the EU's second-largest fintech cluster) and a centre for laser technology and life sciences. [ ECB cuts interest rates by quarter percentage point Opens in new window ] Estonia leads Europe in startups per capita, with 1,100 per million people (4–5 times the European average), and Baltic tech founders are celebrated for their global impact. The World Bank and the OECD often cite the Baltics as models for digital innovation and ease of doing business. As of 2023, ICT contributes around 6 per cent of Estonia's GDP, up from 3 per cent in 2012, and about 7 per cent of its workforce are ICT professionals, the highest share in the EU. Latvia and Lithuania follow close behind and well above the EU average. Around half of all private R&D in Estonia and Latvia is tech-related. As a percentage of European population, the Baltics should have about 1 per cent of EU tech unicorn start-ups; instead they have 12 per cent. Meanwhile, Lithuania leads the EU in the number of fintech licences issued and has thriving tech parks in Vilnius and Kaunas. Lithuania's ICT sector grew 50 per cent in employment over the past decade. They are not only deploying tech to create new companies, the way the government does business here is quite seamless because of mass digitalisation. The problems caused by one Irish hospital not having the medical details of a patient who is being treated in another Irish hospital would never happen here; the entire public sector is paperless. Every government computer speaks to every other one, and to your own laptop. The result of this world-leading e-governance ecosystem is that Estonians can start a company online in minutes and 99 per cent of government services are accessible from home. No queues, no forms, no 'missing in the post' appointments, because one ID card has all the information in one place. Consequently the cost of government bureaucracy has collapsed. This is the future. And yet the region is still captured by the past, most notably the threat of Moscow. [ What does the latest ECB cut mean for borrowers, savers and the broader economy? Opens in new window ] Ireland has become home to a significant Baltic diaspora since the early 2000s, with people from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania now making up roughly 1 per cent of the population (based on the 2022 census and a population of 5.15 million). These neighbours are not from some backward former Soviet region, but from one of the most dynamic parts of modern Europe, the Baltic Sea, home to Poland, Europe's most vibrant large economy, Finland and of course Sweden, as well as the industrial north of Germany. Ireland should learn to use the skills, networks and languages of our new residents to cement relations with this part of the world because this is rapidly becoming a cauldron of EU growth at a time when other parts of Europe are stagnating.
Irish Times
2 hours ago
- Irish Times
Children at west Dublin asylum seeker accommodation witnessed friends being ‘put in the back of a black van'
Children living at an International Protection Accommodation Service (IPAS) centre in west Dublin said 'everyone was crying' and they were prevented from saying goodbye to their three friends who were picked up by Garda immigration officers for deportation on Wednesday morning. Three siblings, Amira (14), Richard (12) and King (7), were among 35 people, including two other children, deported on a flight from Dublin to Lagos, Nigeria on Wednesday night. They had lived at their accommodation, provided by the IPAS in west Dublin since January 2022 with their mother and father and attended schools six Luas stops away. On Thursday Minister for Justice Jim O'Callaghan said returning people whose applications have been refused and who have had deportation orders issued against them is 'the foundation of any modern rules-based immigration process'. READ MORE On Friday afternoon, the children's classmates from St James's Primary School and CBS James's Street having arrived home, described what they witnessed on Wednesday morning. 'I was downstairs having breakfast,' says Kimberly (7). 'I saw five men come into the place and they go to their room. Then I saw the girl crying. They were putting their things in the van. I feel sad now.' Her mother, Pearl Chitatariso, was on her way home from work at 8am when she got a call from a friend getting Kimberly and other children ready for school. 'They were crying. They told me their friends were being deported. The children were so hurt. They said they could not say goodbye to their friends. It was very traumatising.' Farhiya Ali, a mother living with her four children in the centre, said: 'The kids were coming down for breakfast when these five men wearing cargo pants, big jackets arrived. 'They came into the third floor, stood in front of the bedroom door, took the three kids back in and told them to pack up. We heard them say: 'You are going to be deported'. As soon as the other children heard then they were all crying. It was such a horrific scene. 'The family were not given time to process what was going on. It was all in 15 minutes. They were put in the back of a black van. For my kids to witness that it was not good. The way the situation was handled was traumatising not only for the children but for all of us.' She said one of her children will not come out of his room. 'They think the gardaí is coming to get them next. To do that to children, that was real injustice.' A number of the children, gathered around in their St James's primary school uniforms on Friday, said they tried to say goodbye to Amira, Richard and King but were prevented from talking to them. 'We knew they were going to the airport,' said a girl, aged about eight. 'Everyone was crying. When we tried to say goodbye the five men said we shouldn't even talk to them. They were making them ignore us. They didn't let us talk to them.' Another girl said: 'They were very sad. The mum was crying. They were carrying their bags. It was bad. They won't let them in Europe again.' Asked how the process could have been handled differently Ms Chitatariso said: 'I believe they should have waited until the other kids have gone to school. Now it is something that they won't forget. They keep on talking about it.' Nick Henderson, chief executive of the Irish Refugee Council said: 'Deporting children as they prepare for school is shocking. This is not what Ireland stands for. 'We urge the Government to work with families in these situations, explore voluntary return more thoroughly and provide support, guidance, and sufficient time – currently just five days – for people to consider this option.' The Department of Justice has been contacted for comment.
