If you are an ordinary person living in Dublin, you enjoy an immense privilege that is not available to anyone else in the European Union. You can lower your cost of living instantly with one simple action: moving to any other city in the EU.
Well, almost any other. The city-state of Luxembourg is off the menu, but Paris, Copenhagen, Berlin, Verona, Vienna, Amsterdam, Athens – all of urban western and central Europe awaits.
An "ordinary" Dubliner in this case means one working in a typical job, living in rented accommodation and raising young kids. As Aidan Regan wrote recently in the Business Post: "If you are on average and median earnings, you rent, and you have children, you live in the most expensive city in the European Union."
I included Copenhagen in that list of examples both because it is notoriously expensive and because I happen to have a son and grandson living in the city. It is interesting to visit them, not least because it forces you to think about what “the cost of living” means.
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On the surface, Copenhagen really is strikingly expensive, even by Dublin standards. If you get some groceries or pay for a meal in an average restaurant or just buy a coffee or a beer, you learn that your kroner are not going as far as you hoped.
Walk past the displays in the windows of the clothes or shoe shops and the price tags on familiar brands make your eyes water. Taxis charge so much that you would have to be either desperate or on a corporate expense account to use one.
But the real cost of living isn’t just about these things. It’s also about rent and mortgage interest and childcare and public transport and medical bills.
And all of these things are cheaper, sometimes massively so, in Copenhagen than they are in Dublin. The mortgage interest rate is close to half what you’ll pay in Dublin. Rent, even in the city centre, is between 15 and 20 per cent cheaper.
The health service is free at the point of use. A monthly ticket for public transport costs little more than half the equivalent in Dublin. Childcare, crucially for young families, is about 60 per cent cheaper.
But even this understates the difference because what you’re getting for your money in Copenhagen is also generally superior. The quality of apartments is more highly regulated. The health service is more accessible.
The public transport system is vastly better. (It has wild innovations like an actual train station at the airport.) The childcare system is terrific.
This is the problem with so much of the discourse around the cost of living in Ireland. It tends to focus on private consumption rather than on how typical families actually make ends meet, and the public choices that make that task so much harder.
This is not to say, of course, that the Irish have it easy in the consumer marketplace.
The latest Eurostat data, for 2020, show a basket of 2,000 consumer goods and services cost 40 per cent more in Ireland than the EU average, and about 30 per cent more than the other euro zone countries.
But average Irish families are also squeezed by, frankly, the cost of not having built a social democracy. To put it bluntly, ordinary Irish working families are paying a very heavy political premium.
The three starkest examples are the costs of mundane GP visits for children, of childcare and of primary education. It ought to be shocking that average families in Ireland are still paying for these basic services out of their own modest post-tax incomes.
Ireland is the only country in the EU that does not offer universal coverage for primary care. If your child is aged over eight and you do not qualify for a medical card, you have to fork out, on average, €46 nationally or €56 in Dublin for a visit to a GP.
Tell this to anyone living in any other EU country and they look at you with the peculiar horror that is reserved for barbarians. They find it both incomprehensible and revolting.
When it comes to childcare, the burden of which still falls very heavily on women, the best measure of how much stress it is placing on family incomes is to ask what percentage of median female earnings have to be devoted to it, taking into account tax rebates. Across the EU, 14 per cent of a typical mother’s wages go on childcare. In Ireland, it is more than twice as much.
And Ireland does not even have free primary education. Parents are still required to fork out for books, transport and “voluntary contributions” for exotic luxuries such as lighting and heating.
In 2021, according to Barnardos, sending a child to primary school cost parents an average of €336, with books alone costing €101. The Government’s promise to make schoolbooks free has gone essentially nowhere.
This is the political premium, the added cost of our failure to provide collectively for the necessities of life. Public goods – housing, healthcare, public transport, basic education – sell at inflated prices because the State has never managed to create a just and coherent system of making them available to all.
And remember, too, that those goods are often, by EU standards, inferior, especially in terms of access. The cumulative result of having a State that has been governed from the right for all of its century-long existence is that citizens pay more for less.
This is not, though, what the Government wants to talk about when it addresses the cost of living crisis. It does decent and necessary things like raising welfare payments and (very modestly) subsidising household use of energy.
But so much of what makes living in Ireland so expensive for average families is rooted in ideology – the profound conviction that the things society needs in order to function should be regarded primarily as commodities rather than as rights.
Some of this – especially in relation to the costs of housing – will take time to change, even if the State commits itself to doing so. But some things could be done right now.
Free schoolbooks and school transport, for example, would cost the State very little and such a policy could be implemented for the beginning of the next school year. It would give some tangible relief from inflation to many working families.
Why would the Government not do that? Purely because it has an ideological aversion to taking responsibility for services that are regarded as universal rights in other EU countries.
So long as that aversion remains, the political premium on living in Ireland will keep getting higher. And for that there will be, for the existing system, a very heavy price to pay.