Quality of life best in Ireland

By DAVID McKITTRICK

The man who cuts the grass around the holiday homes in part of Donegal, who used to bump around in a rusty old van, can now be seen cruising along the country roads in a fine-looking Range Rover.

For him, as for Ireland in general, business is booming, with thousands of holiday homes and scores of new hotels sprouting across the country. The old bangers have all but disappeared from Irish roads, while extensive road-building programmes have consigned most of the pot-holes to history.

Perhaps most telling of all, thousands of young Irish people are no longer victim to forced emigration: many still go, but now it is a matter of choice.

Ireland has been transformed within a few decades from a glum financial basket-case to a vibrant rapidly-changing country. Money can't buy happiness but poverty almost guarantees misery: and the state has left most of its poverty behind.

It was not a complete surprise, therefore, when the Economist Intelligence Unit - whose parent company publishes the Economist - gave its opinion that Ireland was the best place in the world to live, with the greatest quality of life of over 100 countries.

The EIU concluded that, despite some negatives, it scored highest on an index of wealth, liberty, stability and security. Using "life-satisfaction surveys", it considered income, health, freedom, unemployment, family life, climate, political stability and security, gender equality and family and community life.

Dan O'Brien, of the EIU, said: "Ireland is now one of the richest countries in the world by any measure. It enjoys social calm combined with civil and political liberties, which, surveys show, are not bettered anywhere.

"Thousands of returning emigrants and arriving immigrants who vote with their feet know there are few better places in the world to live."

The three big strikes against Ireland are a relatively poor health service, gender inequality and, unsurprisingly, the weather. Gender equality is below the European average while health deficiencies are an important political issue.

While efforts are being made to grapple with these problems, the weather is clearly beyond improvement. The Donegal grass-cutter knows not to leave his Range-Rover's sunroof open, though of course the rain produced the grass that produced the Range-Rover.

The Irish achievement, as the EIU says, has been to absorb the prosperity while retaining the better parts of its less prosperous past. Dan O'Brien said: "The key to life satisfaction is to have the best of both worlds, the good of the modern and the best of tradition. It is true that there is more family breakdown, that divorce is on the rise and civic involvement has declined. These woes certainly afflict Ireland but - and this is crucial - they do so less than in other developed countries."

Among the casualties of modernisation and increased wealth is the impending closure of the quintessentially Irish Bewley's cafes.

The impetus to build roads arises from a need to alleviate the traffic congestion which, especially in and around Dublin, has been an unfortunate side-effect of economic progress.

And despite having weathered the storm of decades of violence in Northern Ireland, the republic's internal politics have been strikingly stable in recent years, as the EIU found.

It was an old-style Irish politician who said of economic development that "a rising tide lifts all boats". The new-style Ireland certainly bears out his observation.

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1 Ireland

2 Switzerland

3 Norway

4 Luxembourg

5 Sweden

6 Australia

7 Iceland

8 Italy

9 Denmark

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