Your Country Your Call: Ireland's Vision

Ireland's recent call for proposals to improve employment and the economy is an interesting challenge: figure out a proposal that could materially and positively impact the future of employment in Ireland. Presumably, the way to do this is to find a dimension of Ireland that could be developed into a comparative advantage with respect to major trading partners.

First, a check in NationMaster to find any obvious strong points. A good place to start is in top rankings (e.g. statistics where Ireland ranks near the top): not much there since some of the stats are from the Celtic Tiger era and others aren't terribly useful (e.g. Ireland is #1 in the world for per capita beer consumption, etc.)

Alternatively, try a check for the bottom rankings (e.g. statistics where Ireland ranks near the bottom): seems that Ireland has very low rankings for stuff like rates of car ownership, murder, suicide, embezzlement, energy use per person, marriage, etc.

In fact, quality of life tends to be high, even declared best in the world around 2005, but, it's perhaps difficult to turn that into an export or increase the impact on employment except where it's already been done like call centers, customer service, pubs / tourism, etc.

As usual the key challenge turns out to be political -- members of the Green Party in Ireland have a convincing program around investments in people, branding as a clean green economy, and investing in renewable energy (especially wind) to the point of export. Now, the hope is that people will listen to them.