Ireland is full of resilient people who fought and bombed their way to their own freedom from the British. I think they will overtake the British economy before 2825
The Irish economy overtook the British one by most measures some time ago (arguably partially as a result of the UK’s problems with regional development; the British economy, at this point, is verging on basically just being London and its immediate area).
Yes, the Irish economy is bigger than the British, all you have to do to get that answer is: count all the revenue of famous Irish corporations such as Apple, Microsoft, Intel (and others) as Irish revenue, and divide by the respective populations (6M and 70M).
Definitely do not think any further about these measures, just report them as Ireland ^ and UK v.
Yes, GDP figures for Ireland and other small open economies (and, for that matter, _London_, which has the same sort of dynamic) are pretty useless; this is fairly well-known. However, Irish average wages overtook UK ones after the financial crisis, concrete economic activity is generally higher (for instance, Ireland builds about 2.5x the number of housing units per capita per year), the Irish state pension is higher, Irish unemployment is lower, Irish inflation is much lower, and so on.
And it’s much starker when you compare Ireland to Northern Ireland (the bit of Ireland that the UK still runs), or, really, to the North of England or most other UK regions (again, really, the whole UK economy hangs off the south-east). The idea that Ireland would be _better off in 2025_ if it had stayed part of the UK is… pretty out-there, to be honest. The UK is simply very bad at regional development.
Ireland _was_ an economic basketcase for a very long time, but then, realistically, so was most of the UK; more or less since WW2 the UK outside of London and the south-east has been looking pretty unhealthy.
You’d expect that, though; the Greater Dublin Area isn’t far off half the population. And most of the GDP-skewing activity is in Dublin; Irish GDP numbers in general just aren’t very useful. You don’t see the same gap in wages and standard of living between Dublin and the west that you see between, say, London and Wales, though.
Yeah I agree. I don't know why the Brits insisted on cruelty to that magnitude in every place they ruled. I mean yes historically it was common, but they continued it way later into history than most peoples did, or perhaps it's my naivety.
