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Irish Times
11-07-2025
- Business
- Irish Times
The cost of living in Ireland is nuts. Even nuttier are the reasons supposed to explain it
'Stick 'em up!' That's what it should say. Instead, the email's subject line says: 'It's time to renew your car insurance'. The quote is €100 more than it was last year. 'But didn't the insurers promise us the price would come down after the Government reformed the personal injuries law?' 'The reasons for the increase are numerous and complex,' purrs the soothing voice on the other end of the phone. 'You can look around but you won't get it cheaper anywhere else.' Brace yourself, Bridget, as the fella once said. Coffee is called for. READ MORE 'That'll be €4.30,' says the lad behind the counter, handing over the cappuccino-no-chocolate. A bowl next to the pay-by-card thingummy wants to be fed 'tips'. On the Costa del Sol, the lovely, milky coffee comes in a ceramic cup with an integrated holder for your complimentary ice-cream cone. Total price: €2. The world and her husband know the global price of coffee has shot up, but how can it be more than double the price in Ireland? Torremolinos isn't twice as close to Guatemala and Colombia, is it? 'Tsk, it's the minimum wage,' explain those who purport to know. The legal eagles must all be on the minimum wage. How else to explain the prohibitive cost of going to court? The business lobby ISME reckons defamation actions started in a single year generate €30 million to €50 million in fees for 'a small group of lawyers'. That damned minimum wage. Maybe we should start a go-fund-me for the Law Library. Landlords could do with a handout too. The ones who own trophy commercial buildings are barely managing to put bread on the table. Who else but the low-paid workers could possibly be to blame for making Grafton Street the world's 17th most expensive rental address? Surely not the pension companies, investment funds, property developers and wealthy families who own the street. Workers' wages were not the issue when a Circuit Court judge halved the €1. 46 million annual rent Bewley's Cafe was paying a Johnny Ronan company. [ Who owns Grafton Street? Wealthy Irish families and faceless funds control 119 of Dublin's most valuable buildings Opens in new window ] The cost of living in Ireland is nuts. Even nuttier are the reasons supposed to explain it. Take insurance. The Injuries Resolution Board reported on Wednesday that €76 million was saved last year by a reduction in insurance litigation in the courts. Yet motor insurance prices rose by 8.4 per cent in the past year and the Central Bank said last week they'll go on rising because of increasing claims and vehicle repair costs. But then the Courts Service annual report said this week that awards for damages almost halved in 2024. If you're not bamboozled, you must be an actuary. Next, take hospitality. More than 500 restaurants have shut up shop this year. Lobbyists say the antidote is to cut the sector's VAT rate from 13.5 per cent to 9 per cent. That would cost the national exchequer €545 million, with no guarantee customers could get a mug of tea and a fruit scone for less than Jeff Bezos's wedding bill. Cafe owner Jamie O'Connell, writing in The Irish Times last year , said the rent of the building accounted for 21 cent out of a – rather modest – €3.50 cup of coffee. The rest of us must have been snoozing when the Restaurants Association of Ireland was demanding the Government do something about that. Go into a supermarket (please do, Peter Burke , Minister for Enterprise, Tourism and Employment) and try to figure out how the €13.50-an-hour minimum wage can feed a family. According to Conor Pope's research , a kilogram of chicken breasts priced at €4.99 in 2022 now costs €11. There's an extra 27 cent on a two-litre carton of milk since last year and butter is the new caviar at €5.49 a pound for Kerrygold . 'It's a good thing I'm a millionaire,' exclaimed the woman standing beside me as she surveyed the bread shelves. After she walked away, leaving the bread on the shelf, the word 'not' hung in the air. Kenneth Harper, a regular Letters-to-the-Editor correspondent, wrote about his holiday in Cyprus this year. 'A decent supermarket wine' was €5.50, a litre of unleaded diesel €1.32 (€1.74 in his home county of Donegal at the time of writing) and a two-bed furnished flat with access to a swimming pool was €850 per month. A survey by Barnardo s children's charity has found that four in 10 parents are foregoing meals or cutting their portions so that their children get enough to eat. These vicissitudes are not confined to households. High prices for insurance, legal services and commercial rents percolate through the system. It's no surprise the number of visitors to Ireland is declining. The Central Statistics Office said there was an 8 per cent reduction in visits from continental Europe in April compared with the same month last year. And this when experts tell us holidaymakers are fleeing to cooler climes such as ours to escape the continent's sweltering temperatures. Laments about 'the high cost of doing business in Ireland' have replaced the Celtic Tiger's 'soft landing' and 'the fundamentals are sound' audio track of the age. Ireland is Europe's second most expensive country. For the luxury of living in it, you might have to sleep in the street, queue on a hospital trolley, despair of your child getting a school place, wait months for a water connection and cough up gold to afford a packet of rashers. Still, the Government refuses to introduce mandatory reporting for supermarkets so we might understand why they're charging us so much. Remember two years ago when junior minister Neale Richmond hosted a 'supermarket summit'. Please, bring your prices down, he asked them nicely. Now grocery prices are rising at twice the rate of general inflation. Good work, Neale. The Government benevolently doles out one-off payments to subvent the people's spiralling bills, like some feudal lord riding through the village on his snorting stead, throwing oranges to the peasants. It's time it got down off its high horse and fixed the causes – the opaque pricing, insurance claptrap, greedy commercial rents and lawyers' ludicrous fees. These are the costs of doing business in Ireland. Doing the customer is not the solution.
Reuters
06-02-2025
- Politics
- Reuters
Harvard law library acts to preserve government data amid sweeping purges
WASHINGTON, Feb 6 (Reuters) - A unit of Harvard University's Law Library says it is releasing an archive of more than 300,000 government data sets, aiming to protect vital public information at a time when President Donald Trump's administration is wiping it from the web. The initiative, announced Thursday, opens new tab by the Law Library's Innovation Lab, is one of several efforts to rescue official figures and government datasets as Trump and his billionaire allies take a wrecking ball to the federal government, yanking thousands of websites offline and in some cases deleting entire agencies off the internet. Academics and researchers from fields including public health, climate studies and sociology have been left scrambling as the Trump administration scrubs official data. On Sunday The New York Times reported it found that more than 8,000 government web pages had been removed in the aftermath of the presidential transition. The Innovation Lab said in a statement it had so far managed to preserve 311,000 datasets copied between 2024 and 2025, amounting to 16 terabytes of data. Amanda Watson, the Harvard Law School's assistant dean for library and information services, said her institution's rescue effort was about "upholding our fundamental belief that government information belongs to the public." The Innovation Lab isn't doing the work alone. Others that have scrambled to preserve government data include the San Francisco-based Internet Archive, which has been taking systematic end-of-presidential-term snapshots, opens new tab of government websites since 2008, as well as groups such as the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative, opens new tab, which rescued an interactive government widget for checking how polluted a given area was - one of many tools knocked offline by the Trump administration. Jack Cushman, who directs the Innovation Lab, said the government collected an untold amount of data. "That's everything from 'What is the weather or climate going to be?' to 'How are the crops growing?' to 'How much water is in aquifers' to 'What are people dying of?' to 'What jobs are growing or shrinking," he said. "The government tracks so many things that help us understand and plan and make sense of what's happening in the world. We wanted to make sure our patrons can get access to all that information."
Yahoo
06-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Harvard law library acts to preserve government data amid sweeping purges
By Raphael Satter WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A unit of Harvard University's Law Library says it is releasing an archive of more than 300,000 government data sets, aiming to protect vital public information at a time when President Donald Trump's administration is wiping it from the web. The initiative, announced Thursday by the Law Library's Innovation Lab, is one of several efforts to rescue official figures and government datasets as Trump and his billionaire allies take a wrecking ball to the federal government, yanking thousands of websites offline and in some cases deleting entire agencies off the internet. See for yourself — The Yodel is the go-to source for daily news, entertainment and feel-good stories. By signing up, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy. Academics and researchers from fields including public health, climate studies and sociology have been left scrambling as the Trump administration scrubs official data. On Sunday The New York Times reported it found that more than 8,000 government web pages had been removed in the aftermath of the presidential transition. The Innovation Lab said in a statement it had so far managed to preserve 311,000 datasets copied between 2024 and 2025, amounting to 16 terabytes of data. Amanda Watson, the Harvard Law School's assistant dean for library and information services, said her institution's rescue effort was about "upholding our fundamental belief that government information belongs to the public." The Innovation Lab isn't doing the work alone. Others that have scrambled to preserve government data include the San Francisco-based Internet Archive, which has been taking systematic end-of-presidential-term snapshots of government websites since 2008, as well as groups such as the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative, which rescued an interactive government widget for checking how polluted a given area was - one of many tools knocked offline by the Trump administration. Jack Cushman, who directs the Innovation Lab, said the government collected an untold amount of data. "That's everything from 'What is the weather or climate going to be?' to 'How are the crops growing?' to 'How much water is in aquifers' to 'What are people dying of?' to 'What jobs are growing or shrinking," he said. "The government tracks so many things that help us understand and plan and make sense of what's happening in the world. We wanted to make sure our patrons can get access to all that information."
CNN
31-01-2025
- Politics
- CNN
Birthright citizenship: Why the ‘right of soil' is so big in the Americas
When US President Donald Trump signed a recent executive order that would deny citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants living in the United States, he took aim at what he suggested was a peculiarly American principle: Birthright citizenship. As the courts moved to temporarily block his order, various media outlets pointed out that the president's remarks were not entirely accurate. According to the Law Library of Congress, more than 30 countries across the world recognize birthright citizenship on an unrestricted basis – in which children born on their soil automatically acquire the right regardless of their parents' immigration status. Still, presidential hyperbole aside, the data from the Law Library does seem to suggest there is something particularly American (both North and South) about the idea of unrestricted birthright citizenship, as the map below shows. Strikingly, nearly all of those countries recognizing unrestricted birthright citizenship are in the Western Hemisphere, in North, South, and Central America. The vast majority of countries in the rest of the world either do not recognize the jus soli (Latin for 'right of soil') principle on which unrestricted birthright citizenship is based or, if they do, do so only under certain circumstances – often involving the immigration status of the newborn child's parents. So, how did the divide come about? In North America, the 'right of soil' was introduced by the British via their colonies, according to 'The Evolution of Citizenship' study by Graziella Bertocchi and Chiara Strozzi. The principle had been established in English law in the early 17th century by a ruling that anyone born in a place subject to the king of England was a 'natural-born subject of England.' When the US declared independence, the idea endured and was used – ironically for the departing Brits – to keep out foreign influence, such as in the Constitution's requirement that the president be a 'natural-born citizen' of the US. Still, it was not until the 1820s that a movement led by Black Americans – whose citizenship was not explicitly guaranteed at the time – forced the country to think seriously about the issue, according to Martha Jones, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. 'They land on birthright in part because the US Constitution of 1787 requires that the president of the United States be a natural-born citizen. So, they hypothesize that if there is such a thing as a natural-born citizen, they, just like the president, must be natural-born citizens of the United States.' The principle would be debated for decades until it was finally made law in 1868 after the Civil War, which resulted in the freedom of enslaved Black Americans, and formalized by the 14th Amendment, which states: 'All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.' But it wasn't just the Brits in North America. Other European colonial powers introduced the idea in countries across Central and South America, too. Driving the practice in many of these areas was an economic need. Populations in the Western Hemisphere were at the time much smaller than in other parts of the world that had been colonized and settlers often saw bestowing citizenship as a way to boost their labor forces. 'You had these Europeans coming and saying: 'This land is now our land, and we want more Europeans to come here and we want them to be citizens of these new countries.' So, it's a mixture of colonial domination and then the idea of these settler states they want to populate,' said sociologist John Skrentny, a professor at the University of California, San Diego. Later, just as the idea of 'right of soil' was turned against the Brits in North America, a similar reversal of fortunes took place in the European colonies to the south. In Latin America, many newly formed countries that had gained independence in the 19th century saw 'right of soil' citizenship as a way to build national identity and thus further break from their former colonial rulers, according to the study by Bertocchi and Strozzi. Without that principle, they reasoned, Spain could have claimed jurisdiction over people with Spanish ancestry who were born in former colonies like Argentina, said Bertocchi, a professor of economics at Universita' di Modena e Reggio Emilia. So what about all those countries in other parts of the world that were also colonized by Europeans but today do not recognize the 'right of soil'? Many of them – particularly those in Asia and Africa – also turned to citizenship laws to send their former rulers a message. However, in most cases these countries turned toward a different type of birthright citizenship that has its roots in European law: jus sanguinis ('right of blood'), which is generally based on one's ancestry, parentage, marriage or origins. In some cases, this system was transplanted to Africa by European powers that practiced it, Strozzi and Bertocchi wrote in their study. But in other cases newly independent countries adopted it on their own accord to build their nations on an ethnic and cultural basis. Doing so was a relatively easy change. As Skrentny points out, in many of these places the 'right of soil' had never become as ingrained as it had in the Americas, partly because their large native populations had meant the colonizers did not need to boost their workforces. Jettisoning the 'right of soil' sent a message to the former colonists that 'they didn't want to hear any more of it,' said Bertocchi, while embracing the 'right of blood' ensured descendants of colonizers who remained in Africa would not be considered citizens. 'They all switched to jus sanguinis,' said Bertocchi. 'It seems paradoxical, right? This time, to build a national identity, you needed to adopt this principle.' There's one final twist that helps explain why the 'right of soil' principle seems today to be a largely American affair. Over the years, the colonial powers that once followed the 'right of soil' have since moved either to abolish or restrict its use, much like some of their former colonies. In the UK, it was scrapped by the British Nationality Act of the 1980s, which put in place several conditions to qualify for British citizenship – including some that relate to parentage, as in jus sanguinis. Experts say the driving force for those changes – in Britain and elsewhere in Europe – was the concern that migrants could take advantage of the system by entering the country with the intent of giving birth to a child with automatic citizenship. In other words, the same concern being voiced by many of Trump's supporters in today's United States.
CNN
31-01-2025
- Politics
- CNN
Birthright citizenship: Why the ‘right of soil' is so big in the Americas
When US President Donald Trump signed a recent executive order that would deny citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants living in the United States, he took aim at what he suggested was a peculiarly American principle: Birthright citizenship. As the courts moved to temporarily block his order, various media outlets pointed out that the president's remarks were not entirely accurate. According to the Law Library of Congress, more than 30 countries across the world recognize birthright citizenship on an unrestricted basis – in which children born on their soil automatically acquire the right regardless of their parents' immigration status. Still, presidential hyperbole aside, the data from the Law Library does seem to suggest there is something particularly American (both North and South) about the idea of unrestricted birthright citizenship, as the map below shows. Strikingly, nearly all of those countries recognizing unrestricted birthright citizenship are in the Western Hemisphere, in North, South, and Central America. The vast majority of countries in the rest of the world either do not recognize the jus soli (Latin for 'right of soil') principle on which unrestricted birthright citizenship is based or, if they do, do so only under certain circumstances – often involving the immigration status of the newborn child's parents. So, how did the divide come about? In North America, the 'right of soil' was introduced by the British via their colonies, according to 'The Evolution of Citizenship' study by Graziella Bertocchi and Chiara Strozzi. The principle had been established in English law in the early 17th century by a ruling that anyone born in a place subject to the king of England was a 'natural-born subject of England.' When the US declared independence, the idea endured and was used – ironically for the departing Brits – to keep out foreign influence, such as in the Constitution's requirement that the president be a 'natural-born citizen' of the US. Still, it was not until the 1820s that a movement led by Black Americans – whose citizenship was not explicitly guaranteed at the time – forced the country to think seriously about the issue, according to Martha Jones, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. 'They land on birthright in part because the US Constitution of 1787 requires that the president of the United States be a natural-born citizen. So, they hypothesize that if there is such a thing as a natural-born citizen, they, just like the president, must be natural-born citizens of the United States.' The principle would be debated for decades until it was finally made law in 1868 after the Civil War, which resulted in the freedom of enslaved Black Americans, and formalized by the 14th Amendment, which states: 'All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.' But it wasn't just the Brits in North America. Other European colonial powers introduced the idea in countries across Central and South America, too. Driving the practice in many of these areas was an economic need. Populations in the Western Hemisphere were at the time much smaller than in other parts of the world that had been colonized and settlers often saw bestowing citizenship as a way to boost their labor forces. 'You had these Europeans coming and saying: 'This land is now our land, and we want more Europeans to come here and we want them to be citizens of these new countries.' So, it's a mixture of colonial domination and then the idea of these settler states they want to populate,' said sociologist John Skrentny, a professor at the University of California, San Diego. Later, just as the idea of 'right of soil' was turned against the Brits in North America, a similar reversal of fortunes took place in the European colonies to the south. In Latin America, many newly formed countries that had gained independence in the 19th century saw 'right of soil' citizenship as a way to build national identity and thus further break from their former colonial rulers, according to the study by Bertocchi and Strozzi. Without that principle, they reasoned, Spain could have claimed jurisdiction over people with Spanish ancestry who were born in former colonies like Argentina, said Bertocchi, a professor of economics at Universita' di Modena e Reggio Emilia. So what about all those countries in other parts of the world that were also colonized by Europeans but today do not recognize the 'right of soil'? Many of them – particularly those in Asia and Africa – also turned to citizenship laws to send their former rulers a message. However, in most cases these countries turned toward a different type of birthright citizenship that has its roots in European law: jus sanguinis ('right of blood'), which is generally based on one's ancestry, parentage, marriage or origins. In some cases, this system was transplanted to Africa by European powers that practiced it, Strozzi and Bertocchi wrote in their study. But in other cases newly independent countries adopted it on their own accord to build their nations on an ethnic and cultural basis. Doing so was a relatively easy change. As Skrentny points out, in many of these places the 'right of soil' had never become as ingrained as it had in the Americas, partly because their large native populations had meant the colonizers did not need to boost their workforces. Jettisoning the 'right of soil' sent a message to the former colonists that 'they didn't want to hear any more of it,' said Bertocchi, while embracing the 'right of blood' ensured descendants of colonizers who remained in Africa would not be considered citizens. 'They all switched to jus sanguinis,' said Bertocchi. 'It seems paradoxical, right? This time, to build a national identity, you needed to adopt this principle.' There's one final twist that helps explain why the 'right of soil' principle seems today to be a largely American affair. Over the years, the colonial powers that once followed the 'right of soil' have since moved either to abolish or restrict its use, much like some of their former colonies. In the UK, it was scrapped by the British Nationality Act of the 1980s, which put in place several conditions to qualify for British citizenship – including some that relate to parentage, as in jus sanguinis. Experts say the driving force for those changes – in Britain and elsewhere in Europe – was the concern that migrants could take advantage of the system by entering the country with the intent of giving birth to a child with automatic citizenship. In other words, the same concern being voiced by many of Trump's supporters in today's United States.
