I've found the same in the US as a non-native (but white) - my ethnicity is discounted, I'm lumped into a very peculiar bucket and my opinions don't count. Pretty weird experience. Is it really diversity or just a different power trip?
Pretty cool article though. We all became developers so we can build things: we have that in common I think.
Maybe he would, but all the experiments so far have failed for pretty much the same reasons and at enormous human cost.
Meanwhile capitalism in whatever form it's tried has proven itself to be an incredible engine of poverty reduction and human/social progress. There's always been tension between capitalism and democracy and we may be at a point where some of the cracks are showing.
There are likely some historical reasons. Here's a quote from The Times from 1860:
If this [exodus] goes on, as it is likely to go on…the United States will become very Irish….So an Ireland there will still be, but on a colossal scale, and in a new world. We must gird our loins to encounter the Nemesis of seven centuries’ misgovernment. To the end of time a hundred million spread over the largest havitable area in the world, and, confronting us everywhere by sea and land, will remember that their forefathers paid tithe to the Protestant clergy, rent to absentee landlords, and a forced obedience to the laws which these had made. (The Times, quoted in The Nation, May 1860)
I think it's fair to say that in recent times "Ireland was enjoying a quality of life that could not be sustained" but the explanation you offered is incorrect. In reality it was based on a property bubble and cheap investment capital due to artificially low interest rates engineered by the chief eurocrats. Go back a little further and the explanation for increasing employment in the 90s is based on having a young, well educated and underemployed population just as globalization was really kicking off.
Ireland joined the EU in 1973. If "subsidies" and "job luring" are the explanation, I'd have expected to see more progress way back then.
I'm not sure where you're going with your arguments that it was all based on "EU subsidies" and "luring jobs", but since others may read this I wanted to correct the record.
edit: it is true that the UKlent money to the Republic of Ireland in order to bail out UK banks with massive exposure to the property bubble - a bubble created in large part by the reckless practices of those very same banks. That loan has to be paid back by Irish tax payers.
Pretty cool article though. We all became developers so we can build things: we have that in common I think.