Irish Wealth and leisure time

Leading on from my previous post discussing the population changes in Ireland, I’m now looking at another aspect, wealth changes….

Finally, I’ll show one other item that has really changed for Ireland in the past 40 years. Our wealth has significantly increased. Look at that chart below if you don’t believe me, from the IMF. (Anyone working in the Services Industry may disagree, here’s the cold hard figures about the wealth increase…).

Source: World Bank, visualised by TradingEconomics.com

Again, using me as a case study, since I was born, the GDP of Ireland has increased 16-fold. Even you were born only 20 years ago, it has increased 4-fold. While many people may disagree (and the GDP is a very blunt tool for viewing an economy as a whole), the country as a whole is significantly wealthier overall. (Many people working in certain industries, or burned from the the Celtic Tiger crash of the mid-2000’s may disagree…).

SO, AGAIN USING MYSELF AS AN EXAMPLE, THE POPULATION HAS INCREASED BY 1.5 MILLION SINCE I WAS BORN AND GONE FROM A GDP OF ~$25 BILLION TO ~$400 BILLION TODAY.

In addition, as our wealth has increased, we’re also working fewer hours gaining an extra 161 hours in the last 20 years alone: that’s almost 7 days per year to do extra….stuff. We also just have a lot of time for ‘other leisure’ in Ireland (see image right: click to enlarge). We live in a wealthy country and that means we’re not just trying to survive by putting food on our plate, or a roof over our head. We can afford to ‘do stuff’. And as we found last year when the whole of Ireland, couldn’t leave the country, there is a lot of us, and only so many spots that people can do to.

So the key point: there are now a lot more of us on the island of Ireland, and we’re also a lot wealthier. This enables people to afford cars, and aspire to do ‘luxury’ items such as travel and explore.

TrendsNeal McQuaid25 May 2021leisure, activities, wealth, gdp, ireland, trends