The Irish government may be swimming in money, but the Irish people I know - not in Dublin - are scraping by. Don't be fooled: it's a corrupt, poor little Dubl

The Irish government may be swimming in money, but the Irish people I know - not in Dublin - are scraping by. Don't be fooled: it's a corrupt, poor little Dublin-centric mafia nation in many ways, and desperately wants to be a progressive authoritarian surveillance state with the vaguest of laws allowing individual police to decide what constitutes an Offence. Anecdata: I recently wrote to Justice to inquire about the legality of slingshots, for example, and their response boiled down to "not defined in law, but if it's too good, it will probably be considered a Firearm; ask your local Garda office." The coming hate speech laws contain similar levels of vaguery enabling selective enforcement for those the government wishes to harass. But it's not all bad, just different. There is some freedom to be found in the sparsely-inhabited wilds of the west, south, and south-west. Property tax is so low as to hardly register. Barter and neighborliness are alive and well. The old ways continue for those who want to continue them, although from what I see around North Co. Cork It's increasingly eccentric blow-ins (immigrants) doing that continuing. Which reminds me, I need to get up to the bog and collect the turf I cut and stacked, before it all rains out...