There is nothing as expensive as spending money instead of investing it. Renters in Ireland know this intuitively, as high rent is what precludes them from being able to afford a deposit to buy in the first place. The arithmetic of poorness is universal and merciless. You end up permanently paying more for worse outcomes, because you never made the upfront investment that would have made things cheaper in the long run.
One recent headline illustrated the cost of this mentality in the Irish State: the Government is considering writing off part of young doctors’ student debts if they agree to remain working in Ireland, because too many are emigrating to Australia.
At an estimated institutional cost of €25,000 to €30,000 per year, a five-to-six year medical degree represents a public investment of €125,000-€180,000 per doctor. This does not include the cost of clinical placements, internship, and early postgraduate training.
In any normally functioning country, that investment creates a reciprocal obligation, whereby the State subsidises your training before you serve the public system that paid for it. This is the basis of medical workforce planning in France, in Denmark and in Australia itself.
But Ireland has built a system so dysfunctional that the investment buys no loyalty at all. Those graduates emerge into a health service where agency health staff cost €380 million in 2024 – up nearly 50 per cent since 2021 – because the HSE cannot recruit permanently into a housing market that prices nurses out. The doctors themselves face the same calculus. They look at the overcrowding and the 90-minute commute from the only house they can afford and book flights to Melbourne.
The State, rather than addressing why they leave, is now considering partial debt forgiveness conditional on a few years of service. This amounts to treating the symptom while the underlying problem compounds. And when those retention periods end, the doctors will still leave, because the housing still will not exist and the system still will not work. Their replacements will be agency locums at triple the permanent rate, supplied by recruitment firms that capture the margin. The State has now paid to train and to retain staff, yet has still lost its doctors.
And it is not just doctors. The same dynamic operates across an entire generation of Irish graduates and school leavers. The State spends 13 years educating each student through the state school system, only to export them at the point where the investment was supposed to pay off, because it never built the accommodation, the transport or achieved a cost of living that would allow them to stay and contribute. The doctor flying to Melbourne is the most expensive version of a problem that begins with the 18-year-old catching a bus to Belfast to go to Queen’s instead of to Dublin to go to Trinity.
This is a failure premium: the recurring surcharge that the Irish State pays because it never built the institutions to fix the underlying problems. It is not waste in some vague bureaucratic sense; it is a specific, traceable transfer to whoever holds the asset the State failed to create. The beneficiaries are few but increasingly powerful. They are the landlords, agencies, hotel owners and recruitment firms, each one collecting a recurring fee for standing where the State should be.
Sadly, once you see the mechanism of throwing subsidies at symptoms rather than investing in the infrastructure that would eliminate them, you realise they are everywhere. The two aforementioned headlines are not a coincidence; they are the same public money circulating through a system that converts investment into high recurring costs at every turn.
Last week the Greens accused ministers of dragging their feet on plug-in solar panels that would give households cheap energy; a subsidy to the energy companies instead of an investment in domestic energy generation. To unwind the fuel protests the Government announced a €505 million fuel support package; a subsidy to cushion a price shock instead of building the energy infrastructure that would have prevented it. Last week the European Commission approved Ireland’s expanded film tax credit at 40 per cent for visual effects; a subsidy to Hollywood instead of an investment in an indigenous screen industry.
Everywhere you look, the pattern deepens: €1.2 billion a year subsidising hotel owners to house asylum seekers at €99 a night instead of building purpose-built centres; Help to Buy subsidising developers with up to €30,000 per unit instead of building the social housing that would bring prices down; the National Treatment Purchase Fund subsidising private hospitals to clear waiting lists instead of building public capacity; childcare subsidies flowing to private operators charging €1,200 a month instead of investing in public provision.
Each subsidy is presented as helping the Irish people, but each one is the price of not building paid twice over: once by the taxpayer who funds it, and again by the citizen who still lives with the absence it was supposed to fill.
We had an €11.2 billion surplus and €145 billion in annual revenue in 2025, so the money is not the problem. Rather, we have never built public institutions that can convert money into public outcomes. So instead, we pay the premium of contracting out what we should permanently staff while subsidising private holders for assets the State should have built. And in doing so, we end up watching the cost of running the State compound every year. Every euro spent on an emergency subsidy is a euro not spent on a long-term solution that would have made the subsidy unnecessary.
The question people in Ireland rightfully ask is where our money goes. It goes to whoever holds the thing the State did not build, at an extravagant premium. And it will keep going there for as long as we keep offering doctors partial debt forgiveness instead of building a country they don’t want to leave.