Ireland, rich like Switzerland but poor in infrastructure

Showers follow one another at the end of November in Greystones, a small coastal town in County Wicklow, in the east of Ireland. It seems that all the visitors have taken refuge at the Scéal bakery, a trendy bakery on the marina, on the ground floor of a brand new luxury building. They serve appetizing croissants and even kouign-amann, like straight out of a Breton pastry shop. Simon Harris, the current taoiseach (Prime Minister), grew up in Greystones and is the MP for the constituency. The town of gleaming pubs and organic grocery stores is one of Dublin's satellite towns which has experienced the strongest growth in recent years. Its population has jumped 20% since 2016, with the new arrivals being mostly middle-class families looking for housing outside a capital that has become unaffordable even for high earners.

Seated in front of their hot drinks, Val Kiernan, 62, her daughter Claudia Crampton, 27, and their friend Colette Nkunda summarize the problems of the place and those of a large part of Irish voters, before the general elections on Friday, November 29 – consisting of renewing the Dail, the Irish Chamber of Deputies, for the moment controlled by a coalition of the two major centrist parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, allied to the Greens. “My first concern is access to health. There are not enough doctors and it costs 70 euros for a consultation with a general practitioner. There is a social tariff, but strict eligibility criteria must be met”regrets Colette Nkunda, a French woman of Rwandan origin who has lived in Ireland since 1994.

For Val Kiernan, the priority is “housing”. “The crisis is massive. I live in a three-bedroom house, with two of my four adult children, my youngest son and my eldest daughter, who recently divorced, and her toddler son. They cannot afford to find affordable housing.”, deplores this employee of Glencree, a non-governmental organization (NGO) specializing in conflict resolution created during the Northern Irish civil war. His daughter Claudia, a musician, spent four years in the Netherlands, “where the housing crisis is less serious than here”she observes. She returned to Ireland but says she knows “so many young people leaving the country, many for Australia because they cannot find accommodation. I'm renting, but my landlord is selling and I have to leave at the beginning of next year »adds the young woman, anxious.

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