The Great Affordability Lie?

The David McWilliams Podcast

David McWilliams

News & Politics

4.5 • 692 Ratings

🗓️ 9 December 2025

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Around the world, people feel poorer, even when the numbers say we’ve never been richer. In Ireland, GDP is soaring, household wealth has more than doubled since 2014, and yet most families are pinned to their collar. Why? Because the official poverty line is €33,600, but it now takes at least €52,000 a year just to stay afloat. That’s a 40% gap between what’s measured and what’s felt. Rent has passed €2,000 a month, groceries are up 16% in a year, childcare can cost over €1,000 monthly, and still we’re told the economy is “booming.” Inspired by Michael Green’s viral Substack and Kyla Scanlon’s “vibecession,” we unpack the growing chasm between income and cost, and how it’s fuelling backlash, burnout, and political blowback from New York to Newbridge.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature.
0:06.6	This podcast is powered by ACAST.
0:12.8	How you doing there?
0:13.9	It is time for the podcast.
0:15.9	And as we are coming up to Christmas, this is the time of the year.
0:18.8	Anyway, the people talk about charity. They think
0:22.0	about people less fortunate than we are. The economy becomes interrogated by issues of inequality,
0:28.3	who has, who hasn't, etc. And it's against this background that today's podcast is all going
0:34.4	to be about affordability.
0:37.8	Not affordability in the American sense alone, but affordability in Ireland.
0:42.0	And the reasons of the following.
0:43.7	Many, many people in Ireland are so fed up with the fact that economic statistics over the last year
0:50.7	continue to say that Ireland is one of the richest countries in the world.
0:54.6	People are doing extremely well. People who are on the average income are doing well, et cetera. And yet,
1:00.7	in reality, people are pinned to their color. So it's this idea of the difference between income
1:06.9	and cost, because when people look at their own daily, weekly and monthly bills,
1:13.7	what they're saying to themselves is, you know what? My costs are way out of whack of my
1:18.3	income. At the end of the month, I have nothing left. And yet we're told that GDP goes through
1:22.2	the roof and we're told that Ireland is this, that and the other. Now, the reason we're talking
1:26.8	about this in Ireland is that this week in the United States
1:30.6	on a very popular substack job, right?
1:33.4	Yeah.
	...

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