Ireland left the room poor, holy and apologetic. It came back rich, righteous and remarkably sure of itself.
On paper, it's one of the wealthiest countries in the world. In practice, approaching a million people make up hospital waiting lists, a generation struggles to afford a home, government expands while delivery remains elusive, and a vast 'non-governmental' sector depends heavily on government money while increasingly helping to write the script. Ireland has also become rather confident in explaining its moral obligations, to itself and occasionally to everyone else.
Patrick Duffy left Ireland young and has spent much of the past thirty-five years as both emigrant and immigrant: close enough to care, far enough away to notice when the furniture moved.
He has also spent three decades running, studying and researching organisations, including government and public institutions. That gives this book a particular question: what happens when what an institution says it is delivering, when what people actually experience doesn't match?
Across twelve satirical, evidence-led chapters, Duffy follows that question through Ireland's peculiar economic success, public-sector 'capability', the state-funded NGO world, housing and health, land and forestry, immigration, increasingly convergent politics, Brussels, the expanding vocabulary of 'obligations', and Ireland's newer moral certainties.
What emerges is less a collection of failures than a recurring trick.
The lefty leprechaun holds the gold: money, authority, expertise or public trust. The wish is granted, technically, through another strategy, programme, review, consultation or declaration of progress, while the thing people actually wanted remains strangely difficult to find.
The champagne paddy raises a glass to the granting.
This is not a hunt for villains and it requires no conspiracy. The more interesting question is why Ireland, among its Western peers, seems particularly susceptible to this arrangement: why institutions so readily confuse activity with achievement, why grand declarations of virtue travel so comfortably, and why we can often be very willing to accept the sermon once it comes from the pulpit of the day.
Written with an emigrant's affection, an operator's suspicion of institutional theatre, and an Irishman's refusal to waste a perfectly good absurdity, Lefty Leprechauns and Champagne Paddies is sharp, sourced, and unapologetically satirical.
It's for anyone who loves Ireland enough to be furious with it, laugh at it and still expect better.
Because the gold may be there.
It might finally be worth checking what it is made of.
