I deal a lot with the notion of a knowledge economy.  A knowledge economy is where we have a well educated bunch of people, that are pretty familiar with, and unafraid of technology, that can see technology opportunities and have a good chance of exploiting them.

In a knowledge economy, we would not be overly-reliant on unskilled labour nor would we depend on trading in commodities like steel or coal or that kind of thing.

We would have a high proportion of graduates with skills in information technology.  We would have a relatively high proportion of biotechnologists and pharmaceutical technologists.  We would have engineers aplenty.

We would train people in entrepreneurship and have freely-available and accessible information on funding opportunities, angel investors, venture capitalists and the banking sector.

However, these are not really the most important things to consider when we think of Ireland of the future.  We are people that live in a society, not statistics that live in an economy.

A knowledge economy? Sure.

A well-educated workforce? Yes, please.

But there must be more.

We need to think about society and the growth of society.  The knowledge economy is simply a device to make life easier for  the people of the country.

The economy is not the country.

Though, to watch the news, you would think the two were synonymous.

The barbarians are at the gates.  It is time to stand up and say that Ireland is a society and not simply an economy.  The economy works for us, not the other way around.  We are not here to simply keep the banks going.  We are not here to bail out the economy when some bankers make a mess of it.  I’m not prepared to work for the next decade in order to correct some monumental mess that was made by somebody else.

The taxation commission is about to reccommend where more taxes can be raised and I think it is time to say “this is enough”.

Permanent TSB just raised their variable interest rate.  The cheek!!!

I’m a pretty tolerant man but I’ve had enough.