Sometimes that rising tide does nothing but drowns you

It may have been Mark Twain or Benjamin Disraeli who coined the observation that there are three kinds of lies – lies, dammed lies and statistics. Whoever said it, it’s still true . . . just look at Ireland’s exchequer figures for confirmation.

Because the economic experts predict that we will have a budget surplus of just over €65 billion by 2027 – that’s a Lotto win to play around with and, without mixing too many metaphors, give us all a big slice of cake.

A huge corporation tax take, mainly generated by our predilection for global technology and pharmaceutical firms, is spectacularly swelling the public purse.

This year alone the Department of Finance is working on the basis that we will have a budget surplus of €10 billion – that is 3.5% of national income.

And if you talk a walk through Dublin’s Docklands (perhaps by day because Dublin city centre isn’t the cleverest place to walk at night) you’ll find your own little slice of Silicon Valley where a generation ago we had a wasteland.

So, if you go by the statistics, this country of five million people has a budget surplus of €10 billion, and in a short few years it will be close to three times that.

Which should mean that we’re rolling in it – except hundreds of thousands can’t find a room to rent, let alone a home to buy.

The Central Statistics Office’s own figures revealed that over thirteen per cent of the population of Ireland were at risk of poverty last year.

That means that more than one in ten citizens in a country bursting at the seams with spare cash is at risk of not having enough to live on.

And for so many, that’s no longer just a risk – it’s a reality.