Trinity College Dublin and its Innovation District dream

Trinity College, Dublin (TCD), founded in 1592, has announced an aspiration for a “new Innovation District, with a new university campus at its heart” that would be ”a vital step in enabling Dublin to be ranked as a top 20 global city for innovation.”

“We aim to make Ireland the tech capital of Europe and we have many of the ingredients to succeed,” Leo Varadkar, the taoiseach (prime minister), wrote in a July 2018 promotional brochure on the aspiration. “The evidence is all around us as we see so many high tech companies located here.”

Shortage of STEM graduates a myth in Europe and US

STEM is an acronym for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics and because of the importance of innovation for growth in a modern economy the term that was coined by the US National Science Foundation, has become a buzzword in many countries.

The high tech sector has been crying wolf for many years about the shortage of STEM graduates but there is no shortage and the motivation is to have a big pool that would enable it to select the cream.

Epic failure of global war on drugs under lead of US

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in its ‘World Drug Report 2018’ published in June 2018, reports that 275m people worldwide — roughly 5.6% of the global population aged 15–64 years — used drugs at least once during 2016. Cannabis which comes in 3 forms (marijuana from dried flowers and leaves; hashish made from the resin [a secreted gum] of the cannabis plant and hash oil, the most potent) accounted for illicit use by 70% of the drug-taking population.

Irish jobs top 2007 bubble peak as rural villages in peril

Last week data on jobs in the Irish economy showed that total employment in June 2018 had exceeded the peak property bubble total of 2.252m in September 2007, by almost 3,000 people. Meanwhile, an announcement by An Post, the state postal service, that it proposed closing 159 rural post offices in 25 of the 26 counties, raised fears that many villages would face a slow death. The service said its remaining 960 post offices would benefit from "investment and consolidation."

Last November the Government approved €30m of State funding to protect the future of the postal network. 

Also last week, the Central Statistics Office (CSO) reported that the number of immigrants to the State in the year to April 2018 was estimated to have risen by 6.7% from 84,600 to 90,300 while the number of emigrants fell over the same period, from 64,800 to 56,300 (-13.1%) resulting in net Irish inward migration in 2018 of 34,000 — the highest level of net inward migration since 2008.