Ireland is a remarkably dysfunctional country. But I'm a bit salty after being told I'd have to wait 9 months to find out if my daughter had cancer and that I just needed to "be patient with the system". Mind you, that was going private - public would have been even worse.

But hey, sure it's grand, we've always done it this way.

(She does not have cancer. We were able to determine this by going to Northern Ireland and availing of private consultations in the UK. But it's absurd that it was necessary to do this.)

Of course, we have an agent looking for houses in Utrecht for us now, so maybe I'm just trading one dysfunctional state for another. At least one with better bike infra, though!

It's the current government that is the major issue with the country right now. They're unpopular, figuratively and literally. In the last election, they got very few of the first votes, and they were only able to get into power with coalition of arguably the worst political parties in the country. They are well aware none of them will get into power next election, and are using their time in power to not only profit financially, but also ruin this country to sabotage any following government.

If you'd like a good example, the vast majority of the politicians in power are landlords or land owners. In recent years we have seen massive inflation in property prices and rent. There's been an erosion of protections agaisnt homelessness, and large payouts for landlords.

Leo Varadkar when in power was caught in broad daylight committing corruption. Giving confidential documents to a friend who owned a health clinic. The criminal investigation was brushed under a rug.

There's hope with a new goverment, it would likely be quite left leaning and many parties involved would be socialist of some form. But to be fair there are massive problems socially with Ireland, same with the Netherlands and in turn a lot of other European states.