The story of money

Money can be more powerful than religion, ideology or even armies, writes David McWilliams in an extract from his new book, Money: A Story of Humanity. Mess with money and you mess with far more than the price system, inflation and economics – you mess with people’s heads. Today, whether we like it or not, our entire world revolves around money. People living thousands of miles apart, who don’t understand each other’s language or customs, understand money and speak to each other through it. Money is a force that dictates the flow of people, goods and ideas around the globe.
Which brings us to the €336,000 Leinster House bike shelter. When Allen Morgan went public about waste in the public sector, he was hoping the political establishment might sit up and take notice. He had been working in the Office of Public Works for 37 years, during which he had seen a litany of questionable spending and ill-considered property deals. Morgan now looks on with a wry eye as the spotlight lands squarely on the OPW once more. Morgan says the bike shelter story was a “microcosm” of what he has been trying to bring into the open.
If you’re thinking of opening a food business, Jamie O’Connell offers a word of warning. Amid recent news of a slew of high-profile restaurant closures, O’Connell says the Government has created a very difficult trading environment for food business owners. “They have implemented policy after policy that have made it feel like death by a thousand cuts, the key ones being the mandatory pension scheme (forthcoming in January 2025), the minimum wage increase (with another to come), the sick leave increases, a new public holiday, and the PRSI contribution rate increase. Worst of all, is the VAT returning to 13.5 per cent.
McWilliams isn’t the only Irish Times columnist with a new book out. Diarmaid Ferriter’s new follow-up to 2004′s The Transformation of Ireland is “an attempt to make sense of the scale and texture” of a rollercoaster quarter century “through a long historical lens”. What emerges is not just a country radically transformed for the better, but one whose deepest secrets have been exposed, writes Christopher Kissane in his review of The Revelation of Ireland: 1995-2020.
In her advice column this weekend, Roe McDermott, fields a question from a reader who says she is going through a very confusing period in her relationship. She and her partner are talking about marriage but it’s exposing certain areas of friction in their relationship. “We try to have conversations about these issues but I feel like we just talk in circles. I need your advice on how to deal with this, because I love him and I would like to make this work before making any drastic decisions,” she writes.
Back to the question of money, and, in Opinion, Mark O’Connell reckons the eye-watering sums paid for concernt tickets by Oasis fans, thanks to the interesting “dynamic pricing” system, could help bring about the downfall of capitalism itself. He says a much more insidious example of dynamic pricing, where demand dictates the cost of something, can be seen in rental accommodation. “This is less defensible because accommodation is a human necessity in a way that listening to Don’t Look Back in Anger in a field with 80,000 other people is not. If you’re going to call the cops over price gouging for concert tickets, as some of our politicians are suggesting, you’re going to have to call the cops on capitalism itself. And that, I’m guessing, is not what they mean to imply.”
In this week’s On the Money newsletter, Dominic Coyle looks at childcare costs. Sign up here to receive the newsletter straight to your inbox every Friday.
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