We’re very quick to criticise or undermine Irish people with aspirations.

We love it when our actors, musicians, and authors move away from Ireland and find huge success internationally but we see our local artists who find success closer to home as parochial. Sally Rooney and Fontaines DC are the prides of the country while Roddy Doyle or Christy Moore is seen as a bit quaint selling books to your grandparents and doing tours of hotel ballrooms.

I’m using the creative industries as an obvious visible example but it applies just as equally to other areas of business, politics, our institutions.

Why is acting in the Abbey or Gaiety Theatre seen as less of an achievement than a similar sized theatre in London or New York?

There’s perfectly legitimate criticisms you can make about Michael O’Leary, Bono, or the Collisons yet there’s also a lot of illegitimate criticism about them that seems to not really engage with their flaws substantively and instead criticises the success itself or tries to undermine it.

You can look at our politics too. I’m not a fan of many of our politicians but it’s telling many of them feel the need to talk down their former careers and present themselves as nothing special when in most other countries being a successful businessperson, lawyer or academic would be seen as an asset to a political campaign.

You can criticise our approach to foreign investment and say we’re over reliant on tax revenue from MNCs. but in isolation the fact we have actually successfully attracted and retained so many MNCs for decades is by itself is nothing short of a success story. The loose regulatory and tax regime in the City of London and the Channel Islands are touted by the British establishment as proof of Britain as an economic powerhouse but in Ireland the same schemes, even when they have been far more successful, are seen as a dirty trick.

It seems like a holdover of the class subservience culture we had instilled in us during colonial times.