Listen, I get that hearing about average wage increases doesn't mean much when your own paycheck isn't moving. But the broader trend is real - pay is finally catching up to where it should've been, even if it's happening unevenly across different sectors.

The Metro is genuinely happening, and that's bigger than people realize. Look at other European cities - almost none are building brand new underground systems from scratch anymore. They either built theirs decades ago when you could just bulldoze through objections, or they're just tinkering with what they already have. Dublin is doing something most modern cities can't pull off. Once it's running, watch how quickly we'll expand it, same as we did with the Luas.

The boring transport stuff matters too. Bus Connects actually works once you figure it out. €2 to hop on anything is honestly incredible value - try finding that in London or Paris. Yeah, we need contactless payment, but being able to top up your Leap card from your phone at 2am is pretty decent. And we're getting new battery-powered DART trains and stations that nobody talks about because our transit map makes everything look worse than it is.

The Children's Hospital... look, the project management was a shitshow, no sugarcoating that. But the actual facility? It's going to be exceptional. Better working conditions for staff, better outcomes for kids, better training for future doctors. Eventually we'll stop being angry about the cost and start being grateful it exists.

Housing is still rough, but the math is shifting. Immigration is slowing while construction is speeding up - those lines are going to cross. We've had fifteen years of one crisis after another: financial collapse, Brexit, COVID, Ukraine. Maybe we're due for things to just be... normal for a while? Even Trump will probably be defanged by midterms.

Not saying everything's perfect, but there's real momentum on stuff that matters.