Across France, town halls are being petrol bombed while half a million people are drawn to the streets to revolt. I do not need to belabour the extent to which the French, rather famously, tend to go all-in on their protests

Curiously though, in the same week, Ireland staged its largest strike since 2009 – with about 300,000 teachers, nurses and civil servants downing their tools for a single day. The strikers were looking for a pay rise, which can be thought of as a short-term solution to the structural quagmire the country finds itself in, at best.

While the majority of people I meet seem to lament endlessly their dissatisfaction and even anger with the state of Ireland’s economy, at some stage the inevitable question arises: why does anger about our fast-deteriorating living conditions never amount to pressure for structural reform?

The answer, I suspect, lies in how that frustration is organised. While the proclivity for protest runs through French culture deeply, Ireland has a pressure-release mechanism that ensures our anger rarely spills into the streets: we negotiate politely, we distribute out money and subsidies, and eventually, should that fail to satisfy us, we emigrate.

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This creates what we see today; a dystopian equilibrium in which people’s disillusionment is matched equally by their desire to maintain the status quo – in a system that never quite reaches the boiling point of being challenged. And as long as there is enough cash to be handed out and enough one-way flights to Sydney available to escape the problems, this will........

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