Every country that has become extraordinarily wealthy through external extraction has had to answer the same question: what is the windfall for?

Norway, when handed North Sea oil, ring-fenced the revenue in a sovereign wealth fund and used Statoil to build a domestic supplier industry that will outlast its oil reserves; Singapore channelled its tax advantages into directed industrial investment; and South Korea converted US aid and export concessions into Hyundai and Samsung, its national champions.

What these countries share is the simple recognition that external revenue is nothing more than a tool; the raw material to develop its local economy, not the achievement itself.

Ireland has failed to answer this question of what to use its wealth for, as it seems we did not know the question existed. For over a decade, as the corporate tax take rose relentlessly to reach €35 billion – not far off half of it accounted for by three big US companies – the country has behaved as though this bounty was a durable feature of the economy rather than short-term luck.

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The Irish surplus is the largest in the EU per capita, yet our infrastructure index is below Poland’s. Meaning that while corporation tax has quintupled in a decade, our rail network has halved in a century. The State takes in €126 billion a year and cannot create a civil protection agency, a gas storage facility or a train to Donegal.

Leo Varadkar’s recent comments on rural Ireland express this catastrophic failure with unusual clarity. Speaking about........

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