Our rip-off nation has the worst poverty rates in EU

NOW it’s official: we have the highest cost of living in the eurozone. Nobody should really be surprised.

We have traditionally thought of countries like France and Italy as being much more expensive than here. People came back for the World Cup in Italy in 1990 with tales of horror at the cost of everything there. But now that we have adopted the euro, people are coming back with the opposite tales of amazement. They went expecting to pay more - and maybe if they were paying millions of lira they might still think they were paying more - but they are aghast to find that it would actually have cost them so much more if they just walked down to the nearest restaurant at home.

The concerted effort to build up tourism in this country did not really begin until the 1950s. I grew up in Tralee, at a time when it was off the tourist map but in the heart of the tourist region. Some tourists merely passed through en route to Killarney or Dingle, but then a number of enterprising people came up with the idea of a festival to try to put the town on the tourist map.