Michael Collins & The Economy

[drbob1972]

He was wrong on that issue. Federalism might have had a necessary role in a United Ireland certainly, but with 2 constituent parts of the federation, rather than 4. We were very poor back then anyway and having more than that would have being wasting precious resources on bureaucracy.

whilst i'm not saying it would work i'd not be so sure that the bureaucracy would have automatically been larger because of it, it could have been organized in a different way with a single federal government, based in Dublin, and with 4 regional provisional governments / assembles / authorities call them what you would, however in this case the county councils / UDC's corporations would logically be part of the provisional government and not separate entities, scaled correctly with single province wide rolls and functions the total head-count of civil servants could have been level or possibly reduced.

as to the original idea, in principal a federal ireland could work if done more on the swiss model than anything else, there could indeed have been competition (limited to certain areas) between the provinces for things like FDI.

[MFW]

Thank you all for the replies to my question above! Things are now a bit clearer to me.

By the way, does anyone know if there are any state-sponsored or Fine Gael commemorations at Collins's grave? I wonder because I happened to be there last October and his grave was almost invisible under flowers and wreaths. That was one reason why I asked the other question in the first place...

[MFW]

To add something to this topic: I live in a typical federal state (Germany) and I would say it is a good thing in general, but the idea of "competition" between states is often frustrating. Politicians tend to take up this argument to block many desirable solutions for the whole country.

To give you an example, we now have basically 16 different smoking bans - one for every state. In some states you are not allowed to smoke in any pub or restaurant, in other states there are exceptional rules. We also have 16 different educational systems and so on.