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reddit上有个吹爱尔兰的,真是各花入各眼
https://www.quora.com/If-Ireland ... eland?no_redirect=1
I seriously doubt that your question is based on actual experience because you seem to be having it totally backwards.
If I visit Ireland from the Netherlands - which I do a lot; my family has a little house there - I’m always struck by how incredibly well-organised and modern the country looks. The roads are all (and I mean ALL) in perfect condition, houses are modern, public transport uses very modern vehicles, shops are clean and well-stocked. The whole country is clean and just oozes wealth and comfort.
Compare that to both the UK and the USA, where you can obviously find large pockets of massive wealth, but the overall experience is in both countries one of: you can clearly see that once upon a time these were well-off countries. They used to have a modern society, but it is in dire need of some repair and upgrades. The busses often look like they’re handovers from third world countries, the roads are (more so in the US, but definitely more in the UK than in either Ireland or most of the continent) in need of repair, on average you see much more houses that are clearly overdue for a coat of paint, and so on.
I don’t know if Ireland is as ‘rich’ as you claim, but it certainly looks rich to me. I get the same feeling there I get in the Netherlands, or Scandinavia: all the stuff just works and is modern and well-maintained. Travelling to either the US or the UK (I have little experience with Canada; I literally only ever spent twenty minutes there) feels much more like a jouney back in time. Even the way you do your banking (especially in the US), with your paper money and cheques feels like something out of a historical novel these days.
UPDATE 15/1/2020
Although this is not the highest upvoted answer I ever made, it’s certainly the one that has the most expansive comment thread I’ve ever experienced, which suggests that the answer - or maybe the question - has struck a nerve somewhere.
I have never had an answer being commented, shared, forwarded, thanked for, and translated as much as this one (yes, someone thought the Italian Quora might benefit from my insights into the comparative wealth or lack thereof in a list of Anglo-saxon countries).
I have stated this in the comments several times, but it keeps coming up so I’ll do a ‘one size fits all’ reply:
The main motivation for my answer was the clearly ignorantly formulated question. In my desire to put that into words, I may have heaved a little to the other side and not communicated clearly enough that I was talking about trends. How I, as an almost yearly visitor of Ireland in the last 25 years or so, have seen the country improve significantly in terms of organisation and infrastructure. The people who keep coming up with examples of bad roads or leaking buildings in Ireland are very likely correct. The people who say things haven’t changed in their neighbourhood for the last two decades are also probably correct. I wasn’t trying to make the point that Ireland is perfect now - it clearly isn’t.
But so much stuff is clearly so much better now than it was in the past. I have seen travel times by car from coast to coast cut almost in half in about a decade and a half. I have seen a country jump from an almost 19th century, paper money world into one that is almost completely digital in the same amount of time. And it’s not only that, it’s the people and the culture as well. I know many Irish people and am proud to count many among them as my good friends. They all acknowledge my observation that in that same short space of time, the country changed culturally and politically, from a dour, conservative, pessimistic religious bastion into a modern society with a lot of room for diversity.
Ireland isn’t perfect, and neither the UK or the US are now third world shithole countries.
What I will stand by is that so much does get better every time I visit Ireland - obviously that does not mean everything gets better. I will also stand by my opinion that the same does not happen on the same scale in either the UK or the US. Maybe that is just a result of Ireland coming up from a place that was a lot worse than the UK and US were in at the same time; that they had more low hanging fruit to improve upon.
But the fact remains that when I drive on a backroad in Ireland in heavy rain in the middle of the night, and it’s a well paved road to begin with, I’m confident that the quality of the road surface will be the same and will risk driving at the speed limit regardless of poor visibility. In the US and the UK I will have to assume unexpected pot holes will materialise so I’ll adjust my speed accordingly. It’s little things like that that make me by and large stick with my answer, regardless of the many counter examples presented below here concerning the true state of Irish infrastructure. |
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