My New Job

Progress for Progress Ireland (I hope!)

Lord knows I’ve made lots of mistakes. In order to keep track of them, and to do better in future, I have created a public mistakes page. If you’ve found an error in something I’ve written, please email me so I can catalogue it.

Three weeks ago, I graduated from university.

And three days after that, I started a new job, as the Innovation Policy Lead for Progress Ireland.

To follow exactly what I’ll be up to in this role, I recommend subscribing to the Progress Ireland Substack. As part of getting back into the groove of more regular publishing, this year I am also a Blog-Building Fellow with the Roots of Progress Institute.

Progress Ireland is an independent think tank that launched in September 2024. To the best of my knowledge, we are the only non-government-funded think tank in the country. I was involved with PI from the beginning as a Non-Resident Fellow. Other Non-Resident Fellows include my friend Julia Willemyns, co-founder of the Centre for British Progress, and (as Senior Fellow) the incomparable Ed Walsh, founder of the University of Limerick. However, there was only so much I could do from afar while also finishing my degree.

If you go back far enough, you can probably trace the existence of PI to a cold Twitter DM about a Fitzwilliam post I received from our now Executive Director, Seán Keyes. When I first met him, Seán was a finance journalist, cruising for a normal middle-class Irish life with 2.1 kids in the suburbs. Now, all his friends are weirdo internet polymaths in their 20s. I often wonder what his wife must think of me.¹

My job title is purposefully vague, but here are the areas I am most excited about working on in this role:

• Understanding the burgeoning field of metascience, and what we have learned about how to better manage the scientific production function. It’s ironic that, for a discipline based on experimentation, the organisation of scientific institutions has been subject to remarkably little experimentation. The two main funding organisations for science in Ireland, the Irish Research Council and Science Foundation Ireland, have recently merged into a single body, Research Ireland. Their new CEO, Diarmuid O’Brien, is, by all accounts, an imaginative and open-minded person. I would like to see more experimentation with alternatives to the traditional funding models for science and to peer review. (I’m pleased that I often get to discuss these issues with my friends at the Institute for Progress, Open Philanthropy Project and Renaissance Philanthropy.) Along similar lines, Ireland is one of the world’s major hubs for pharmaceutical production. Yet, very few clinical trials actually take place here. The ones that do face unnecessary delays and have their scientific value undermined by bureaucracy.²

• Although Ireland is often seen as a relatively pro-business environment, this perception largely stems from its favourable tax treatment of large multinationals. Ireland has poorly structured capital taxation rules – for example, we have no equivalent of the ISA – that make it difficult to save or invest outside of pension plans and housing. Irish startups are struggling, and SMEs’ value-add is weak.

• I am personally highly uncertain about AI policy, but I know that we all need to be thinking more about it. The EU headquarters of OpenAI and Anthropic are in Dublin, and Ireland and Irish diplomats have a track record of influence on policy relevant to technology companies that is off the charts in per capita terms. Yet, the number of people working on AI policy full-time in Ireland is approximately zero.

• Nuclear power is currently banned in Ireland. While I’m not optimistic that building a nuclear power plant will be politically feasible, it’s important that we unban it, and to lend our support toward it at the European level. I think successfully running such a campaign is well within our powers. In the best case, Ireland could lead the world by being a regulatory sandbox for the deployment of SMRs and other new nuclear technology.

• Irish foreign aid has received little serious scrutiny. The best efforts in global health have been extraordinarily successful,³ and Ireland is quite uncreative in how it spends its preposterously large budgetary surpluses. I am particularly excited about advanced market commitments and other market-shaping initiatives, including for the impending crisis of antimicrobial resistance.

If you are a subscriber to this newsletter, there is a decent chance you are on board with this mission. If you are already working on any of these issues and you think that I can help, let me know. But what can you do to help?

First, the range of topics I need to know about for my job is bewildering. If there is a reading group, seminar, class, or event you think I’d particularly benefit from, let me know. This is part of what I’ve had in mind with the Fitzwilliam reading group, but I feel I am still nowhere near the frontier of how quickly I can learn, and take input and advice from thoughtful scholars.

Second, if you can help me with any of this directly, please email sam@progressireland.org. Fortunately for my employer, I have no life, and am happy to meet any day and almost any time, Monday to Sunday.

Third, you can donate. If we have more money, we can hire more people, publish more, and have more influence. I honestly think the case for donating to Progress Ireland is extremely compelling. You can donate directly on our website, or, for a larger amount, email me, and we can share more information. Our donors are listed publicly, and we are transparent about where our funding comes from.

Naturally enough, there are only so many details that can be shared publicly, but let me just say: we already have a good track record of influencing national-level policy conversations. The clearest example of this is on seomraí (granny flats), which soon will no longer require planning permission. Our Director of Housing Policy, Seán O’Neill McPartlin, has also been pushing for a relaxation in Ireland’s extremely high and costly minimum apartment standards. (My own views on urbanism are a story for another day, but there are worse places to start than Bertaud’s Order Without Design.)

A friend with extensive experience in Irish politics once told me that he thought that the system is so conservative that the optimistic case for an outsider organisation is that it would take ten people working full-time for five years to have any meaningful impact. We managed it with four people in a year.

In addition to email, my DMs are also open.

Most of my closest friends have emigrated from this country, mostly out of frustration, mostly because of entirely preventable policy failures. We can do better.

Beir bua – onward, to victory. ☘️

PS We host a monthly ‘friends of PI’ meetup on the last Wednesday of every month. The next one is on July 30th (tomorrow!) at 6:15pm upstairs in The Duke. You can (optionally) RSVP here.

Sam Enright is editor-in-chief of The Fitzwilliam. You can read his personal blog here or follow him on Twitter here.

1. Incredibly, this is not even the only economist in his 40s named Seán with whom I’ve had a similar relationship.

2. Ruxandra Teslo is worth reading on this topic (and on everything else). This report from the Irish Pharmaceutical Healthcare Association compares Ireland to Denmark, which has a similar population but three times as many clinical trials. A fun piece of PI lore is that Ruxandra was able to get a visa in time to go to the policy workshop discussed in the link above through a Progress Ireland effort to ferry her passport to and from the American embassy in Dublin in time.

3. Note that July’s Fitzwilliam reading group with Santi Ruiz was about PEPFAR.