Ireland has a new Minister for Finance. Simon Harris is energetic, personable and politically agile. He is skilled at communication and more than comfortable in the relentless rhythm of public life. But the role he has now stepped into is no longer a ceremonial portfolio for steady hands and reassuring soundbites. It is about to become the single most demanding job in the State.
Ireland is heading into a period of economic correction unlike anything we have experienced since 2008. The difference now is that we no longer have the buffers of that era: no rising corporate tax surge to mask our structural weaknesses; no ultra-low interest rates to hide bad decisions; no runaway tech expansion to inflate our balance sheets.
The next decade will require something Ireland has not often demanded of its political class: genuine economic statecraft.
For 20 years, Ireland has relied on a narrow growth model comprising low corporate tax rates, aggressive courting of foreign direct investment (FDI), the gravitational pull of US tech and abundant global capital. This insulated us from hard choices. We built an economy that performed spectacularly on paper and struggled visibly on the ground. Housing became a supply-chain failure; infrastructure lagged far behind demographic reality; productivity figures were buoyed more by multinational accounting than domestic dynamism.
That era has ended.
The transition we face now is not a cyclical downturn but a structural realignment. Interest rates will likely never return to the near-zero world of the 2010s. Corporate tax receipts are flattening. Global supply chains are reorganising along geopolitical lines that do not favour a small, passive economy. Even the stability of FDI is no longer guaranteed.
This is the moment in which Ireland needs a Minister for Finance capable of long-horizon macro-design, led by someone who can reshape the fundamentals of how the Irish economy works. It is a job that requires more than merely communicating through the incoming crises.
And this is where the discomfort begins.
Harris has spent much of his career in what might be called “urgent-but-low-complexity” ministries: health, higher education, further education. These are intense portfolios, and in the case of health include managing a runaway budget and persistent waiting lists, but their most important demands are crisis management and public reassurance, not structural economic design. His most recent role, foreign affairs, is strategically important, but it does not require technical economic expertise. His strength has always been optics and communication. None of this should be dismissed, of course, but it is not the skill set required for building the fiscal, industrial and capital architecture Ireland now needs.
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Nor did his earlier stint as minister of state at the Department of Finance meaningfully develop deep fluency in macroeconomics, taxation, capital markets or industrial strategy, as it was a political role, not a technical one. His rise to become the youngest taoiseach in the history of the State highlights the pattern that Harris has been consistently rewarded for political agility, communication and organisational stamina rather than for domain-specific expertise. His rapid ascent is impressive, but it is rooted in political capability, not in economic statecraft.
More strikingly, though rarely said aloud, Harris does not have an academic background in finance or economics. This is not an argument for elitism. Rather, it is a reflection of a deeper cultural pattern. In most jurisdictions, economic stewardship is a specialist discipline; in Ireland, it is filled without regard for domain expertise.
This is simply how the political system is constructed in Ireland. It favours professional politicians over experts.
One of his predecessors, Jack Chambers – who was minister for finance between 2024 and 2025 and is now Minister for Public Expenditure – took on the finance portfolio aged just 33. He holds degrees in law, political science and medicine, but he had no professional experience in economics, capital markets, taxation or industrial policy before assuming one of the most technical roles in Government. His route to the ministry was again political rather than economic.
In a country brimming with economists, financial lawyers, analysts and industrial strategists, we should think carefully about placing the most important economic portfolio in the hands of people whose backgrounds would not qualify them for an entry-level role in the sectors they must oversee.
Ireland’s approach to the finance ministry has become indifferent to domain expertise, treating the stewardship of the economy as a mere political rotation rather than the specialist appointment it urgently needs. The obvious exception is Paschal Donohoe, whose academic grounding in economics and public policy gave him a technical fluency rare in Irish politics. His tenure demonstrates the point rather than undermines it: when we place specialists in specialist roles, the quality of economic stewardship improves. But this has been the exception, not the rule.
This is not a question of youth or class; nor is it a question of competence. Finance is not a ministry one “figures out” over time. It requires deep fluency in how capital moves, how complex systems behave, how risk accumulates, how shocks propagate and how a small open economy survives global turbulence. It requires an economic strategist, not a short-term understudy.
Ireland’s political culture has long been defined by a soft anti-intellectualism, in that we have a preference for generalists over specialists, leading to favouring ministerial loyalty over capability. We reward political stamina rather than technical depth, treating complex portfolios as rites of passage rather than domains requiring mastery. The result of this is clear: we have created a Government that responds to crises, yet is less capable of preparing for them.
The consequences of this approach are now unavoidable. Ireland must redesign its housing and land system, rebuild its industrial base, develop a national productivity strategy, restructure its infrastructure model, reduce its dependence on corporate tax and participate meaningfully in EU-level economic design. These are structural, technical undertakings that cannot be solved through PR or outsourced to consultancies.
Other small states such as Denmark, Finland, Estonia and Singapore understand this. They appoint ministers with deep domain expertise to the portfolios that govern their future. Ireland continues to imagine that good intentions and work ethic can substitute for strategic capability.
That luxury is gone.
Harris is not unintelligent, incapable or ill-intentioned. He is simply mismatched to the moment. And the moment is too consequential to be led by people who must learn on the job. The next five years will determine the next 50 years of civic and structural progress. If Ireland is to navigate the economic restructuring ahead, it will require leadership equal to the scale of the challenge.
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Ireland deserves, and urgently needs, a Minister for Finance whose skill set matches the future we are walking into.
Sinéad O’Sullivan is a business economist, formerly at Harvard Business School where she served as the head of strategy of the HBS Institute for Strategy
