Add the half cent to the cent

There once was a time when one left Ireland, a land of few jobs and correspondingly low prices, for other countries with lots of jobs and higher prices knowing at least that you'd have good purchasing power on the occasional trips home. Well, for the Irish emigrants in the USA, this upside to being abroad is well and truly dead. We were already counting the squeeze induced by the ever weaker dollar and now comes an Irish government report confirming what we already suspected -- that the Republic has the highest consumer price level within the eurozone countries. That qualifier eurozone is important because of course our nearest neighbour, the UK, is not included. In fact, it's the relative familiarity of Irish people with UK, and only UK, prices that has sustained the illusion within the Republic that it is a still a cheap place to live. Like just about everyone, we experience monstrous sticker-shock on those trips to London and all of a sudden Dublin seems like a bargain. But head east rather than west from London, and it's a different story. Somehow the Irish have an image of Paris prices derived from visions of fabulous historic apartments, tailored shirts for corrupt former prime ministers, and urban legends of a friend of a friend who once paid 5 quid for a glass of coke. But whether one considers the tourist-friendly activities like eating out, or social services like education and health, France is not that expensive. It's the 3 things we just mentioned where Ireland is the bad boy of the eurozone, price-wise. Nevertheless, the weak dollar is not Ireland's fault. We wonder at what point the parents will start sending remittances to us.