Ireland has sinned

As we posted before, the British military defence chief implicitly compared the Irish Republic to Pakistan. And the world will learn, via The Economist magazine's pocketbook of world figures for 2004, that those Irish drink themselves silly and don't bother getting married (presumably because they are too drunk to make it up the aisle). Old stereotypes die hard, it would appear. Now, whatever about the debate over Dublin's striking resemblance to Islamabad, it turns out that The Economist, doubtless seeking a statistic that would be too good to be true, managed to find just that. For the marriage and drinking statistics are bogus.

As reported on Friday's Irish Times, they got the drink spending wrong by comparing the retail spending on booze in Ireland to the wholesale spending in the rest of Europe -- with the taxes and profit margins on booze, you can see (unlike The Economist) how that would make a big difference. And for the wedding statistics, it's hard to see where they got their number, although one possibility is simply that they lost some zeroes.

The basic message of the correct statistics is that the Irish are about at the EU averages. And where is The Economist? Well, about at the stage where Punch magazine was regarding the Irish in the 19th century, as you'll see from this nicely collected set of images on a Haverford College academic's website.