I live on an estate of 9 houses of which two are occupied... the other seven have been rotting for most of the last 3 years and at least 4 are owned by the banks as the developer went broke. The same is true all over the country. All these house were built as we were seeing immigration figures of over 200,000 people a year and our population was booming.
DP is a trained IT technician who can't get a job for love not money, our government run employment agency FAS told him 'There are no jobs, emigrate or do another course'
Our rent is 520euros a month (that's rural prices, we moved from the city 3 years ago as our rent was 850 a month and about to go up), car insurance is 45 a month, tax is 96 every 3 months for a small engined car, home heating oil costs over 200 for less than a months supply which we can't afford so we're surviving with 2 electric heaters and a tiny open fire, my weekly shop for 5 of us buying budget comes in at 150 euros or more (more most weeks tbh), electricity is 116 a month, rubbish collection 25 a month, broadband (which i need to study) is over 350 a year... the list goes on. And yet the country has no money... i'd love to know where it's all going as there's certainly enough of it flying out of my hands 
Most Irish people have to pay for all health care, if you do have a medical card you have to pay a nominal amount for prescriptions... we pay for our children's school books as well as endless extras through the year and there's no such thing as school dinners over here. We don't pay corporation taxes but we do pay large amounts of refuse charges, road taxes and various other taxes and charges that do get used for the same purpose as British corporation taxes and we don't receive the same tax credits and other benefits that most English families are entitled to.
All that being said i think the blame for this situation is purely laid at the door of the Irish...
the government who profited from the recklessness of the developers and gave them break after break whilst allowing our commercial and industrial investors to up and leave one by one without doing a damn thing to stop them... thousands of Irish were employed by foreign multinationals in factories and call centres across the country and the vast majority of those people are unemployed now.
The education system who put the notion into the heads of thousands of young people that as long as you have a degree jobs will fall at your feet, most of these people are working as cold callers, supermarket assistants and factory workers now... better the money was spent to fund them in vocational training than so many people with no particular aptitude for university education were sponsored through university so they could sit behind a checkout and scan bar codes.
the Irish people who think it's their god given right to own their own home no matter what their financial or employment status and are too naive to realise that if it sounds like too good a deal then it generally is.
The banks who borrowed to those they knew would never be able to repay, and who loaned millions to developers for unneeded housing that the aforementioned idiots above would buy for extortionist prices and then fail to pay the mortgage on within months.
And now we're borrowing money from our ever so gracious neighbours in the EU and my children will be grown by the time the country recovers.
We can't even emigrate as we don't can't afford to 