Positive Irish
Good news for a change. According to the World Bank, Ireland ranks in the top 10 countries to do business. This, despite the IMF/EU bailout, despite the austerity measures, despite the flight of talent from our shores, despite the increasing taxes, despite many other factors that would give the impression that the country should be struggling to do business. Ireland ranks number 10 overall. It gets better: go to the cited report and use the interactive controls to narrow the range on each ranking to 1-13 and thereby reduce the selection to the overall top 5. Ireland comes in at #5. The others (in ranking order) are Singapore, Hong Kong, New Zealand and the USA. If you then compare these five countries according to World Bank category rankings, you find that Ireland only falls down in three categories: the ease of getting an electricity supply, registering property and enforcing contracts. In all other areas it scores highly.
Image from: ease-doing-business.findthedata.org
While this does look like a very positive picture, one should also keep in mind that the categories are equally weighted, which probably does not reflect the priorities that real businesses would place on these different factors. Of course, no two businesses would agree on how to balance these, so I suppose an equal weighting is as good as any other. (That is, probably useless.)
Maybe if we fixed the electricity and did something about the land registration process we could rank #1 next year. That would be good news.