The Marshall Review

Content Advisory

This essay contains concept placement. Readers may be exposed to unfamiliar questions, occasional advocacy and speculative thinking. Side effects may include curiosity, reflection and a desire to discuss the future. Adult supervision is advised.

We need a vision

This is a phrase that appears frequently in Irish public life. I used it myself only recently in my article titled The Need for Vision. The phrase surfaces whenever discussions turn to housing, infrastructure, energy, education or regional development. It is usually followed by agreement. Yes, we need a vision. Yes, we need long-term thinking. Yes, we need to look beyond the next election.

Yet the phrase leaves me uneasy. Not because it is wrong. Because it may be asking the wrong question. What if Ireland does not lack vision at all? What if the real question is:

What happened to our imagination?

For much of its history, Ireland was powered by acts of imagination. The generation that sought independence imagined a country that did not yet exist. The generation that built the institutions of the State imagined a functioning nation where previously there had only been aspiration. The architects of Ardnacrusha imagined electrification reaching a largely rural society and transforming daily life.

At the time, such ambitions must have seemed extraordinary. Yet somebody imagined them first. Later generations imagined a different Ireland. One connected to Europe. One open to trade and investment. One capable of offering opportunities that previous generations could only seek abroad. Many of those ambitions were realised.

Perhaps that success has created an unexpected problem. For decade upon decade, Ireland knew what it was trying to do. It was trying to become free, it was trying to become prosperous.

Today, Ireland is among the wealthiest countries in Europe. The language of economic catch-up no longer carries the same urgency. We have spent decades climbing a mountain, only to discover that reaching the summit does not answer the question of where to go next.

Prosperity, it turns out, is not a destination. It is a capability.

And capabilities raise further questions. A wealthy country can build more houses. But what kind of communities is it trying to create? A wealthy country can build renewable energy infrastructure. But what sort of landscape does it wish to leave behind? A wealthy country can invest in education and research. But to what end?

Increasingly, I find that many of our public debates focus on means rather than ends. We discuss targets. We discuss delivery. We discuss funding. We discuss regulation. All of these things matter. Yet they are ultimately instruments. They tell us how. They do not tell us why.

Somewhere along the way, we seem to have become uncomfortable discussing the destination.

Perhaps this is because imagining the future feels risky. It is much easier to argue over a budget line than to describe the country one hopes to inhabit twenty-five years from now. Numbers can be defended. Visions invite disagreement.

Yet every significant achievement begins as a vision of some kind. Before it became a bridge, a research institution, a university, a port, an orchestra or a power station, it existed as imagination. Someone looked beyond the present and asked:

What if? What if this country could do that? What if this place could become something more? The question is not whether Ireland possesses imaginative people. It undoubtedly does. The question is whether we have created enough space for collective imagination.

Modern life encourages a relentless focus on the immediate. Elections, news cycles, quarterly results and social media all reward short horizons. The next headline is always more urgent than the next generation. Perhaps this explains why discussions about the future often feel fragmented. We talk about housing in one room, energy in another, transport somewhere else and education somewhere else again. Each conversation is important, yet the larger picture remains elusive.

What kind of Ireland are all these efforts intended to create?

We rarely stop to ask.

Maybe we have mistaken administration for direction. Maybe we have become so concerned with managing the present that we have neglected the task of imagining the future. Or perhaps the imagination is still there, scattered across communities, universities, businesses, arts organisations, local initiatives and public institutions, waiting to be assembled into a more coherent picture.

I do not know.

But I suspect the first step is not to produce a grand strategy or a new national plan. It is simply to recover the habit of asking larger questions...

What should a successful Ireland feel like in 2050? What capabilities should it possess? What should future generations inherit? What would make us proud of the country we leave behind? These questions may never produce unanimous answers. That is not their purpose. Their purpose is to remind us that nations are shaped first by imagination and only later by policy and action.

Every great project begins the same way. Someone imagines a future that does not yet exist. Then they ask whether it might be made real.

David Marshall Dublin