Peter Boland, as well as running Cases.ie is the director of the Alliance for Insurance Reform.

*****

There’s a lot of people talking about the other thing, but I'm sure you’ve heard enough about it by now, and there’s nothing extra that I can say that hasn’t already been said, so let’s talk about something else.

Let’s talk about the state of the world and
its people. Bear in mind that
life expectancy in Ireland in 1916 was just 53. Thinking of all the
countries in the world, taking into account the huge populations of the poor
countries in Africa and Asia, what would you guess is the average life
expectancy of people today? 50 years? 60 Years? No, the
average across the whole world is now 70.

And again, across the whole world, what
percent of the population do you think has access to electricity? The answer is
80 per cent. And if you had to guess what percent of children had at least some
of their vaccinations? Again, across the planet, the answer is 80 per cent.

Finally, if you had to guess, over the last
hundred years, taking into account the massive population explosion we’ve had,
what has happened to the number of people – the absolute number, not the
proportion – the number of people who die each year in natural disasters; has
it more than doubled? Stayed the same? In fact, that number has more than
halved.

All these figures come from a
book by the Swedish academic Hans Rosling, and he formulated them to show
us that sometimes, things are much better than we think they are, and in
particular, for all our cynicism, things can and do get better. Lots better.

By those metrics that he chooses, the
average person in the world today is vastly better off than the average person
was in Ireland a hundred years ago.

More children – much, much more children –
are getting educated, much more people are getting basic healthcare, much more
people have access to the basics of comfort that the whole of humanity went