In most countries, GDP, representing all the activity recorded in the economy and GNI, representing the activity that really took place, are more or less the same. In Ireland, from the 1990s onwards, the two diverged ever more widely. In 1995, real GNI7 was 8 per cent lower than GDP. In 2019, it was 40 per cent below. We were back, in other words, with double realities – the way things seemed to be and the way they were – and the gap between them was getting steadily larger.
