One in every 40 people living in Dublin is a millionaire – at least in dollar terms – according to the latest wealth report from Spear’s, a UK financial publication. A dollar millionaire (€743,000) is, however, still some €257,000 short of euro millionaire status. And as inflation steadily erodes the purchasing power of cash, one million held in any currency today is worth far less than the same sum a decade ago.
The magazine claims that Dublin has 26,600 millionaires, 13th in its global league table – based on the number of millionaires as a percentage of a city's population. Within Europe, Dublin is placed ninth, ahead of Paris. The capital has been helped by its status as a financial centre, which has attracted high-income earners – bankers, lawyers, accountants and consultants – much as London has done on a far larger scale. There, one in every 30 people is a millionaire. Statistics on wealth, however, should be treated with caution.
Eight years ago Bank of Ireland produced a major wealth report that, for members of the banking inquiry, should be required reading. It suggested Ireland's wealth per head was second only to Japan, and estimated that there were 30,000 millionaires in the country. Ireland was, it claimed, living in "a golden age of wealth accumulation" – which had only just begun. Two years later what unfolded instead was the start of a dark age of wealth destruction, with Bank of Ireland among the main casualties: its shares losing almost all their value before recovering. The Irish wealth phenomenon was narrowly based on soaring property prices of bubble proportions.
The American writer, Michael Lewis summed it up well when surveying the ruins of the property crash, where prices halved: "The Irish decided they wanted to buy Ireland – from each other". Wealth, as we have seen, can only be built, and sustained, when based on firm foundations. The number of millionaires, as we have seen to our cost, can prove a misleading indicator.