Ireland's hidden crossover

The CSO released a hundred-year comparison earlier this year looking at how Ireland has changed since 1926. One column stopped me in my tracks. Occupational.

In 1926, Ireland had 10,852 drivers of horse vehicles and 10,291 drivers of motor vehicles. We were almost exactly at the crossover.

There were 1,441 saddlers and 1,399 grooms keeping the old system running, and 4,609 motor mechanics already building the new one. The CSO themselves called them the new saddlers of the machine age.

But the horse was not just on the road. It was the engine of the farm. In 1926, more than half of everyone at work in Ireland, 51 percent, worked on the land. By the time we joined the EEC in 1973, it was 24 percent. Today it is 4 percent.

The total number of people at work did not fall. It rose from 1.3 million to 2.3 million.

I keep coming back to that. The jobs changed, the industries shifted, and the skills people needed looked nothing like before. But there was more work at the end of it, not less.

That is worth remembering when you hear predictions about AI replacing entire categories of work. The same pattern has played out before, with engines, electricity, and machines. The work changes. People find new things to be useful at.

If you run a business, the work will change. What matters is what you want your team to be doing when it does.