For someone like me, heading towards retirement, it's too late. But I look at my teenagers and I wonder.

For younger people here in the next few years there will be a big decision to make -- to stay in Ireland or to leave.

If I was graduating from school or college and had my whole life stretching out ahead of me, I know which option I would be choosing.

It's not just the question of trying to find or hold on to a job here, something that is very hard now and is going to get increasingly difficult in the future as unemployment hits the half million mark and beyond.

Even for those who will be lucky enough to get a job, pay rates will be going down and opportunities will be very limited. That's the first thing.

But that's just the start of it. There is also the huge burden of national debt repayment that will have to be shouldered by the coming generation of workers, something that will affect personal income and lifestyle in a big way here in the years ahead.

If I were a young person coming on to the jobs market in Ireland in the next year or two, I might be asking myself why my generation should be the one which has to pay for the excesses of what went on during the boom years. Somehow it doesn't seem fair.

There will be higher taxes and new taxes; there will be charges for all kinds of things (like medicines and college education) that used to be free to those who qualified. The bottom line is that everything in Ireland is going to cost more, a whole lot more.

At the same time, competition for the available jobs will be intense and pay rates will suffer. In a nutshell, it won't be a good time to be living in Ireland.

The reason for all this is something we have been exploring in this column for weeks now, the huge gap that has opened up here between tax revenue and state spending.

Tax revenue collapsed when the boom died but state spending has actually been increasing, mainly to pay welfare to all the people who have been losing their jobs. Major cutbacks have to be made to stop Ireland going bankrupt, and in this column last week we considered some of the areas for cuts identified by the so-called Bord Snip report for the government.

That report caused an outcry for a few days here, but now everything has gone quiet again. An air of depressed indifference has settled over the country, made worse by the awful wet summer we are having. The politicians are on holidays, and there's a feeling that all that bad stuff can be left to later in the year.

But like it or not, the bad stuff is coming down the line. The government's plan, which includes the €5 billion ($7 billion) in spending cuts suggested by Bord Snip, or their equivalent, along with new property, water and carbon taxes and probably higher income taxes, will still require borrowings of more than €60 billion ($84.5 billon) over the next four years.

If you add in the €20 billion ($28 billion) borrowed this year, the existing national debt is going to nearly triple, from €50 billion ($70 billion) to €130 billion ($183 billion). The extra cost to the taxpayer of this added debt will be around €6 billion ($8.4 billion) a year -- more than wiping out all of the savings from the Bord Snip cutbacks, for example.

If we can endure all that pain, we will begin to get our finances back to a level of borrowing that is more in line with our European partners. We will avoid national bankruptcy and an invasion by the International Monetary Fund.

But that's a big "if." Already there is strong opposition building up to the cutbacks report, and we don't know how much of it will actually be implemented.

The government figures also assume that there will be a reasonable level of economic growth in Ireland from 2011 on, with a tax revenue recovery, and that is still far from certain.

So even on the government's own figures, there are years of hardship ahead, years when the reduction in the feel good factor we are used to here is going to be enormous.

The standard of living is going to be way down, and people are going to feel like they are working for the tax man more than ever before. The college leavers and young couples starting out in life in the next few years are going to feel this burden heavily ... and they could be carrying it for the next 10 years.

The unfairness of this is striking. But there is another unfair factor at work here which I think will push many people into leaving and trying their luck elsewhere.

That factor is the way that many powerful people in Irish society will be able to avoid carrying their share of the burden. In spite of the call from the government that everyone must put a shoulder to the wheel to solve the mess, there are some well-connected areas in Irish life -- professionals and state workers are two examples -- where people are aiming to do as little as possible.

Every day now we hear stories about the way tax money is being wasted to pay an army of state workers we can no longer afford. These workers, through their unions, are preparing to fight any attempt to disturb their privileged positions, even though their pay is much higher than the private sector and their pension arrangements are bleeding the state dry.

The pensions are a particularly sore point at a time when private sector workers have seen their pensions wiped out by the stock market crash. The guaranteed pensions of state workers, which are worth up to two-thirds of their finishing pay, would cost much more than half their total salary over the years if they had to fund the pensions themselves. Instead, even with the recent levy, they pay only a small fraction of this.

But it's not just the state workers. There is also the army of professionals, many of whom do state work, who are still charging the same fees they got at the height of the boom.

There are lawyers, consultants, accountants, doctors, pharmacists and many others who are bleeding the system dry. They are leeches on the tax paying private sector, the sector that produces the manufactured goods and services that supports everything else.

One thing this army of state workers and state paid professionals has in common is that they produce mainly paper -- endless reports and opinions and advice. But nothing that you could butter your bread with.

The result is a country that is now hugely expensive to do business in, examples of which we see everyday all around us.

Just over a week ago, the commercial diamond manufacturer Element Six (formerly De Beers) said that 370 workers at its plant in the Shannon Industrial Estate were going to lose their jobs because costs were too high. The move is a further blow to employment in the west of Ireland region, where companies has been reducing worker numbers over the past year, including almost 2,000 lay-offs at Dell in Limerick.

The company said that its Shannon operation had the highest cost base of all its plants around the world, with workers in Element Six earning €12 ($16.9) an hour more than in some other countries. It's not the fault of the Shannon workers, of course, who simply looked for pay scales on a par with everyone else in the Celtic Tiger economy.

In the Irish economy as a whole in the years 2003-2007, unit labor costs here went up by 17%. In the same period in Britain they increased by 9%. and in Germany they fell by 4%, which shows you just how mad things got here.

The key to unpicking this mess now is to reduce the burden of the state sector and its attendant army of professionals. Once those costs start to come down, incentive will return to the real economy and a recovery just might begin.

That is why the cutbacks that the Bord Snip report suggested are so vital. There is not a moment to lose, with the cost of keeping the state boat afloat now costing us an extra €400 million ($563.9 million) in borrowing every week, making the debt mountain higher and higher. Resolute, immediate action is what is needed.

But the government, and especially Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Brian Cowen, seems to be in no rush, keeping a low profile, doing nothing and staying on holidays. Why?

Because they don't want to start the cuts until they get the Lisbon referendum passed in a couple of months. And in the meantime, we carry on pretending that everything is normal.

But there are a lot of young people here now who see what is happening, and who feel that the government won't have the steel needed to take on the state sector and its attendant paper army when the time comes.

Instead of hanging around to carry an unfair share of the burden, these young people will be out of here. And they will be right.