There’s quite a bit of talk of late about the sate of the economy, the future of our infrastructure, the ever-worsening immigration issue and of course, the housing market’s collapse. All of this bad press is contributing to a visible and tangible mist of depression among Irish people these days. Gone are the smiles of optimism and ostentation and donned are the faces of gloom and doom. Perhaps the most apparent cause of this sadness lately is due to the atrociously shi**y weather we’ve had since 2008 started.
But this is merely the sheep’s clothing of the issue that people are waking up to. Like the hangovers of years gone by, this headache we’re collectively nurturing is painful and sore. But what’s different about this one is the fact that there is no forgetting what caused it. We’re all guilty of the perils of riches – spending. I’ve done it, and you’ve probably done it too. We had it so good. We had a great 10 years of it, thanks in part to stable government and a favourable global economic climate. But the clouds have been here for a while now, and it’s starting to rain – quite heavily.
Make no bones about it, we’re headed for a monsoon of bad news in 2008 as a torrent of workers are left behind in the wake of the mass exodus of our biggest employers as they transport themselves in this ‘mobile’ economy to warmer climes and subsequently cheaper workforces. Today, Costa Rica, Mumbai and Shanghai are the Ireland’s of the 21st century. We’ve become a casualty of our own foolish belief that it would never end. Sadly it has, and we’re paying for it big-time.
HOUSING
We’ve long since known that our housing market was the driving force between our recent economic growth. In the early days of the Celtic Tiger (see the references to ‘Síbín’ as I call her on DDN) the focus was on industrial property. This lead to masses of employment and the steady rise in perceived wealth by our nation’s brightest of offspring – the college dropout. These people saw fit to pack it up and go off working in the building trade and reap the massive rewards that existed for the fortunate few who could make it on their own. Now, the teat has dried up and the sucklers of constructions are suckers for sure, as they find themselves out in the cold, looking for work in a bearish market of torturous proportions.
The graduate doesn’t escape lightly here either though. If you had the misguided misfortune to go to college to pursue something like Information Technology or Commerce in the last 10 years, and then shot yourself in both feet by staying here on some two-bit Graduate Trainee Programme, congratulations on falling for the modern equivalent of slave labour. I know your pain.
If on the other hand, you left Ireland and came back for the boom, you’re probably thinking of where you were and wondering why you bothered coming home.
EXPENSE
We really blew it. How many people went out in the last 5-10 years and bought a house in a newly developed estate built by companies they never heard of in places promised to be ‘tranquil but with all the facilities of a modern town’ and are now sitting on nothing more than a shell of badly built quality, built by the lowest bidder on ground that was probably reclaimed from boggy marshland in an area you now wouldn’t stray into without some form of blunt instrument for protection after dark. The answer is thousands. And now, those people who when they eagerly battled for the reasonably priced speculative 2-bed apartment and signed their lives away on 100% mortgages are living with the realities of negative equity, life-long repayments and the prospect of selling up just to get out of debt. They’ve been screwed by the unscrupulous oligopoly that their builder, solicitor, bank manager and developer all operated to maximize profit and minimize effort. And now they’re just living to scrape together enough money to pay huge service fees, interest repayments and loan agreements.
I’m not guilty of this in a roundabout way. I bought a car – ok, a modest price of €10,000 two years ago. Now, a college graduate with an honours degree in nothing, working 40 hours a week on less than the average industrial wage, I’m faced with the prospect of never being able to buy a house without drastic action somewhere along the line.
PUKE
We’re all suffering. The cocktail of our economic prowess however has a bitter aftertaste and we’re no better for buying into it. It made us feel powerful and garnered glances of envy from every corner of the globe. And as we drank it, we like its tingling impulses and warm fuzzy liquidity. But as we get to the bottom of the glass, we’ve realised that the things we’ve tried to avoid are now sliding down our throat. The bits of sediment that we didn’t realise were there until it was too late. And as we look at the Martini glass in which this cocktail of money and credit was served upon us, we realise that it sits on a very narrow foundation that could snap at any given moment.
AWAKE
Unfortunately, we’re still not actually awake from this nightmare binge session. We’re still being peddaled the lies about how the property bonanza is just resting for a while, and that now is a good time to buy. We’re being told that while you can’t have a 100% mortgage, you can have a mortgage intermediary take control of your house for a modest rate in excess of the legal blood-alcohol rate. We’re being screwed and squeezed for every cent we’ve got, until the companies who’ve wrung the towel dry move on to greener pastures.
Ireland needs to wake up, sit on the toilet for a good think and smell the coffee. We live in the second-most expensive country in Europe, relying on foreign direct investment from the USA, competing on nothing but an ideal against countries who can offer the cost-savings that companies want, and being asked to pay more for a litre of water from the local valley than a litre of petrol from the Gulf.
Emigration is now our only option. Let’s hope the Jihadist’s don’t turn us into Britain while we’re gone.
diarmy
