26 Jul 2008
The Big R
The party’s over.
It’s official: we’re in recession. The media talk of nothing but the R-word,
and there’s no problem getting a builder and an unwonted silence at the tills.
A few people
still haven’t noticed that the lights have changed, but I know only too well
that there’s a recession, as I was laid off at the beginning of the month. I’m
one of the lucky ones, with no mortgage, grown-up offspring and a working wife.
Some people are going to get an awful land, though, and for some it could mean
emigration, or not being able to sell a house they can’t afford to live in and
is now worth less than the mortgage.
You have to hand
it to Bertie for getting out at the right time. He’d probably have ridden out
the Mahon Tribunal when we were on Easy Street, but not now the public’s
looking for someone to blame for taking our sweeties away. You would feel sorry
for Brian Cowen, only that as the last finance minister he made no more effort
than his FF predecessors to channel the country’s wealth into better education
and health provision, the two areas of investment which would have done most to
help Ireland’s disadvantaged. As
resources get tight, it is, needless to say, the poor who will be hit hardest;
I find it obscene that there is open debate about lowering the minimum wage.
There will also
be hostility between those with competing needs for increasingly scarce
resources. Resentment of immigrants is only too likely, but I do find it odd
that those who move on to more prosperous EU countries are also resented,
almost as if they were asset-stripping.
It’s already
started, the discrimnation and scapegoating. The other day I heard FG
councillor Darren Scully on Radio 1 giving out yards about single mothers who
‘deliberately get pregnant to get a house’. If only it were so simple…
Luckily, most
people I know are simply tightening the belt and making do, ruefully waving
goodbye to the high times without too much complaint and without trying to
blame others. But in a culture of ‘what I have I hold’ there will be those who
resent any gains or moves towards equality made by others, including us. We may
be in for a bumpy night.