We can either keep on whingeing that the party is over . . . or we get out there and get on with living
IF YOU are reading this you have already survived, at a minimum, five days of 2009.
Congratulations.
Given some of the prognostications for this year we should all by now be shivering in our foxholes as the financial system explodes around us and dazed bankers and politicians wander around No Man’s Land where we can, satisfyingly, take pot shots at them.
Instead here, I hope, you are perusing your Irish Times over the toast and marmalade.
Just how confident you feel about the rest of the year depends, I suspect, on a couple of factors. The first is whether your job or your business has kept going and whether you are confident that it will continue to keep going.
The other is whether you have been through this before. People who came through the price hikes of the 1970s and the dark economic days of the 1980s are likely to feel a great deal more confident than those to whom a downturn is a new experience.
In my family history I can go back further than the 1970s to find parallels with the boom and bust of recent years.
In the 1920s and up to the early 1930s, one of my grandfathers made a lot of money out of exporting cattle to Britain. He was based in Kildare but travelled as far afield as Kerry to buy up cattle for his English customers.
He lived in a decaying mansion which he had inherited and he enjoyed the trappings of wealth – just like many of us did in the Celtic Tiger era. He had servants, private tutors for his children and a house in Dublin as well as the one in Kildare. He also had lots of land.
But just as our recent good times were built on property, his was built on a cattle export business which collapsed when Fianna Fáil came to power in 1932. De Valera refused to pay back money which the British government had loaned to Irish farmers before independence.
Britain retaliated with a 20 per cent import tax and the UK market for Irish beef vanished.
This left my grandfather with no income. The man who had travelled up and down the country by train buying cattle now cycled the 20 miles to and from Dublin to save the three pence train fare. He used to say he kept himself sane by writing poetry, which is still admired in the family today.
Did this throw the family into a state of gloom? Not that I know of. There were three aspects to the experience which I think are relevant to what we are going through now.
The first is that although the income diminished to a trickle, the land remained. I think it’s also true of ourselves in this era that the country has accumulated wealth that will stand to us in the future. From a social point of view, for instance, it’s a good thing that we have all those houses even if they are making nothing for us at the moment.
The second aspect is that my grandfather’s children – my father, uncles and aunts – developed a philosophical attitude to money. They didn’t waste much time lamenting the disappearance of the good days. They saw that money comes and goes and that it isn’t something to be overly impressed by.
That’s a lesson we have just learned ourselves. When we get through this financial earthquake and we start doing well again we will have a different and, I hope, more enduring attitude to what matters in life. And we won’t be so easy to impress next time around.
And the third aspect is that they enjoyed telling their children, my generation, stories of the days when all that money was coming in. They told it almost as a sort of fairytale. Maybe they even exaggerated it – people do. But there was never a note of regret for what was lost.
So that’s the other thing – we can either go around whingeing because the party’s over or we can shrug and get on with living and even make up a few tall tales for our children and grandchildren about the golden era of the Celtic Tiger. I’m for tall tales.
Padraig O’Morain is a counsellor. His book Thats Men the best of the Thats Men column from The Irish Times is published by Veritas
Bouncing back . . .how people have survived recession past: Features, page 15, main paper