Commentary: We are more obsessed with money than before, yet we have also been remarkably careless about what we do with it. It is as if Irish people are still unable to make up their minds about affluence, writes Fintan O'Toole
Last September, a company associated with MasterCard did a survey of credit card usage in the Republic. One of the most intriguing findings was that half of all Irish credit card holders - nearly three-quarters in the under-25 age group - had never heard of the annual Government tax of €19 on each card. Since the tax is levied automatically, and since many people have three or four cards, a large number of people were being informed once a year that the best part of €60 or €80 was disappearing from their accounts. The only conclusion to be drawn from the fact that so few noticed is that many of the children of the boom do not even bother to read their credit card statements.
Here, obviously, is the way to sort out the public finances: double the tax on credit cards and keep quiet about it. But here, too, is a paradox of the boom. We have become, in some ways, more obsessed with money than before. Yet we have also been careless about what we do with money.
It is as if Irish people are still unable to make up their minds about affluence. On the one hand, they know what they have had to do for prosperity, the long hours and hard grind; the willingness to put up with the traffic, the rush and the corporate disciplines of transnational capital; the quiet revolution in family life. On the other hand, they still can't shake off the old, glorious attitude that the only point of having money is to have a good time getting rid of it.
On one shoulder, sits a time-and-motion expert, shouting orders in our ears: get up, dump the kids in the crêche, endure the commute, work hard, do overtime. On the other, sits a familiar, seductive Irish angel, whispering sweet nothings: feck it all, enjoy life while you can, sure the good times mightn't last and there'll be plenty of time for misery.
Inside our heads, we like to think that we can be both rational hard workers and reckless free spirits. Deep down, we fear we might be neither, lacking either the ability of other rich societies to use money wisely or the feckless swagger of our old, careless selves.
Older Irish people remember a time when we used to read about the lives of the filthy rich and, to assuage our envy, ask the rhetorical question "But are they happy?" How, after the golden years of economic growth, would we answer that question about ourselves? The simple answer might seem to be "yes".
Asurvey by Amárach Consulting for Guinness UDV on quality of life in Ireland, carried out last November and published last month, showed that 38 per cent of people are very satisfied with their lives and 52 per cent are quite satisfied, compared with an EU average of 21 per cent and 62 per cent; 71 per cent of people, moreover, believe that the quality of their own lives has improved in the last five years and 77 per cent say that the general quality of life has got better in that period.
It seems obvious enough, then, that the boom has made us happy. In fact, though, it is not obvious at all. For one thing, the proportion of Irish people who declared themselves happy with their lives in 2001 is almost exactly the same as it was in 1980, when we were vastly less well off, and slightly lower than it was in 1997, when the boom really started to go into overdrive.
At the same time, there is almost as much disparity in happiness as there is in wealth. The category of humanity beloved of sentimental novelists - poor but happy - is thin on the ground. About one-fifth of the population regards itself as having a mediocre, poor or very poor quality of life. Not surprisingly, in a society where the richest 10 per cent has 14 times more money than the poorest 10 per cent, and where a large majority regards money as the key to happiness, this section of the population with a bad quality of life tends to be poor and, what is often the same thing, old.
It is also worth noting that the boom has changed the Irish notion of the good life. In 1989, when we were asked what we would do if we had more money, we had a strikingly high-minded view of ourselves. The single most common response, given by 48 per cent of those surveyed was "help a good cause", followed at a respectable distance by "enjoy myself more". The Guinness/Amárach report found a complete reversal of these responses.
The number saying they would help a good cause had halved to 25 per cent and the number saying they would enjoy themselves more had shot up to 57 per cent. This, perhaps, is as much a reaction to experience as a change of values. We have had more money, and as the decline in volunteering has shown, we haven't used it to help the Vincent de Paul Society. In the battle between hedonism and idealism, we know who won. Watching hedonism dance on the table and idealism picking up scraps from the floor, we have fewer illusions about our reaction to riches.
The same sense of settling for less than we thought we wanted is evident in the intimate sphere of marriage. In a 1990 survey, 46 per cent of respondents said that the ideal arrangement within a marriage was that the two partners had equally absorbing jobs and shared housework and childcare equally. Just 20 per cent thought the ideal was that the wife should have a less demanding job and do a greater share of the housework and childcare.
THE picture that emerges from the Guinness/Amárach report is starkly different. The proportion saying that equality outside and inside the home is the ideal has declined to 32 per cent. The proportion favouring an arrangement in which the wife has a less demanding career and does more of the housework has almost doubled to 39 per cent. Strikingly, this latter ideal is favoured almost as much by women as by men. Some of the shift might be due to married women finding that whereas their husbands claim to be in favour of equality, in reality working wives end up doing most of the housework. But the main reason for the shift is surely the sheer difficulty of maintaining a balance between work and home in the conditions of boomtime Ireland with its long commuting times and poor childcare facilities.
In all sorts of ways, then, the boom has been a matter of settling for less than we thought we wanted but more than we actually had. When we were relatively poor, we thought that if we had money we would be great people altogether. Now we have enough money to know better.
Series concluded