The past year was characterised by harsh economic truths and a grinding dilution of hope, especially for people on the margins of society and those who saw their lifestyles – and livelihoods – dissolve
IT WAS the year of uncertainty. Of waiting, and waiting, and dreading. The dominos of society collapsed one by one – the see-no-evil bishops and priests, the senior gardaí who colluded with them, the invincible developers, swaggering bankers, procrastinating judges, grasping politicians, language itself – and trust fell off a cliff.
More than two out of three people declared they trusted no-one, in a monthly poll on the mood of the nation. Loss of trust was a theme of the year, says Carolyn Odgers of Chemistry Advertising, which commissioned the poll from Amárach Research. It was confirmed by The Irish Times/Behaviour Attitudes social survey last month . Only three in 100 will be bothered to look more closely at Government and in the event of another recession, even fewer at untrustworthy bankers. Overwhelmingly, we are back to self-reliance. Save more, spend less, ignore the wizards behind the curtain. Trust only in yourself.
And so this year, whenever another financial wizard uttered that great Wall Street dogma, "we are where we are", at least we knew what he meant: he hadn't a clue where we were. Worse, it probably meant we were being whipped by some faceless hunt master towards somewhere uncharted and probably not good. But one thing we knew for sure: the dogma of "we are where we are", aka "taking the medicine" (in five budgets, all told, this year), was a synonym for soaking the little guy. What else could it be? Who would you trust to tell you otherwise? "Uncertainty" was the mot du jourin the slow-burning nightmare of the early January headlines. Invariably, it presaged the worst. "Uncertainty" about Anglo Irish Bank meant nationalisation within days. "Uncertainty" about Waterford Wedgwood prefaced the disappearance of an Irish icon. "Uncertainty" about Dell collapsed into the loss of 1,900 jobs and a savaging of 10,000 more.
People cried out for a leader, any kind of leader. Michael O’Leary was starting to look attractive. The January inauguration of Barack Obama was almost cruel in its timing. Here, at the new year’s dawning, was a tough, confident, attractive, intelligent leader offering harsh medicine and hope, placing Americans’ challenge in the context of their forebears’ toil and sacrifice, articulating with curled lip and righteous gaze the people’s disgust at bankers and lobbyists and their cheerleaders.
MEANWHILE, AT HOME, we waited and yearned for that decisiveness, that same independence of mind, someone to brew the bloody medicine and get it over with, but who was equally offering a vision beyond the sour, gauche "it's brutal and will get twice as brutal for years and years", someone to articulate the hope of a more noble, more sustainable nation at the other end, whenever that might be.
In its absence, a fairly average speech delivered by Brian Cowen to the Dublin Chamber of Commerce in February was hailed as a piece of oratory not far off Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream . . .”. In the vacuum, instead of hope, courage, unity of purpose, there came the new sectarianism: private against public sector. The intrinsic value of work was also a theme of the year. What price a banker’s bounty against a firefighter’s? A television star versus a nurse? A back-bencher versus a carer? And all the while, the official drip-drip of uncertainty and dread continued: Christmas bonuses gone, childcare supplement dead, job-seekers’ benefit period cut back – all made immeasurably worse by the dour, repetitive promises of worse to come.
A bemused world’s press gathered to watch us scramble over our hubris to placate the previously-despised “faceless technocrats” of Brussels and go bald-headed for Lisbon. Meanwhile, the more intrepid foreign journos took the well-worn path to Limerick and Tallaght. Some even made it to busted housing estates in Longford and Leitrim before, inevitably, trying for an interview with Sean Dunne, whose wife had opened a grocery shop in one of Dunne’s previously-despised hotels.
They asked about Nama. “It is good, it will save you, ja?” We don’t know, mate. No-one does. Is it best represented by Nama, the folk hero who built an ark to save his family from a flood? Or by the crater called Nama, waiting to swallow some unwary soul on one of Jupiter’s many moons? Is it yet another “uncertainty” or a big, fat, calculated “risk”? Behavioural economist Dr Pete Lunn of the ESRI distinguishes between “risk” and “uncertainty”, because experiments show people instinctively react differently to each. Risk is when you know the odds you are up against; uncertainty is when you don’t. A risk is playing roulette; uncertainty is playing roulette without knowing how many red and black numbers are on the wheel.
And all the while, the fall-out from the economic roulette was worming its way inexorably towards the surface in the form of hundreds of thousands of lost livelihoods. Among the hardest hit – though least heralded in the statistics – were the self-employed, the small café operators, the boutique owners, estate agents and architects as well as those about whom some trade unions agitated noisily during the boom: the carpenters, bricklayers and labourers, left with bad backs and no security.
Some had chosen to be self-employed; after all, the roulette game would never end. For others, the “self-employed” label was just a means for employers to evade their responsibilities. Many of the same “self-employed” were among the Breakfast Roll boys, the lads given first dibs on “discounted” apartments and houses-to-let on the bosses’ own developments. Now, in the worst of all worlds, there was no work, plummeting rentals or no rentals at all. Negative equity and disappearing migrants collided to wreck the dreams of more than fat-cat developers.
When RTÉ aired a profoundly sad documentary called The Sheriff and Me, a central character was a Co Offaly builder, fighting depression and unemployment. His was a world away from the champagne-swigging, helicopter-hopping masters of the boom. "We used to go for breakfast in Banagher on a Saturday, then on to the toy store," said his young wife wistfully. Another exhausted couple struggling to rear six children in a decaying hardware shop in Clondalkin described the paralysing misery of a visibly withering living. The sheriff's man stood by, eying up their assets.
People who had always regarded themselves as proudly self-sufficient suddenly found themselves in unfamiliar territory. A beautician tells of a woman sitting having her usual rather expensive nail and facial treatments, while musing worriedly that her husband had probably lost his job – there were ominous signs, including an injunction not to ring him at work – but hadn’t yet told her. Worryingly, the Chemistry/Amárach survey suggests 30 per cent of respondents believe their relationships are suffering due to the recession.
Savings gone, some – the ones who were able to think straight – might have found themselves seated before a person such as Teresa McCourt, development manager with the Co Westmeath Citizens’ Information Service. Trying at last to front up to reality, to opening the post, to breaking the agony of uncertainty, they would discover that the lot of the work-less self-employed is a meagre one.
'THERE IS Ahuge difference between this year and last year," she says, noting that it's not so long since three-quarters of their queries were related to employment law, such as employees' rights around holidays or pay. This year, the top five queries among the 2.5 million visitors to the citizensinformation.ie website related to social welfare (39 per cent), employment (26 per cent), travel (14 per cent), health (11 per cent) and moving country (8 per cent).
“You would see a lot of sad situations among the self-employed, a lot of men who worked in construction . . . I’ve had men sitting in front of me practically crying. One told me he’d gone for a job with the HSE as a caretaker but was told he didn’t have the qualifications. And they become very angry. I would have experienced that anger. They might just have started out with a normal query, then they get on to something else. They rarely come in angry, not initially.” The staff have had to start “minding themselves”, she says. This year, that anger and sense of despair have surfaced often enough for staff to take courses in suicide intervention. “Now if people say ‘I’m going to end it all’, we’d pursue it. We’d ask them if that’s what they mean and get help for them.”
She reflects for a moment, then returns to that word, “uncertainty”. “A lot of it is about that. That and no hope. That has been the theme of the year.”
It’s not an image outsiders have of the Citizens’ Information Service (CIS). Teresa’s boss, Tony McQuinn, CEO of the Citizens’ Information Board, which oversees the CIS and the Money Advice and Budgeting Service (Mabs), tries to see the glass half full. On the one hand, online help and services didn’t exist during the 1980s recession. Nor did Mabs; now there are 50 Mabs centres in the country. People are also better educated now, have more experience of employment and of the possibilities on offer and so are starting from a different base.
On the other hand, he says, back in the 1980s, people weren’t used to wealth or choices. Their expectations were lower. But now, for the young unemployed with no experience of hard times and burdened with debt, he says, there is no clear picture of where hope is to come from. Who would have thought, a couple of years ago, that his agency would be running websites called losingyourjob.ie or keepingyourhome.ie? And yet . . .
Many would argue that the media has been remiss, even obstructive, in ignoring the positives. Carolyn Odgers of Chemistry suggests that there is a general obsession with the recession here that is not observable in other hard-hit countries such as Spain or Britain. Is it because Irish under-35s – unlike their British peers – have never known recession in their working lives and are in greater shock? Or is it because this is also a middle-class recession of severely shocked 30- and 40-something architects, solicitors, engineers and marketers, who may well be more vocal and articulate? Has talk of pay cuts in the private sector been exaggerated because the media industry was among the first to suffer?
THE GOOD NEWSis that half of the population has no borrowings. A torrent of money is flowing into savings accounts – driven by uncertainty, to be sure, but also by hard lessons well learnt. Some 88 per cent of the working population are still in jobs.
Brian Lenihan sees light somewhere down the economic road (although it's fair to note that many others don't). The recent poll by The Irish Times/Behaviour Attitudes also showed that people had moved beyond anger and the blame game, probably ahead of the media. The Chemistry/Amárach polls also reflected everyday positives such as relief that the pressure to keep up with the Joneses was off; it's okay to wear the same outfit twice. They talk about reassessing their lifestyle, switching loyalties and brands (a huge trend in June), about retraining in safe, solid jobs such as computers, nursing, teaching, medicine, engineering, hairdressing, going back to what matters, to volunteering (though there is anecdotal evidence that overwhelmed charities are now looking for money rather than volunteers), frugality and simple lives. More than a third are cutting their spending by "a lot" for Christmas. Then again, is it not the media's duty to reflect the facts as they are, rather than how people wish them to be?
Last week, for example, a report from the British think-tank, the New Economics Foundation (NEF), challenged the notion that high pay doesn’t matter as long as poverty is eradicated. It argues that high pay is often generated by big businesses that destroy other parts of the economy or fail to pay the full costs of their activities. The NEF concluded that, all things considered, financial workers, advertising executives and tax advisers destroyed value, while hospital cleaners, childcare workers and staff in the waste recycling industry gave much more to the country than they took out. So it calculated that, for example, tax accountants were the most destructive, burning £47 of value for every £1 they created. The biggest bankers destroyed £7 of value for every £1 (on the basis that jobs and tax contributions are offset by the cost of the current crisis and the negative impact on public finances), and advertising executives £11 for every £1 (they promote over-consumption). On the other hand waste-recycling workers generated £12 for every £1 spent on wages, childcare workers up to £9.50 for every £1 and hospital cleaners £10 for every £1.
Roy Foster, professor of Irish history at Oxford University, writing about Ireland ’s rise and fall in the Guardian, ended on a positive note. “But what remains of the years that the locust has eaten? Ireland, if poor again, is still younger, sharper, less deferential (particularly to the Catholic Church) and more entrepreneurial . . . The government may have to rediscover Swift’s dictum that the wealth of a country is its people. How far the ‘people’ forgive the government for the way it has treated them remains to be seen.”
