This week’s “official confirmation” from the ESRI that Ireland’s economy was now in recession stands common sense and ordinary intelligence on it’s head. Talk of Ireland going into recession pre- assumes that, up to now, everything was “apple pie” with the country’s free-market capatilist economy which clearly was never the case.
Our free-market professional economists point to the so-called residential property boom as evidence of an economy in rude health over the past 15 years. They remind us of the hordes of ordinary working people, particularly young workers, lining up outside the doors of estate agents to invest their “new found wealth” (delivered by Ireland’s economic boom) in new and even second homes. They point to the throngs routinely queing at the check-in desks of our airports getting ready to holiday abroad and in the same sentence tell us how a weekend in Bray, Courtown, Bettystown or Clogherhead was the very most our working class parents and grandparents could ever aspire to. That was the visible public image of Ireland’s celtic tiger economic miracle. This was the image of “modern” Ireland that our politicians, professional economists, the media, even our trade union establishment, loved to spin to all and sundry. The well-hidden blunt and truthful economic reality for these very same house buyers and holidaymakers was as far (and further) removed from real Ireland as the leprechauns.
The hard cash to pay for the new homes, the new cars and the foreign holidays was not coming from well-paid, life long secure employment. Over the course of the celtic tiger miracle there were tens of thousands of Job losses, closures and redundancies, many simply went unoticed and un-reported. When thousands of workers left their employment or retired in the past 15 years their jobs were never filled i.e. thousands of “invisible redundancies”. Manufacturing industry in Ireland contracted massively in the country, where there was employment growth it was in the low-paid, non-union, minimum wage service industries.
The reality and simple truth of the matter is that this week’s “official launch” by the ESRI of Ireland’s economic recession is really a belated recognition and acknowledgement of what ordinary people instinctively knew all along but chose instead to accept rather than question the official “expert” economic analysis being spun by government, banks, and official Ireland generally. The celtic tiger lifestyle of the country was bought and paid for with billions of borrowed “credit-card” euro that sooner or later had to be paid back. The residential property boom will, when the histoty of the celtic tiger era is written, rank as the greatest scam ever perpetrated on the masses. A scam designed and run by a grand coalition of the country’s financial instutions, political elite, land speculators and the property lobby. At it’s height the public were being systematicly ripped off with 40 and 50 year mortgages (and re-mortgages) being freely encouraged, and handed out to facilitate the purchase of residential property priced at more than 100% above and beyond it’s true value. All this at at time when economist David McWilliams was publicly pointing out that there were approximately 80,000 new-build homes and appartments vacant and unsold in the country, so much for the “official” line of demand massively outstripping supply as the reason for Ireland’s overblown house prices. Even the “all the eggs in one basket” aspect (construction) of the country’s dysfunctional capatilist economy was obviously being manupilated and doctored. The artificial property boom fed and sustained the ugliest and most base of human frailties – greed, even to the point that our capatilist national and local media lost all sense of shame and of right and wrong. Fattened by billions of euro in property advertising revenue the country’s free and independent media chose to look the other way.
Meanwhile the public, particularly young first-time home buyers were being robbed left, right, and centre. Those of us who inhabited the real world and questioned what was going on were routinely portrayed as the “looney left”, “headbangers” and “out of touch” with modern Ireland. Every con-artist establishment politician, the official trade union movement and the country’s leading economic experts and commentators all participated in the the Big Lie of Ireland’s economic well-being, all singing from the same hymn-sheet of a “soft-landing” worst case outcome.
Now that our negative- equity property recession has finally come home to roost the experts that solemnly swore of a soft- -landing only outcome, should not be taken seriously when they speak about Ireland’s celtic tiger economic miracle. The reality was a contrived, overblown property rip-off that broke every rule of their own free-market, economic doctrine. We never did have a real economic boom, just a talked up residential property market that masked a dysfunctional capitalist economy and now it will be ordinary working families who’ll pay for Ireland’s big economic lie with job losses, life-long debt and poverty, cuts in public spending particularly in the areas of health, social welfare and education.
This week’s “newly announced” recession has been around for quite a while, we were simply encouraged and told to pretend it wasn’t. On reading and hearing this week about the onset of a downturn ordinary working people and their families are now asking- when was there ever a real economic boom.?
