Ireland's pain begins

Ireland's pain begins

Once the 'best place to live in the world', Ireland is haunted by the spectre of bread queues as public services are slashed

Mary Fitzgerald guardian.co.uk, Friday 10 April 2009 11.30 BST

For a country that was enjoying roaring growth just a few years ago, the outlook for Ireland is now shockingly bleak. The number of unemployed is expected to reach 450,000 by the end of the year, which, in a country of only 4 million, is staggering. Privately, financial experts say that Taoiseach Brian Cowen's prediction of a 10% drop in living standards is "a dream" – the reality is likely to be closer to 30%. Of those still in jobs, nine out of 10 have taken pay cuts to keep them. It's all beginning to look "quite 1930s", as one friend observed: dole queues have quadrupled and April saw the first bread queues in Dublin for more than 20 years.

Just as in Britain and the US, there is outrage at the bonuses paid to the chairmen of banks bailed out by the government. Unlike anywhere else, though, the government seems to be blaming its own citizens for the crisis, and punishing them for it. Tapping into old Catholic traditions of guilt and penance, it's pushing a message of "collective guilt". Society has overindulged and must now pay the price, or so the logic goes, and so finance minister Brian Lenihan framed his emergency budget earlier this week as "a call to patriotic action".

What it is, in reality, is a cynical cutback on vital public services – at a time when they are more likely to be needed than ever. In an attempt to balance its books, the government aims to shed €6.6bn from the public purse by 2011, including some €725m earmarked for badly needed road projects, €81m from the education budget and €62m from the Department of Health's budget. Even services that, in a recession, will be relied upon more than ever, face cuts.

Peter McVerry, who runs a Dublin-based trust for homeless people, says that the government's kneejerk reaction of "indiscriminate, slash and burn cutbacks" amounts to little more than an outright attack on the poor. The decision to halve jobseeker's allowance for the under-20s was particularly brutal, as McVerry points out, given the rampant inflation of the past decade, a young homeless person "just cannot survive on just €100 a week".

The government is making a big show of practising the austerity that it preaches, culling the number of junior cabinet ministers and announcing pay cuts for those remaining. Yet, despite the protests from some quarters against "taxation with a vengeance", the truth is that Lenihan's budget increases taxes on the rich only marginally. In short, those who did well from the boom are not being made to pay for its consequences.

"The real pain of political self-interest, incompetence, negligence and laziness will be kept clear of those who have left the Irish economy so unprepared for the severe global slowdown that is forecast in 2009," predicts Michael Hennigan, founder and editor of Finfacts.ie.

Worse still, the government has squandered many of the opportunities afforded during the good years to reinvest in the country. Although average incomes have risen, little has been done to pull the generational poor out of poverty. Just minutes from the sleek new Smithfield development in north Dublin, with its organic shops and crisp new apartments, lies the Devaney housing project, where many windows and doors are boarded up and shops are Portakabins with bars on their windows and doors. Some of the apartment blocks have been demolished and local authorities have been promising for years to redevelop the estate, but there is as yet no sign of this, and families still live in appalling conditions. Scenes like these, familiar in all of Ireland's cities, stand at sharp odds with the official brand image of a country judged by The Economist in 2004 to be the "best place to live in the world".

Unlike in previous generations, the Irish cannot blame their problems on anyone else now: this is their own mess – and they will have to fix it. They could start by electing a new government.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/09/globalrecession-banking