GIVE ME A BREAK:'I DIDN'T BENEFIT from the boom, so I'm hoping I won't suffer from the downturn." If only I had €1,000 for every PAYE worker that has said that to me in the past week. The Celtic Tiger is dead, long live the Celtic Tiger, says Kate Holquist.
I don't know about you, but I'm sure going to miss those hot-stone massages and weekly manicures and two or three holidays a year and €1,000 handbags and big black traffic-stalling SUVs that I never had.
Other people had them. Apparently. So we were all supposed to feel good about this, even though we gave out about it, because it was a sign that we on this island of fools were in one of the best places in the world to live (how quickly we've fallen off that graph).
Like a lot of people on PAYE who spent the Tiger years struggling to pay for childcare because the Government never got to grips with the issue, who budgeted tightly to pay for the mortgage or remortgage they really couldn't afford, and who kept working harder and smarter because that's what the market and employers demanded, I have about as much sympathy for people whose share values have fallen as I do for John McCain.
And now these same people who benefited - including a Government which got itself re-elected on the back of a promise that it brought us the Celtic Tiger and would keep the gravy train rolling - are telling us to "tighten our belts". Charlie Haughey, gone to that great regatta in the sky, must be looking down and laughing, a glass of champagne in hand.
Our betters are planning to introduce third-level fees and to take away the paltry child benefit for 18-year-olds because, my goodness, wasn't I using it to buy handbags anyway and haven't I got a nice little nest egg squirrelled away in one of those banks that collapsed in the past few weeks?
The trend-spotters have been busy telling us how fashionistas will become bargainistas, how frugality will become a badge of status rather than a reason to cringe, and how shopping in Lidl for suspiciously processed food will be the new fashion (just look at the number of big black SUVs in the Lidl car park!).
But the trend that really kills me is the one that says "the 1980s are back". Wake up, folks. We've just lived through the 1980s. Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and their trust in the "trickle-down effect" is what we've just survived. Our Government supported well-off people getting richer and convinced a lot of us that - like serfs dependent on a benign king - we too would benefit eventually.
Just ask any young couple with one or two toddlers living in a devalued house in a soulless development with a 90-minute commute to and from work (forcing them to leave their children in creches from 8am to 6pm) how they feel about how much the Tiger improved their lives. They went along with it because they believed that they were part of a future that was getting bigger and better all the time. Imagine how they feel now that the emperor has no clothes.
We cheered the naked emperor because associating ourselves with the glorious lives of the rich (OMG, we can buy Manolos in Brown Thomas!) made us feel better about ourselves. We had so many more glamorous malls to browse in, so many expensive coffee bars to choose from, so many types of top-brand chocolate, so many retail outlets selling sofas and minimalist flat-pack furnishings to liberate us from our parents' bad swirly-carpet taste.
And we bought our social rise from swirly to beige on credit. Always borrowing against the future because, we believed, things were only going to get better, the big win was just around the corner, with the economy going so well there was no crime in maxing out the credit card for that second or third holiday or that sofa we really didn't need because the discount places were advertising day and night for leather sofas that would somehow make us feel that our houses were relaxing places to come home to, even though we were working too hard to spend much time in them and the sofas were bought on credit.
I hope you've got enough put away to pay for your parents' medical care because we all have to pull up our socks and let the over-70s do without medical cards. Keep a close eye on your mother, who might ignore that niggling pain or bleed she has because your father's heart problem is already costing so much. And when you're sitting in AE with one of your parents on a trolley, just remember how good we had it. Think of all that money you saved up and buy your parents a VHI policy (although they'll have to pay their subscriptions retrospectively, which will cost a fortune.)
In the years when we could have built a mutually supportive society, laying the basis for reliable care for children and the elderly, we were too busy buying imaginary €1,000 handbags and reading in magazines about the virtues of hot-stone massages. Our faces were pressed up against the window, like immigrants in a new land, believing that some day all this could be ours.
Meanwhile, the people who are currently purchasing Manolos in BTs are about as worried about the Budget as I am about changing the oil in my non-existent SUV.
