Ireland has had a seismic shock, says Isabel Morton

‘WHAT YOU need is an earthquake,” said my friend Sue, who left Ireland during the last recession and hasn’t returned, even for a short visit, since the mid 1980s.

We were having one of those disorientating “my morning time/her evening time” phone calls, chatting about the goings-on in our respective countries. We vied for the best dramatic story: her stories concerned the recent earthquake in her adopted home town of Christchurch, New Zealand (7.1 on the Richter scale); mine the incredible tale of woe that is the Irish saga.

She talked about earthquake liquefaction (liquid mud oozing up through cracks in the ground) and the effect on buildings which were constructed on marshy, reclaimed land. I got in my bit about Irish planners permitting housing estates to be built in flood-prone areas.

When she complained about the earthquake damage done to older buildings in Christchurch’s CBD (Central Business District), I retorted that it couldn’t be half as bad as the economic damage done to this country. And when she expressed sympathy for the small number of Kiwis who’d been forced to evacuate their structurally damaged homes, I pointed out that at least those people would eventually return to them, unlike many of the unfortunates here, who are being forced to sell or, worse again, are having their homes repossessed.

She conceded, as the earthquake apparently wasn’t all that bad. Although there were a few injuries, nobody actually died. And the depressed Kiwi construction industry will now get a much- needed boost, as builders are employed to repair damaged roads and railways, replace sewer and water pipes and reconstruct damaged buildings.

She went on to explain how, following the 1931 earthquake, which destroyed the north island town of Napier, killing 256 people, the authorities set up a system whereby a percentage of all household insurance payments are invested on behalf of the Earthquake Authority Fund. Five billion NZ dollars of this fund have recently been allocated to cover the 60,000 insurance claims generated by September’s earthquake.

This, in effect, means that the entire sum of five billion dollars will go directly into the New Zealand economy and will greatly benefit the entire community. In response, I mumbled something about our National Pension Reserve Fund being available for the rainy day when our increasingly ageing population would need it, but then remembered that it had already been raided for the bank recapitalisation programme and that there is talk of it being dipped into again for the same purpose.

Then, I had to admit to her that, despite what we were promised, all attempts at recapitalising our lending institutions to date, have failed miserably and have done absolutely nothing to kick-start our economy.

We commiserated with each other over the high unemployment figures, the increase in numbers emigrating and the drop in value of our homes, but in reality, as New Zealand is now officially out of recession, our respective countries just didn't bear comparison. We discussed the demise of the Decklanders, the stars of David McWilliams's boom-time bible In Search of the Pope's Children– a book I sent her some years ago, as proof of what was happening here at the time.

She joked about how it sounds like things have come full circle and it now appears nothing much has changed since she last visited Ireland (she no longer calls it home) 25 years ago. Later, after we’d wished each other a good day/ good night, it struck me that the nation’s mood is probably considerably worse now than it was back then. At the time, we knew no better, never having experienced the good life. This time around, things are different; having enjoyed the excesses of the banquet table it is hard to go back to eating dry bread.

Should Sue ever return to her native Dundrum, at least the apartment blocks, vast shopping centre and dramatic Luas bridge will provide physical proof that the Dublin suburb she was brought up in benefited from the economic boom. Otherwise, she might not believe it had ever happened.

I glanced at my bookshelves and marvelled at how many publications I would have to send her this year. Some, I'd read, such as The Bankers, The Builders, Who Runs Ireland?and Ship of Fools. Others, such as Wasters, Scandal Nationand Feckers, I planned to devour myself, over Christmas. Their titles alone, say it all. Each one, an account of an era we will look back on with shame and embarrassment, a time when we believed we were invincible.

Ireland has experienced its own earthquake. In fact, we have had a series of them, along with a number of before-shocks, after-shocks and in between-shocks. However, unlike New Zealand and its Earthquake Authority Fund, we, sadly, didn’t have the foresight to create a Celtic Collapse Fund.

• Isabel Morton is a property consultant