OPINION: There's nothing the ordinary person can do about a recession . We know we have to sit back and take the hit, writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE
DO YOU think that it is too early to talk about recession fatigue? It's just that I'm a bit worn out. There are those of us who thought that we could make it to Christmas before we started screaming at the prospect of yet more ignorant bankers being pursued by yet another phalanx of hysterical economists, but now that we are being advised to decorate the tree with used lollipop sticks it's pretty much touch and go.
Some people are getting a big thrill out of this recession. Their enjoyment is a little unseemly, because most of the doom-sayers look pretty well got and are no longer in the summer of their lives. I thought the grey-beards were meant to be the steadying hand on the tiller of any culture, but there is nothing this lot enjoys more than predicting disaster for us all, emigration for the young ones and the sure-fire certainty that the baby boomer generation is going to spend its collective old age in a series of bins.
It's like the boozy uncle who stands by the cot, playing boogie man to entertain the baby. Then it suddenly becomes apparent that the baby isn't having such a great time after all; it's just that the horrible old uncle loves terrifying the baby.
To those of us in the lower economic orders, recession analysis appears long on problems, short on solutions and very, very promiscuous in its use of anecdote.
The climax of any recession analysis in this country is when the commentators shout "The Eighties!" and then run for the hills in their goatskins, where they try to pretend that they know what to do with the banks. For those of us who lived and worked through the 1980s these scare tactics are not very effective, but we have children under 35 here, of a sensitive disposition, and this is the kind of fright that might send them over the edge if they ever turned off their iPods long enough to hear it.
Of course we all enjoy a certain mean- minded glee as we tell each other about more repossessed 4x4s, cancelled Christmas parties and the banking bonuses that won't be paid this year (although, come to think of it, we haven't heard about too many banking bonuses that won't be paid this year). But the novelty is wearing thin. The Americans have Obama. We have Brian Cowen. It's tough.
At this stage we've all heard the one about the brand new Mercedes (the model of Mercedes varies with each telling, and frankly who cares?) which was abandoned at Dublin airport as its owner (or leasee) fled the country for greener pastures.
It may be significant that hairdressers are saying that the whole country is going brunette because colouring your hair blonde is just too expensive. Or it may not.
The fact that barbers say that men are getting their hair cut every six weeks instead of every four is neither here nor there. But the news that a wife, taking her husband out for a celebratory dinner in a very expensive restaurant, then spent the evening in a dining room where the only other customer was the said husband, is a little bit unsettling. Never mind, though, it was mid-week and she did say that the staff were awfully nice to them. So that was a whole new experience in Dublin dining right there.
On the positive side the new Zara in South King Street, for which disaster has long been predicted, seems to be doing all right. Mid- week, it appears to be filled with fashionable young women shopping alone, who are on their mobiles pretending to be at work.
"Yes, yes," say the lone shopping women as they are flicking through the knitwear. "I know they're very happy with it. I'm in a meeting at the moment. Can I get back to you tomorrow?" So reassuring. This is the type of woman who, during the Emergency when stockings were in short supply, kept everyone's spirits up by getting their husbands to paint seams on to their legs. Blimey - no wonder the population went up.
We've seen all this before. There were the doom-sayers who confidently predicted that we were all going to fry in a nuclear holocaust and there are still the eco-worriers who have a whale of a time counting down to catastrophe whilst offering very few suggestions as to what we can do to avoid it. There are six-year-olds who can't sleep for worrying about the melting polar ice-caps and really, what good does it do them, poor little things?
There's nothing the ordinary person can do about a recession, we know we have to sit back and take the hit. We know our politicians are useless. We know it's serious. We know it's started. We even know, in a rather confused way, that it makes sense. It's just that there's no need to try and make us cry all day, every day.