So You Say

Breaking news: Ireland is apparently out of recession. I say apparently because, sure, according to the definition we are. A recession is defined as  a period when GDP falls for at least two quarters. Ireland’s GDP grew by 2.7 percent in the first three months of 2010 meaning that we are technically out of recession. But forgive me if I don’t start jumping for joy just yet. Brian Cowen has warned of a “hard road” to full recovery. I guess he isn’t jumping for joy either. There are a couple of reasons for my pessimism.

According to the Central Statistics Office our unemployment levels are around 13.7%. This is extraordinary when compared to the 4.3% of 2007. Jobs that were once thought to be secure are no longer hiring, law and architecture being good examples.  People are slipping from high earning careers into dole queues. Unfortunately the national contraction  in employment as a whole means that it you are unlikely to get another job even if you retrain in a different area. The problems are only being exacerbated by the number of people who took out loans and mortgages when times were good and are now facing the possibility of losing their family homes. And it’s not as if our exorbitant costs have fallen either as just yesterday it was announced that our food and drink prices are the second highest in Europe.

The question on everybody’s lips for the last two years has been ‘who’s fault is it?’ After reading the summary of the Regling-Watson bank report (http://thestory.ie/2010/06/09/summary-regling-watson-report/) it is clear that the over-dependency on the property market and construction sector was a major issue. This in turn lead to excessive lending. The report strongly indicates that the government encouraged this to happen and did not implement any of the necessary procedures to ensure a soft landing.

Of course, it is easy to blame the government. The report says that we should have been saving up for a rainy day when we had growth from the mid 1990s to 2006. However if that had happened then I imagine every agency and charity would have been outraged that the government had not done more to improve the lone parent allowance/investment in the health system/transport etc. The problem with being in government is that once you’re in power you don’t want to lose it. Fianna Fail have endeavored to become a catch-all party over the last couple of years and many of their decisions were made in an effort to remain popular. They had become short-sighted.

I am normally against the government, supporting a different party, but I actually do not think that Fianna Fail are that bad. It is very easy to overlook their achievements while in power when you’re trying to pick them apart. However it is clear to me that the party is a very different entity to what it once was. To put it simply I’ll quote a line from Eamon Gilmore’s speech in 2007 – “Eamon De Valera would never have taken fistfuls of cash in a suitcase.” Even if it wasn’t illegal, the handouts Bertie Ahern took were not right and it signalled the new path that his party had taken.

Even if the economy and the health system and the banking system were to improve I still believe there is no way Fianna Fail would be able to remain in government. There always comes a stage where government needs to change. I don’t support the Conservatives in Britain but I believed in the necessity of change so that the country didn’t stagnate. Brian Cowen is right: there is a long hard road still to be travelled and I’ll bet he won’t be at the helm by the end of it.