Focus on Ireland DAVID QUINN
Few eyes are smiling now
The Irish have punished the Fianna Fáil Government that was blamed for the country’s economic downfall. But with unemployment high and many families still saddled with debt, the newly elected coalition Government has a bumpy ride ahead
to befall any member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development since the Second World War to change that. The general election on 25 February in Ireland reduced Fianna Fáil from 78 seats
S
ince its foundation in 1926, Fianna Fáil has been easily the most domi- nant political party in Ireland. It has taken the worst economic downturn
out of 166 in the old Dáil to a mere 20 seats in the new one, which met for the first time this week. This result was forecast for a long time, for Fianna Fáil had been languishing in the polls ever since the full extent of the disastrous events of autumn 2008 when the banking crisis, and the accompanying eco- nomic crunch, began to hit home. What finally sealed Fianna Fáil’s fate was the arrival into Ireland of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Union (EU) in November 2010 to “rescue” the nation from its economic travails with a “bail-out” plan. The reason for those quotation marks will be revealed shortly.
SUMMER SCHOOLS IN CELTIC
SPIRITUALITY AND LITURGY
Mary Immaculate College Limerick is running ten-day
summer schools in medieval Irish liturgical music (6-17 June 2011) and Celtic spirituality (20 June-1st July 2011).
The courses are designed as
workshops where participants can learn something of the unpublished material available and investigate texts in Irish and Latin written in Ireland pre AD 1000.
For further information,
contact
www.mic.ul.ie/isss Catherine.swift@mic.ul.ie or ring 00 353 86 067 9708
12 | THE TABLET | 12 March 2011
But the fate of Fianna Fáil was the only clear message that could be gleaned from the election result. With the new Government comprising a coalition between Fine Gael, which has 76 seats, and Labour, which has 37 seats, voters did not opt for a clear alter- native. The economic policies worked out by Fine Gael and Labour look very like the economic policies of the outgoing Government for the simple reason that Fianna Fáil is a centrist party lying roughly halfway between the new coalition partners. The big issue in the
election was, of course, the economy. Unemployment stands at almost 14 per cent and it would be much higher were it not for emigration. An esti-
The Germans and the
French are going to have to decide to pay for the rescue of the euro or else plunge everyone into deeper crisis
mated 50,000 people, mostly young, will leave Ireland this year. My own constituency – Dublin North
Central – is a mixture of working-class and middle-class neighbourhoods. One candidate I spoke to said that in the middle-class areas it was common to find parents whose grown- up children had already emigrated or were planning to do so, for the recession has hit professional classes harder than usual due to the impact on the financial sector of the eco- nomic crisis. In the working-class areas, said
the candidate, there were the same concerns, but often the parents as well as the children are unemployed. The worst-hit sector has, of course, been that of construction, which is why working- class areas have been affected worst of all. Indeed, the overwhelmingly male working population in construction is the reason that the recession has been dubbed by some a “man-cession”, because men have been dis- proportionately affected by unemployment. The last time Ireland was in severe recession was in the 1980s (when this writer went abroad to find work). Unemployment then climbed even higher than now. In 1986, the year I struck out for Australia, it stood at 16 per cent and in 1993, the year I returned, it was still 15 per cent although on its way to recovery. But the difference between the 1980s and now is that today private debt is much higher than it was in that other lost decade. Quite apart from bank debt, many house- holds are mired in debt. When the property boom was at its peak, couples frequently took out enormous mortgages in order to get on to the property ladder. Others sought to exploit the boom by buying second and even third homes, some- times overseas. Banks in Ireland became “debt pushers”. In retrospect, it was scandalous. Although the problem is not con- fined to Ireland, the difference in its case is
not one of kind, but of scale. A total of 44,506 households – or 5.7 per cent of all mortgage- holders – are more than 90 days in arrears with their repayments. That is a 56 per cent increase on a year ago and the figure is bound to increase still further because the interest rate charged by the European Central Bank will certainly rise this year. Many people in Ireland are suffering greatly because of the recession. Organisations such as the Society of St Vincent de Paul have been doing their best to help those in most drastic
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