Archive for January, 2010

Many years ago, just before the fall of communism in Russia, I lived for a while with a Russian family in a small village about 100 miles west of Moscow called Novi Ruza. The experience was a bit like going to a Russian version of the Gaeltacht. I lived with a family who didn’t speak English, except for the daughter whose only access to English was a scratched recording of Hey Hey My My by Neil Young.

Has Fianna Fail destroyed the Irish middle class? If the answer is yes, then this recession will have considerably more dramatic lasting effects than even some of the most realistic observers suggest. The reason for asking this question is that the huge debts incurred by the broad middle class in the property boom can’t be paid. And with no coherent mechanism for individual mortgage default, the Government is putting bondholders before mortgage holders.

Do you remember the concept of the ‘free house’? When I was a teenager, one of the greatest gifts a parent could give a child was a ‘free-er’. Parents who went out on a Saturday night and left their 16-year-old son or daughter in charge had no one to blame but themselves for the state of the place when they came home.

Like all nursery rhymes, the origins of ‘Old Mother Hubbard’ are more complicated that they seem at first. When I was young, the rhyme was repeated to reinforce the value of savings. The moral of the story was that if you don’t put away something in the cupboard when times are good, you’ll have nothing to fall back on in bad times.

We are moving into the next big phase of the Irish downturn. The first phase was the crash itself; the policy response to it was containment at all costs. The second phase is the debt deflation phase. This is the phase in which anyone with substantial debts, no matter how dexterous or clever they looked in the boom, will go bust. Be warned: countries as well as individuals are likely to go to the wall.

Our politicians are putting bondholders before the Irish people they are meant to represent.

Go to any dole office in the country this week. Just have a look. You will see young people. Our fittest and best able have become the number one victims of the recession. Given that this recession was almost entirely based on home-grown economic mistakes, the real victims of the back-slapping Celtic Tiger years were the very people who were supposed to inherit it.

When you think about Lisdoonvarna, what comes to mind? If you are of a certain generation, it’s probably the first music festival you went to. The weekend was immortalised by Christy Moore’s iconic song, Lisdoonvarna, which included the fabulously evocative line: ‘‘Anyone for the last Choc Ice?” For others, Lisdoonvarna is famous for match making.

Yesterday the, largely ceremonial, president of Iceland stood up for what is right. He decided that it was not democratic for the Icelandic government to insist that the Icelandic people pay foreign depositors who deposited money in Icelandic banks that subsequently went bust

In global economics, the two big stories of the past decade have been the rise of the middle classes in China and other formerly poor countries including India and Brazil, and the related weakening of the middle classes in formerly rich countries such as the US, Britain and, of course, Ireland.