As the initial high gave way to anxiety, Irish people began to wonder if rumours of their wealth might not be greatly exaggerated, writes Fintan O'Toole.
There was something grimly appropriate about the way, in 2007, the nation had cocaine on the brain. From the huge bales of the drug found in the sea off Mizen Head in July, to the rows about Justine Delaney-Wilson's book and television series, to the travails of the jockey Kieren Fallon and the awful deaths of young men and women - including the model Katy French - traces of the illicit white powder were all over the headlines. If cocaine is indeed God's way of telling you that you have too much money, the drug's effects - delusions of grandeur, unproductive hyperactivity, feelings of immortality and invincibility - were not unlike those of the long Irish economic boom. And the sense of exhaustion and bewilderment that you get when the high wears off is, in both cases, rather similar.
If coming down from a high was the year's great theme, there was a sense in which Bertie Ahern was never more of an Irish everyman than he was in 2007. The first half of his year was a string of pearls. His first grandchildren were born, and nature, in a bountiful mood, gave him two at the same time, Jay and Rocco. His place in the history books was secured as his greatest achievement, the Belfast Agreement, finally blossomed into the miraculous reality of Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness sharing power in Northern Ireland. Manchester United won the Premier League and the Dubs looked like they just might be good enough to take the Sam Maguire cup.
He got to address the joint houses of parliament in Westminster and to bask in national and international admiration. And he capped it all by becoming the first Taoiseach since Eamon de Valera to win three elections in a row.
He was untouchable, invincible, the man who had crushed the Opposition and the media begrudgers, brushed aside the awkward questions about his personal finances and developed a whole new layer of shiny Teflon.
And then the drug of triumph wore off and he had to face a sour and sobering reality. By the time September came around, the property market was visibly on the slide, the West was up in arms over Aer Lingus's decision to end its flights from Shannon to Heathrow, the Dubs had been beaten, as usual, by Kerry and Bertie was before the Mahon tribunal. The bullets he had dodged during the election campaign turned out to be scalpels cutting forensically into the story he had told about dig-outs, whip-arounds and conservatories, and leaving his credibility in shreds.
The Cabinet's decision to award itself massive pay rises, and the Taoiseach's pleas of virtual poverty, stripped away the last vestiges of Bertie the humble Dub who didn't care about money. The beaming grandfather, the avuncular peacemaker, the man of the people, the emollient conciliator, was transformed into a defensive, irascible figure unable to conceal his outrage at the ingratitude of the people and asking his parliamentary questioners whether they were deaf or stupid.
PARADOXICALLY, HIS PERSONAL journey from high achievement to high anxiety made Bertie Ahern, even as he seemed increasingly out of touch, a truly representative figure. His fate mirrored that of a nation being brought back to earth after more than a decade of euphoria. There was no sudden crash in 2007, but it was clear that the boom times were over. The property bubble burst, leading to a decline in consumer confidence, a rash of unsold luxury apartments, a swing of the public finances from black to red, a rise in unemployment and a slowing of immigration that would in turn reduce demand for property. The prospects for 2008 were for a halving of net migration to 35,000, the loss of 25,000 construction jobs, and a rise in unemployment to around 120,000. Though not disastrous in themselves, the figures represented a major psychological shift from the almost endlessly benign prospects that we had taken for granted since the mid-1990s.
These changes, and the anxieties they generated, were already in the air at the time of the general election in June, but their effect on voters' choices were far from straightforward. With the Opposition offering no radically alternative vision, voters thought more about what they had to lose than what they might hope for. They opted for a kind of sympathetic magic - the belief that, if things stayed broadly the same politically, they might stay broadly the same economically. It wasn't an enthusiastic endorsement and it had more to do with fear and uncertainty than with trust and confidence. And, as a consequence, the public mood after the election was that, not of an infatuated lover, but of someone who has slept with an old flame in a moment of weakness and woken up with feelings of guilt, unease and vague repulsion.
The sense of realising what choices they had made only when it was too late pervaded the post-election period. People in the mid-west, who voted overwhelmingly for parties who supported the privatisation of Aer Lingus, seemed stunned when Aer Lingus behaved as a private company and abandoned Shannon airport, with nasty consequences for the region's economy. People who voted for health policies later summed up by the rebel Fianna Fáil TD Ned O'Keeffe as "confrontation, privatisation and Americanisation" were distressed by the realisation that those policies could kill people like Susie Long, who died because, as a public patient, she had to wait too long for the tests that would have revealed her cancer. People who voted to endorse Bertie Ahern's struggle against a supposed media conspiracy were shocked to find, not only that he had real questions to answer, but that his answers were so evasive and so hard to credit.
NONE OF THIS would have mattered much if the economy had continued to roar ahead. Experience had shown that most people were prepared to put up with failures in the areas of planning, social justice and ethics, so long as they felt that they were rich and getting richer. But 2007 was the year in which Irish people began to wonder whether rumours of their wealth might not be greatly exaggerated. One of the reasons why the proposed Cabinet pay rises became such a big issue was that they crystallised these doubts in a particularly stark way.
It was not just that the Taoiseach evidently considered his proposed salary of €310,000 to be barely adequate, prompting others to wonder whether, in that case, their own much more modest salaries constituted prosperity. It was also the revelation that almost 1.5 million people - three-quarters of the workforce - have salaries of less than the Taoiseach's proposed €38,000 pay rise.
In this regard, the most interesting survey of the year was one conducted by Bank of Ireland Life among workers aged 30-50. It found that, while most regard Ireland as a wealthy country, four out of five believe Irish people are not as wealthy as we think we are, but are merely "obsessed with the trappings of wealth". They saw that obsession as being rooted in status anxiety: three-quarters agreed with the statement that "it's all about keeping up with the Joneses", and admitted that they themselves often compared their lifestyles with others. Instead of the secure enjoyment of a comfortable prosperity, the survey pointed to a society in which money is used for competitive display and the fear of falling behind haunts daily life.
This perception of a disjunction between a "wealthy country" on the one side and a population that is not really rich on the other is rooted in reality. With the end of the property and credit boom that succeeded the classic export-led Celtic Tiger boom of the 1990s, it was possible to take stock of the effects of what may well be a unique period in Irish history. There is no doubt that the boom years generated vast personal wealth. The Bank of Ireland Wealth of the Nation study put the net wealth (that is, household assets minus household debt) of domestic households at €804 billion - an average of €196,000 per capita. This looks like serious money in anyone's language. But that conclusion needs to be qualified in two ways. The figure is inflated by high property values which, as we learned in 2007, are vulnerable to significant falls. And the money is very unevenly spread.
The top 5 per cent of the population holds 40 per cent of the wealth. But, in reality, the concentration of financial assets is even starker than this would suggest. If residential property is left out of the equation, Bank of Ireland estimated that 1 per cent of the population accounts for around 34 per cent of the wealth. This small sliver of the Irish populace has an asset base (excluding residential property) of over €100 billion - four times larger than in 1995. And even within this tiny cohort, there is a super-rich elite. Of Ireland's 33,000 millionaires, 30,000 are worth less than €5 million. Just 3,000 are worth between €5 million and €30 million. Sitting at the top are 330 people with more than €30 million each.
It is this elite that gives Ireland the sheen of a "wealthy country". But the vast majority of the population is not rich, and much of the wealth it does have is tied up in houses whose value may, to a significant extent, be artificial. And the impression of private wealth is not matched by the availability of public goods. The rudest awakening of 2007 was the realisation that, in matters of life and death, ours is a seriously impoverished society.
WHAT EMERGED IN the course of the year was an alternative body politic - a politics inscribed on the bodies of citizens battling serious illness. There was an off-stage chorus of women's voices that got louder as the year went on. Susie Long, who was to die in October, wrote to Joe Duffy's Liveline programme on RTÉ in January, giving a calmly furious account of the fact that she was going to die because it took from summer 2005 to February 2006 for her, as a public patient, to be given a colonoscopy: "A very nice man who was in the same, if not worse, condition as me when he went to his GP is going to live because he had private health insurance and I'm going to die because I didn't."
Rebecca O'Malley sacrificed her anonymity to prefigure a larger crisis in breast cancer services by telling how she was given the all-clear before discovering 14 months later that she did in fact have the disease and undergoing a radical mastectomy.
Orla Tinsley, a 20-year-old with cystic fibrosis wrote in The Irish Times a nightmarish account of her experiences as a frequent patient in Irish hospitals: elderly and confused patients denied dignity in general wards, "old and young people dying in the room I sleep in", the "constant fear of infection", the struggle for basic necessities like pillows. "The idea that someone is poor, fragile, incapable and not in control of his/her destiny terrifies me. Yet right here, in this shambles of a health system, the reality is that what we fight so hard not to become has become us, uncontrollably so."
These voices produced no real echo in the political system. The voters re-elected the Government. Mary Harney, the Minister for Health, comfortably survived a vote of no confidence. But they may have helped to alter our collective understanding of Irish reality after 15 years of economic prosperity.
That reality included a major city (Galway) without drinking water for much of the year; the early warning signs of the creation of ethnic ghettoes; a spectacular failure to achieve the stated goal of world-leading broadband provision; development built on an unsustainable dependence on the two million motor vehicles that clog up the roads; and an education system with no State pre-schools, some of the largest primary school classes in the developed world, a below-average number of PhDs and a very poor provision of life-long learning.
These things matter, not just because of the miseries and injustices they involve, but because they suggest unpleasant answers to the key question that hovered over 2007: if the Celtic Tiger era is over, what's next? The answer is supposed to be a high-class, innovative economy built on a flexible, creative and highly skilled society. But the social, environmental and educational markers of such a society are a long way from what we've got.
We are left to decide whether we remain addicted to artificially-induced highs, or to begin the new era with an acknowledgment of reality.