During the good times very few of us questioned what was going on as we were benefiting too much, writes DAVID ADAMS
IMAGINE IRELAND as a football club that had languished for decades in the lower reaches of the league, never doing anything more than hold its own.
Then suddenly the fortunes of “FC Ireland” changed, and, over the course of a few seasons, it shot up through the divisions, even perching for a while at the very pinnacle of the premiership.
The supporters were ecstatic, eager to share in the success and to wallow in the glory.
They took such enormous pride in their little club being among the top performers in the world; few were tempted to look closely at how the miracle had been achieved or was being sustained.
The truth is everybody was having too much fun to care. Far from having to face many awkward questions, those most closely associated with FC Ireland were generally lauded as heroes and geniuses. This made the fall when it came so much harder to bear.
With their club now plummeting through the divisions, the once delirious fans and pundits have turned viciously on FC
Ireland’s directors, its management and its outrageously overpaid players. You wouldn’t have guessed it at the time, but it now seems that everyone except the people in charge had “known all along” that the club’s economic model would prove disastrous in the medium to long term. According to current wisdom, it was always obvious that success couldn’t be sustained.
You can only take the football analogy so far, of course, because the economic model that underpinned FC Ireland was little different from that shoring up nearly every other “club” in the premiership.
With the dawning of harsh economic realities, they have all been forced to cope with “relegation”, though few have fallen quite as far as Ireland.
The point is, during the good times very few of us – aside from notable exceptions, such as Fintan O’Toole – questioned what was going on because we were all benefiting too much to care.
I am as guilty as the rest. Here in Northern Ireland I was delighted when my house almost doubled in “value” over a 14-month period.
It crossed my mind that first-time buyers might be finding it difficult, but as it didn’t directly affect me or mine, I didn’t raise a fuss about it.
You barely needed to put down a deposit or show much evidence of a steady income to qualify for a mortgage, so I comforted myself that whatever the first-timers were losing on the swings they’d probably already gained on the roundabouts.
Many of those same people – if, in fact, they still have a home of their own – are now stuck with houses that will never be worth anywhere near what they’re paying for them, and that’s without taking into account the interest on their loan.
During the good times, far from worrying about the possible implications for house buyers at home, many were considering whether they could stretch to a little place abroad, maybe somewhere in the Algarve or in the south of France.
Perversely, in the UK the people now being punished most for our years of profligacy are those who transgressed the least, the savers (of whom I am not one, I should say). The drastic lowering of UK interest rates (currently sitting at 0.5 per cent) to help mortgage payers meet their commitments has meant that the savings of people who were careful not to go into debt are sitting in banks and building societies earning virtually nothing.
I can’t recall too many protests in the Republic at the time either, when, for example, parcels of land in and around Ballsbridge were changing hands for barely believable sums of money. If anything, there was an air of boastfulness in the reporting of the figures, a certain pride that parts of Dublin and beyond could command such prices.
National tub-thumping was even more evident in the various newspaper reports and magazine features that told us how Irish property developers and speculators were “buying up London”. “Benign colonialism” the media were calling it.
There haven’t been too many glossy features in recent times congratulating the property speculators on their efforts.
No doubt, many of the same writers are now penning articles castigating the high rollers, and wondering aloud how the rest of us could be so daft as to let them get away with it for so long.
Of course, we should reflect on how we managed to get ourselves into the mess we’re in, and certainly anyone who broke the law must be held to account. Still, let’s not kid ourselves that only land speculators, builders, bankers and politicians were to blame.
With few exceptions, we were all helping ourselves to as much of the pie as we could get our hands on. When people like O’Toole raised awkward questions, they were either ignored or castigated as killjoys.
Moreover, if FC Ireland were to shoot up through the divisions again, would we overly concern ourselves with how the miracle had been achieved or was being sustained?
Somehow, I don’t think so.