The opposition have blamed Brian Cowen. Brian Cowen has blamed the world economy. Everyone has made sure to point out that it wasn’t their fault. Eamon Ryan, though, knows who is to blame for our failing economy – we are. This report is from the Irish Times, as politicians today voted in an 11-week Dáil break.
Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources Eamon Ryan told the House that Irish people had helped burst the Celtic Tiger boom by indulging in bigger houses, cars and holidays.
Mr Ryan said affluent consumer behaviour helped contribute to higher energy prices and a rise in the general cost of living.
“We bought bigger cars for the status that it gave. We built bigger houses with X number of bedrooms and bathrooms, regardless of how we were going to heat these massive properties.
“We flew to New York in a way that turned Madison Avenue into our latest Grafton Street. Let us be honest with ourselves, that is the phenomenon that occurred.”
There you have it. It’s all our fault. Not the Government who solved every potentially embarrassing industrial relations problem over the years by throwing money at it. Not the councils whose land rezonings created instant millionaires. Not Charlie McCreevy, whose single-rate 20% Capital Gains Tax made it more profitable to be a property speculator than to earn income by working. Not the builders, who took the Government’s largesse, enriched themselves, and then stopped building stone-dead as soon as it looked like their profits might dip. Not the Central Bank, who stood by while the financial institutions bent the lending criteria in every way possible to lend people bigger and bigger mortgages, thus feeding the property inflation flames. Not the financial institutions themselves, who have now panicked and stopped lending to anyone, thus turning a slump instantly into a collapse. It has nothing to do with people abroad – speculators who play with currency rates and oil prices, or idiots who lent ’subprime’ mortgages to people with no jobs and poor credit records, and who found to their amazement that these people didn’t keep up the payments.
So the next time you hear of a young couple who’ve lost their jobs and can’t keep up the repayments on their tiny house miles from Dublin, or of a child still schooled in a prefab because capital grants have been decmated in the Government’s slash-and-burn panic solution, or of a pensioner who can’t afford to heat her home because of the savage price hikes, don’t feel sorry for any of them.
Remember, it’s all their own fault.
