John McGuirk

I couldn’t write this morning. I had a tonne of copy-writing sitting in front of me, and I was just drawing a blank. To be honest, things haven’t really improved, and so this post is as much an attempt to get the juices flowing again as it is an expression of my desire to write about anything in particular.

I had two conversations this morning, both with friends, both of them unemployed for months now. And just now, I’ve noticed that another friend, David Cochrane, has written a blogpost on the same subject. I, myself, have been surviving on the bits and bobs I pick up here and there, but comfortable I am not. The Dole beckons unless there’s a significant upturn.

Now, I’ve always been philosophical about rough times. As in all things, they pass. There will again, in the future, be times of great plenty, both personally and for us as a country. But it struck me today just how many dear friends are in an awful place, financially. And it struck me further just how talented those people are. We’re not talking people who were in the building trade and went down with the ship. We’re talking about people with huge experience in advertising, accounting, IT, and other fields. With qualifications. And education. And experience. All sitting on the sidelines, drawing benefits in order to feed themselves.

And there’s little hope of light at the end of their respective tunnels. Employers can handpick the person they want, and pay them less than they are objectively worth, and do so while throwing hundreds of surplus CVs on the scrapheap.

It’s bleak out there, and it’s not getting any better. One friend appears to have succumbed to total depression, staying in bed for most of the day and rarely going out. Others, with jobs – at least on paper – are struggling to maintain the pretence that they are comfortable when they are anything but. When you ring people and ask them to go for drinks, they are amazingly busy even though when they were working they had all the time in the world. We’re still, I think, in denial about how bad things are.

10% of mortgage holders are in trouble, living every day in the fear of losing their homes. Earnings have fallen dramatically but supermarket prices are as high as ever, and the cost of a pint has actually increased. Small time developers have gone bust – but you see them in the clubs anyway, pretending everything is ok.

It’s bizarre. I’m lucky, because I have a wonderful family and great parents. I’ll never end up on the street, or without a roof over my head, at least while they are alive. My own mortgage doesn’t have to worry me because they know how bad things are. But there are people out there facing absolute destitution, and the most society can offer them is €196 a week. Try living on it, some time.

I’m not sure this post has a point to it, other than to suggest that perhaps a large part of the media and political elites are in utter denial. The everyday struggles of people just to retain their dignity are not the stories we read about or see on television. We hear lots about the national debt, and how it’s growing, but the mountain of personal debt is what’s really crushing this economy – and worse, crushing lives.

I’m a deficit hawk. I think the Government should spend what it can raise. But it seems to me that now, more than ever, we need to use the national credit card to invest in a stimulus programme, or what the Americans are currently calling a “jobs bill”. We can’t of course, because we signed up to the stability and growth pact. In Europe, “stability” is a more pertinent economic consideration than unemployment.

So what happens next? How long are these people that I know, and the hundreds of thousands like them, going to be left on the sidelines to waste away whilst we await the recovery? It will come, because even the most incompetent administration cannot escape the economic cycle, but when it does, we may have lost a generation of young people who get skipped over in favour of fresh graduates.

I don’t know. I had missed the worst of the recession up until now, both in terms of personal finance and awareness of what was going on around me. This morning, for some reason, it hit me pretty hard.

It is, indeed, the economy, stupid.