JOY AND SORROW

Harrington does it again! The remarkable Padraig Harrington won the US PGA Championship at the weekend to bring his golf majors tally to three in thirteen months.

What a man! Undoubtedly, he is the greatest sportsman Ireland has ever produced and that is without what may happen in the decade or more he has left to accumulate more honours. The look of steel in his eyes on Sunday evening as he caught Sergio Garcia on the home straight and crushed him with a superb finish suggests that Harrington has only begun to achieve and is a different and more ruthless warrior than in the past.

Indeed, Tiger would arguably not have lived with him on Sunday last, with his two rounds of 66 posted over a long day after rain delayed the third round on Saturday.

Well done Padraig! You have again lifted the hearts of a nation - again.

The joy of seeing Harrington achieve great things was offset by the reality of life in Ireland now. A mere temporary escape from the doom and gloom pervades throughout Ireland now.

Ireland is frozen, in an economic sense. The headlines scream with the tales woe being felt by everybody from billionaires to paupers. The banks have no money to lend to anybody and they will not even lend to each other. All building has stopped. Developers, sub-contractors, small builders are going out business. The really big developers are being kept alive by the banks who know if they call in their loans that the whole house of cards will collapse.

Fear is the new drug. It is causing people to stop shopping for all but the essentials. Shiny glossy shopping centres and retail parks are spartan places now. Footfall has dramatically decreased. Luxury goods stores are suffering big time. Impulse spending is being curtailed. Restaurants that would normally be impossible to get a booking in for months will now happily seat you if you walk in unannounced. Pubs are empty in rural towns and only half-full in the cities. People are staying at home, drinking cheap beer bought in Aldi or Lidl.

The country is flooded by water, and flooded by empty hotels. All of the lovely places that were built on the back of tax breaks are now finding that their business plan was built on sand. There is a glut of hotels throughout the country, all of them losing money. If you want good value in a break in one of the many 5-star hotels dotted around Ireland, look at the advertisements in the national press. Rooms are half-price. Ring them up and offer less and they will take it. Believe me, they will. The customer is now king, but the customer is now poor and utterly lacking in confidence. Don’t expect much company when you get to your nice hotel. Don’t expect much service either, as many of the staff are sacked and the place is running on a shoestring.

The Americans are staying at home and many of the Irish have no home anymore. Repossession of houses is reaching for the stars and still a long way to go. Crippling readjusted loan- to-value (LTV) criteria on many homes are leaving people facing negative equity and higher mortgage payments that they are simply unable to meet.

None of the above scenarios is the stuff of urban myth. They are the current reality and beneath the generalizations expressed are the horror stories of individual situations. The banks are, as always, the bastards behind all of this. When trouble comes, they are like a moon on a bright night – useless!

Padraig, it is time for you to rise to the occasion again!