THRIFTY IS TRENDY

How things have changed in Ireland in such a short space of time.

In 1994, the Celtic Tiger started out a whimpering cub, trying to shake off the generations of poverty and lack of confidence. In the next decade, it grew into an animal that devoured all before it.

Confidence went up. The price of houses and wages went up. The cost of credit came down. The availability of it from all financial institutions became easy. Credit card spending became the norm. If you were not in debt then you were a fool became a tag line. Use cheap credit to improve your life was the advice of a new breed of homespun financial advisers, usually with an agenda to pursue.

The dot com melt down of 2000 caused merely a blip in consumer-oriented Ireland. A few shaky months passed and the upward trend continued. Houses soared in price and demand as immigrants fuelled the need for accommodation. New car sales set year on year records. Foreign holidays became a seasonal event and weekends away became a monthly event. The chattering classes outdid each other with their boasts of Mediterranean villas and Manhattan apartments. For God sake, even the window cleaner had a home in Spain!

Come the end of 2005, the first signs of the bubble bursting began to manifest themselves. Interest rates increased every quarter on eight consecutive occasions.

Suddenly the second mortgage on the Irish home to finance the holiday property did not seem such a good idea. Cash flow became tighter as monthly mortgage payments rose. Interest only periods on mortgages came to an end and the reality of paying over twice as much per month to meet capital and interest payments hit home.

The party is over. The new trend is thrift. Vanity has a new overcoat. It is coloured Green. Being forced to do without is dressed up as a virtue in helping to save the planet. All those carbon emissions – how dreadful, lets get a smaller car, dear.

The number of fancy cars repossessed has soared. The number of fancy cars voluntarily and quietly returned to their lenders has soared even more. Shopping in Aldi and Lidl for the upper middle classes is de rigueur. Buying designer clothes in Oxfam is helping the less fortunate, don’t you know. The Hermes bag and Mercedes convertible are vulgar monuments to the excesses of the past.

The thrift trend has permeated down to the working classes. Cheap imported beer bought at service stations is now the alternative to being fleeced in your local pub. Drink irresponsibly at home is the new adage.

Restaurants are feeling the pinch as people suddenly start to use all those fancy appliances in their homes that heretofore were merely for decoration. Aga cookers are actually used to cook food for the family. Who would have thought we would see the day?

Welcome to the new Ireland folks! What next? The D4 set ordering fish n’ chips at Malloccas?

PITY THE POOR IRISH MOTORIST

Nobody in authority in Ireland appears to have any sympathy for the Irish Motorist (IM). The IM is a much-maligned creature, blasted with venom from every angle. This, despite the fact that many of the people who are openly critical of IMs are in fact IMs themselves.

It is hard to find another country in the developed world that is as anti-car as Ireland.

From the word go the IM is screwed.

First of all, as he or she buys their new car they are fleeced with an illegal tax, known as Vehicle Registration Tax (VRT). This used to be call import duty, which was banned by the EU on the reasonable basis that we are, in effect, one trading entity of 27 countries and there was no need for this antiquated protection tax. Ireland, however, managed to get derogation from this for a period. When this expired, they hit upon the swindle of calling it VRT instead of import duties and ever since are getting away with it, despite the attentions of the watchdogs in Brussels.

Having endured this initial pain, the poor IM is faced with the very high road taxes that pertain in Ireland. Now that the means of calculating these has changed to emissions, the poor IM who has a high-powered car or jeep not alone faces higher taxes but also has to endure the wrath of the mad tree-hugging Greens.

Next up is insurance of said motorcar. Insurance for experienced drivers has fallen considerably since the early years of the decade when, post-9/11 it soared to outrageous levels as the gangsters that masquerade as insurance companies took the opportunity to increase cover on all risks by ridiculous sums.

However, for a young driver in Ireland, there still is this horrendous outlay for them to meet annually. For years, insurance companies convinced the public that they were losing money on motor cover for young drivers. It was only when one large underwriter accidently (no pun intended) broke out the profits it made from each risk category that we realised that in fact they were making massive profits in that sector. Even with the fall in motor insurance for older drivers, the IM pays a much higher premium than those in all of the of the other EU countries.

Once on the road the going gets really tough for the IM. Ireland has third world infrastructure and under the NDP, they are gradually upgrading the road network. Despite getting billions from the EU to do this, it seems that they cannot build 20 kilometres of motorway without putting a toll on it. The commuter who drives to and from Dublin each day is faced with anything up to eight tolls depending on where they work.

Along with the high fuel prices (out of which the Government extracts painful amounts of duty), the unfortunate IM sees their weekly wage decimated by the cost of getting to work.

It is not as though there is much alternative with public transport.

Despite a fortune spent on advertising telling us how they are “getting there”, Irish Rail remains a farcical dinosaur from the semi-state days. It offers the commuter very little by way of a reasonable alternative to driving their car to work. If everybody were suddenly to take the train to get to work tomorrow, there would be chaos. As it is, travelling with Irish Rail makes those over-crowded Indian trains seem very attractive.

Buses offer an alternative, particularly the private operators. Of course, the state owned Bus Eireann uses its muscle to squeeze out private competition. With them, it is a case of using taxpayer’s money to hammer the same taxpayers.

So, spare a thought today for the IM. It may shortly be an endangered species. As it is, the IM is a little-loved creature through no fault of its own.

TEACH THEM ABOUT MONEY

Continuing the education theme of the last post, one observes that the education system in Ireland, up to completion of secondary level, actually delivers very little knowledge in the ways of life that students will encounter.

Sure, it teaches them the life science subjects but one aspect that is missing is financial education.

All education is designed to inform, first and foremost. After that, it is all about coaching students to pass exams in order to have a career where they earn money to provide them with the essentials of life. Money is the key word here. Money provides the basics, but it also provides the luxuries we all hanker after.

If you take the career graph of a university graduate in any discipline, it is noted that 94% end up in jobs working for somebody else. They move jobs as their career progresses but they still end up working for someone else. Their ability to earn is dictated by the constraints of the career or company they work for.

They have fallen into a trap. It may not be a poverty trap in the sense that they are not begging on the streets, but it is a trap nonetheless, that imposes limits as to what they can earn.

They get married or live with partners and start a family. They need a mortgage to buy a house or find the money to pay the rent. They need a car or maybe two depending on circumstances. They need holiday breaks from a demanding career that stresses them out. All of this costs money; for most ordinary people the career path does not provide enough of it.

From the outside, things may look rosy but scratch the surface and you find people who struggle to meet the bills every week of their life. They save to educate their kids, advise them on finding a safe career that actually sentences them to the very same lifestyle they have.

It is one of a grinding battle to find the money to live within a tight parameter impose by the salaries they earn. They will never be rich. At best they might achieve what is called being comfortable. It doesn’t matter if it is the university professor or a public servant. There is a ceiling on what they can do with their lives because of the income they have.

Avoidance of this could be addressed if money management and money creation was taught at secondary school, instead of what is in effect bookkeeping.

Teaching kids lessons on how be creative in making money will throw up entrepreneurial flair at young age. Some will say that this trait will show itself anyway, but that is only true of a limited number of people who have confidence at that age.

Others without this quality need to be taught that there is more to life than straitjacketed careers of enduring desperation. There is no money to be made in working nine-five for somebody else. You are merely a tool in another’s ambitions. You are deemed useful until you become useless. A grey suit in a faraway place will study a spreadsheet and make a decision that puts you on the dole. You do not have control of your own destiny.

If the education in Ireland had financial self-reliance as a subject on the syllabus for the five years of secondary education, there would emerge from our colleges a body of students with a an entirely different outlook on life and how to deal with the most important part of it.

In fairness, it is not just Ireland that is at fault. The entire western world lacks this facet of knowledge in their education systems.

There is a famous book written about achieving financial independence, called Rich Dad, Poor Dad, by Robert Kiyosaki and Sharon Lecter. It should be compulsory reading on any secondary school syllabus. Secondary education should see their goal as one that sends out students equipped to deal with the world.

Failing that, every parent who cares about their kid’s future should buy it and make them read it! It is worth the price.

WHAT IS THE POINTS?

This being the silly season where nothing much happens, the media have an annual field day with the Leaving Cert results, which came out this week gone by. Acres of newsprints covered the topic, much of it filler commentary that could have been transcribed from last year’s newspaper editions, such were the similarities.

The same old views are expressed, the same people make the same sane recommendations, the Department of Education agrees to consider them and a year later, nothing has happened.

Tomorrow, the CAO publishes the offer list and students are faced with another harrowing experience as they digest the offers and make a decision, which send them on a life-changing route and maps the future the rest of their lives.

Second – level education is fundamentally flawed in Ireland. By default, this leaves third-level education flawed by the CAO points system.

At secondary level, we are teaching our kids how to pass exams, not educate them. We educate them to score points that will get them their preferred place in college, but not necessarily the course most suitable to their attributes.

Career guidance in our secondary schools is so poor that it is beyond belief. It is merely a nameplate on an office in which sits somebody more intent on achieving high points for the school than the interest of the pupil. That is maybe too much of a generalization and harsh on some good people in the system, but by and large it is a fact.

The Leaving Cert should be abolished, and replaced by a five-year continuous assessment system. There should be an exam in the middle of that period that would define the status of a pupil for the final years of their secondary education.

At present everything is geared towards a two or three-hour exam at the end of five years.

A pupil could be sick on the day, freeze with nerves or have domestic worries that wrecks five years of good work.

Their entire future and life is determined by that exam and that most brief of periods. Mess it up and their career course takes a different direction that may lead them into a dead-end job doing what they don’t like just to make ends meet.

Not alone that, but the points system emanating from those results can ensure that a person who may have an aptitude for the career that the other higher qualified person hates, doesn’t get the opportunity to follow it.

The only way forward is continuous assessment during secondary level education. After that the points system must be altered so that students are not selecting courses in advance of exams as at present. Continuous assessment would ensure that the aptitude of the student is matched to the course rather than the current carriage-before-the-horse situation.

Every year at this time, the same old changes are advocated, and then forgotten about.

It is time to do something – now!

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!

BANJAXED IN BEIJING

The Olympic Games opened in Beijing last week with great fanfare. The Chinese are using this opportunity to show case the country to the world whilst conveniently hiding any evidence of human rights abuses for which the country is notorious.

Indeed there would be no Olympic Games opening in China on the 08/08/08 (they love their eights in China – lucky numbers and all that bull) were it not for human rights abuses.

All the Games stadia were effectively constructed by slave labour, particularly so when it looked like they were not going to make the necessary deadlines. At that point, the Government hauled hundreds of thousands of workers in from the fields to complete the projects on time. People had no choice in the matter. It is estimated by news agencies that hundreds, if not thousands, of workers lost their lives during the preparations for the games. Health and safety issues on building sites were low down on the Chinese authorities’ priorities.

In an overall context, you would wonder about the status of the modern-day Olympic Games. Their value is completely eroded because of the political circuses that have grown around them. They are monuments to power, money, illusion and corporate excesses. The staging of them has broken cities, and even countries – witness Los Angeles and Greece- and the benefits are only short term in relation to the return on the investment. When the Olympics are finished the host city is generally left with an excess of sporting facilities that become dormant and end up a millstone around the neck of the city authorities.

The process of selecting the locations is corrupt in the extreme with well-documented bribery apparent in many of the past choices. And, of course, this corruption extends onto the track where doping scandals have destroyed the reputation of the Olympic Charter.

The amateur ethos is long since departed and with the rewards for success so high, the temptation to use drugs to enhance performances is huge. As soon as more stringent anti-doping measures are put in place, the scientists are inventing methods to defeat them. It has got to the stage that if a world record is broken, then rather than acclaim the athlete, the public wonder how he or she avoided being tested positive. It is a bit like the suspicion in which we hold the husband of the murdered wife: Guilty until proven innocent, in other words.

This year Ireland travelled with a team of 57 athletes. RTE travelled with a team of 93 personnel, none of them athletes and most of them not broadcasters either.

What an utter waste of money in both situations.

Of the 57 athletes, about 14 are there on merit. All of that 14 have only outside chances of making a semi-final, much less win a medal. The balance are there because that arch-dictator, Pat Hickey, head of the OCI in Ireland, needs to justify his position and the money that is given to his organization by us, the taxpayers, through Government funding.

No disrespect to the athletes, but in all honesty, most of them shouldn’t be there and are only embarrassing the country. The much-maligned and oft repeated mantra that the importance of the Olympics is the taking part is historical bullshit. That was fine when all the athletes were actual amateurs and went back to their day jobs when it was over. Now the Olympic Games are a professional event, thinly disguised as adhering to the original principles. The fact that ladies beach volleyball is regarded as a sport worthy of Olympian merit says it all. This is soft-core porn parading as a sport. What next? Olympic lap dancing?

As for RTE, one would be forgiven for thinking that Ireland was a world-class athletic nation, judging by the number of people they have covering the occasion.

I doubt CNN sent as many staff! What do we get in return for this grossly extravagant waste of our money? Colm Murray eating Chinese food as though it was a new found cuisine. He couldn’t even use the chopsticks, for Gods sake! May we suggest he visits Kites, just around the corner from RTE, for authentic Chinese food and they will also teach him how to use the chopsticks?

We also had the cringe-inducing sight of him trying to perform a native dance with a posse of Chinese girls. Is this what we pay our licence fee to see?

A suggestion that would save RTE and us a lot of money: leave them all out there and see how they like it when the Games are over and they are despatched to the paddy fields!

LEARN TO PLAY THE GAME, TV3

I had the dubious pleasure of watching for the first time on Sunday last the coverage of the All Ireland Football Championship from TV3.

Last year the GAA auctioned the rights to provide coverage of the games in both football and hurling codes. Previously RTE had a monopoly on coverage since time began, with the exception of BBC Northern Ireland, which covered some of the All Ulster clashes.

I sat down to watch the Kerry-Monaghan qualifier clash at Croke Park. Initial impressions were good with sound analysis from the studio team, headed by Matt Cooper.

Cooper and TV3 impressed when handling the Rugby World Cup in 2007 so a similar refreshing take on GAA games was not an overly ambitious aspiration by the viewer.

There the professional presentation unfortunately ended.

The viewers were sold a pup. We had the bland and entirely unsuitable Trevor Welch commentating on the game. Is TV3 living on such a shoestring that they must employ this excuse for a commentator on GAA games as well as soccer matches?

He is bad enough at that pedestrian game because firstly, it is as slow as a caterpillar in the Olympic 100 metres and secondly there are only 22 players to identify instead of 30.

On Sunday, the commentary and camera work was appalling. You would see and hear better at a county final of a Junior Championship, when the committee would ask the least illiterate of its number to do the job for the sake of the club. This lad would then borrow a handy cam from a friend and bellow his way through the game. You can be sure though that he would know his players and those of the opposition. The viewer would be at least entertained.

The Kerry-Monaghan was a great match. Welch and his camera crew were a disaster and an embarrassment. Constant mistakes with identification of players followed by hasty corrections made the viewer cringe. The monotone voice that might as well be commentating on a particularly tragic state funeral, failed to grasp the important scores and events throughout the game. Poor judgement and opinion on pieces of action were constant throughout. It was an utterly incompetent display of commentating made worse by the fact that it was a good game.

Worst of all was the camera work. The panning of the action was atrocious. At one stage, the Monaghan corner forward was bearing down on goal and the camera stayed fixed in close up mode. The viewer was screaming for a wider view to see the context of the play, and the options available to the Monaghan forward. He could have been hurtling towards his own goal for all we knew. The dreadfully inept camera crew must have been on their first assignment after college – that is if they went to college at all.

TV3 paid a lot of money for the rights to broadcast GAA games. They should now go out pay good money to hire decent staff to protect their investment.

STAY AWAY CHARLIE

Charlie Bird is a national institution in Ireland. He is far from a national treasure but he is getting up there. When he dies, he will probably be deemed as such. RTE describe Charlie as their Special News Correspondent. This gives him licence to turn up on our screens with breaking news on any subject under the sun. It must really piss off other journalists dedicated to politics or crime that when something big happens in their field, Charlie has first handle on it.

Charlie has this breathless urgency about him when reporting. He can make an orderly bus queue sound like a riot; a report on flash flooding generates such excitement that the viewer expects to see Noah and the Ark in the background.

He was in Rome for the election of Pope Benedict and the resulting dispatches put Dan Brown and his TheDe Vinci Code novel in the category of boredom occupied by Becket’s Waiting for Godot. When his sources told him that the odds were on the German to win, we half expected Hitler to appear from the white smoke and announce there was no Heaven.

When his prediction about Cardinal Ratzinger proved correct, Charley delivered his “I told you so” report with all the smug pleasure usually reserved for the doctor who tells a patient they have three months to live and thumps the table in satisfaction when they die on the 90^th day.

We can therefore assume that RTE place great value on the contribution of Charlie to the broadcaster’s archives. So much so that they, in effect, give Charlie a free holiday every year, at the taxpayers expense, to indulge in his hobby of exploring the great rivers of the world.

Last year RTE viewers were treated to Charlie exploring the Amazon. This year it is the Ganges. We can only imagine what all this is costing the national broadcaster, which usually brings us American junk TV.

To listen to Charlie rowing his boat down the Ganges or the Amazon, you would be forgiven for thinking he was the first person to discover the place. Looking suitably dishevelled with a nice beard growth, Charlie tells that he is approaching a place that poses real danger because of the presence of some obscure tribe who like to eat people. He informs us in hushed tones that he is all alone in this wicked place. What about the camera crew Charlie? Cue an advert break and we are left wondering (perhaps even hoping) that we may see Charlie being turned over on a blazing spit after Vodafone tells us about another great deal. But, lo and behold, there is the bould Charlie talking to the cannibalistic natives. They are all smiles and Charlie is making wild gestures when they run into difficulty with translation. They all love Charlie and before he leaves for the next dangerous assignment, they are kissing him and the women are all shaking their exposed breasts at him. Obviously, they get the RTE News out there in the jungle because Charlie is feted like a hero.

The series runs for weeks and we learn very little about the Ganges or Amazon and a whole lot about Charlie. What a load of semi-state institution cobblers. What a waste of money that could be put to better use doing real and relevant documentaries. RTE insults their viewers with a series devoid of any real information. This crap just caters to the whims and desires of their egotistical chief news reporter.

If they really wanted to provide us with in-depth information on both of these great rivers all they had to do was pay a small royalty fee to the National Geographic Channel or Discovery Channel, who both have done many wonderful documentaries about all the great natural wonders of the world.

Instead, tens of thousands of euro are wasted on paying for Charlie’s holiday.

Do us all a favour RTE: leave him out there in the jungle and hope he never comes back.