Whither Ireland goes, does UK plc follow?
I had the good fortune to be in Dublin yesterday. Fortune is perhaps a two-edged sword when it comes to the state of Ireland. The great Celtic Tiger engineered by the profligacy of the boom years is worse than on its knees. Yet, landing at the city’s airport, you would not immediately know that this was so.
Swirling numbers swarm around the baggage belts. Rows of sleek black VIP limousines still pick up executives. And the journey into Dublin itself, through the equally sleek tunnel that brings you out in the docks, speaks of the infrastructure investment the country so badly needed.
Open the newspaper, and there is the Taoiseach Brian Cowen fresh from yet another parliamentary joust in which he preserved his job to fight yet another day.
He is flanked in photographs by the remarkable Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan, who is combating not only the worst crisis to confront his country since the Great Famine, but is also personally and hugely courageously battling pancreatic cancer at the same time. Indeed he himself had just emerged from a week in hospital fighting off an infection.
The newspapers are also full of Irish magnates fighting off the receivers or bowing to inevitable bankruptcy. There is rage against the banks and against the state’s bad debt bank – NAMA (the National Asset Management Agency) or debt dump.
On the streets and in the overblown four-star hotels you don’t see the ranks of unemployed. Yet every individual you see, you wonder how near the brink they are.
Thousands of homes are being repossessed and nearly half a million people are unemployed. From a population of four and a half million, and a workforce of around two million, that represents between a quarter and a third of the entire work force.
Upon departure, Dublin Airport is a depressing meander through retail outlets – miles of them, it seems, selling stuff that if a bulldozer happened by could easily be confused with landfill.
Is this a message to UK plc? Is this the terrifying spectre that engineered the departure of Sir Alan Budd – the UK’s still new boss of the Office of Budget Responsibility? He forecast 1.3 million unemployed as a result of the budget measures alone. Now he’s going. There is, according to several sources in Whitehall, much more to his desired return to retirement in Devon than has yet met the public eye.
In short, whither Ireland goes, does UK plc follow? Heaven preserve us all if it is!