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Why Ireland is in Recession…

Almost every day of my life I make the journey from where I currently live, Sallins, into the capital. I have done so for almost 12 years. This is cause number 1 – Ireland’s Ridiculous Commuter Culture. People travel for hours every day from various places around the country to Dublin, to work. Hundreds of thousands of people, get into their car every day, and join moving car parks called Motorways and make the trip to the big city. People also get on buses, and trains, in every county around Dublin to do the same thing. People get up at the crack of dawn, to leave their suburban house to head off and get into the office a couple of hours later. However before I send people in the wrong direction, I see nothing wrong with people wanting to live wherever they want, and in fact in a country as small as ours, its actually quite unavoidable.

Part of what made the economy so strong for a while is the apparent dream of every single person in Ireland to want to buy and own a house, their own little castle in the suburbs. And buy we did, in the thousands. And the Builders thought this was great and launched in buying land and building huge estates (with money they didn’t have) for us to buy (with money we didn’t have). But somewhere along the line, builders forgot to stop building houses for a second to see if they had anyone to live in them…

Unfortunately for everyone, the so called global economic crisis/credit crunch threw a spanner in the works, and the banks could no longer continue handing out mortgages, because they realised that they had put assets into bad funds and with their collapse, no longer had strong enough capital to guarantee the deposits that they had. This had a knock on affect that it meant that people could no longer  buy houses. This had a further knock on affect which meant that developers weren’t selling any houses which meant they could not pay back the loans on the land and estates that they had built. Thus the land and estates that sat unused and unsold turned into extra and new bad debts that the banks now had on their books. However, had the economic crisis not happened, the banks and the developers plans might have worked as you can easily see how they would have both made money out of this.

With the tremendous speed of town and village development, however, more problems arose. The services and local amenities that would have followed in a more stable growth period, never got the chance. I’m sure many people thought and believed, that they would still arise but in a delayed manner. And with everyone making so much money it didn’t really matter that you didn’t have a shop, a school, a communal area, that you couldn’t walk to. It would all work out in the end. But now, the government has no money left… so no school will be built. Small shops couldn’t compete with the massive supermarkets and people wouldn’t walk to them anyway, so they don’t exist anymore. And in the current economic climate, people are unlikely going to take the kind of risk involved in setting up local shops.

Apart from local amenities, other things also got forgotten about. Like how all these people were going to get to work. Local councils didn’t care, they were getting growth and with it more money. Other state bodies, like CIE, also obviously didn’t care, as they moved glacially slow in improving services for their passengers. So much so that people abandoned public transport in favour of the car, and hence you join a huge traffic jam into work every day. Irish Rail services, are still overflowing with passengers during peak hours, and I don’t know anyone that will tell you they find the service worth the huge amount of money that they pay every year. A charge that has increased by a huge amount in the years that I’ve been travelling. My feelings about Irish Rail as a service have been voiced before however, so I wont go into them again.

However, it does bring me to my second cause of Ireland’s economic woes – The inability of people to do their jobs properly. Very recently, numerous events have shown how ineffectual some people are at doing their job, from Ryan Air’s unbelievably bad PR people(here, and here too), to global financial regulators and in a case very close to my heart – Irish Rail’s revenue protection unit. I just want to point out that, had this company to survive in the private sector, they would be long gone. I have never seen a fine penalty process so badly thought out, implemented, and managed as this one. A little while ago, I forgot to get a ticket before I boarded the train in Sallins. No problem, I thought, I’ll just get one on the train. No ticket collector. Then behold ticket checkers at the doors in Heuston. Ah well, fine time. I didn’t really mind. It was a mistake on my part and well I deserved it. However I was completely shocked by the “Revenue Protection Officers” attitude, and I reacted badly to this. So the fine doubled. No problem, I shouldn’t have risen to the idiot.

But that’s when the trouble really started. I wasn’t told how I could pay the fine, and the little slip of paper that I was handed was actually a receipt for fine payment(!) so it didn’t help. So i phoned and emailed to complain about situation I was told that I had to pay by check to the following office. Not having a check book, I was then told I could pay at the office in Connolly station. So I took a morning off work to head there and pay the fine, only to be told that I could have paid it in any ticket office! Wow. Not impressed was I.

Thinking that was the end of it, I forgot about the whole unfortunate episode, only for it to be brought back to the fore today with a letter that stated that I had 7 days to pay a fine that I had already paid and for a figure that was nothing like the fine that I had been given, and on the low side too. Another error in a very long list of errors and another sign that people can’t do their job properly.

But there’s one last cause, and this one is going to controversial… The dishonesty of Ireland and many of its people.

We see it everywhere now, and in everything we do, in every aspect of society. People no longer keep to the speed limit – “Ah sure, its only there to make the government money”, I heard one person say recently. People abuse things in work, like phones and stationary, where the attitude is always that “the company has loads of money, so what if I make a few mobile phone calls…”. A large number Irish people are all out to get whatever they can for themselves and care not one iota about the consequences. Two perfect examples of this recently – The selling of bogus mass cards and a recent caller on RTE1′s liveline show who spoke of a despicable act, where a conman, purporting to be selling an Apple iPod, left notices in the local supermarket. A child saw the notice and saved up as much money as he could to buy it and then when the conman arrived he stole the child’s money and left the child with a phone book in a bag.

Recently, I’ve spoken to many people who have seen this in their organization, in their community, but most people don’t care. Look at our politicians! It would appear the more corrupt they are, the more votes they get! People see dishonesty as ok, a bit of grease for the wheel.

But it’s not ok, and its destroying our country.

Tags: Bad Customer Service in Ireland, Building Houses, Buses And Trains, Buy Houses, Car Parks, Collapse, Credit Crunch, Dublin, Global Economic Crisis, Ireland, Irish, Irish People, Irish Rail, Journey, Little Castle, Mortgages, Recession, Ryan Air Bad PR, Wrong Direction