BRENDAN O’CONNOR: How Ireland is changing gradually and suddenly
There is whole new generation who don’t have our baggage, says Brendan O’Connor, and they don’t believe that optimism will end in tears
YOU wonder when the change comes, will it come suddenly — a tipping point, but a tipping point we’ve been building up to for years. How will the country change? Two ways, as the man said: gradually and then suddenly. And the sudden will hit us before we know it. The future is gathering out there. It’s Leo and Macron standing together. It’s the Citizens’ Assembly; however it might have diverged in views from the country at large, it represents some kind of rump of new thinking. And the future is a younger generation who are unlike you and me and their parents; who are unrecognisable, really. They’ve grown up in a different world. The gulf between them and us is not just the normal intergenerational gap. Between them and us there was an industrial revolution that changed everything. That’s a onceevery-few-hundred-years event. And it changes things both gradually and suddenly.
When the industrial backdrop to life changes, it changes the whole texture of the world. When how people are employed changes, it changes the whole texture of their thinking, of their dreams and aspirations and of how they live their lives, the timescales in which they plan.
Due to a combination of farming, economics and Catholicism, Irish people tend to think longterm. Just a few generations back, gratification was deferred for your whole life on the promise of a reward in the next world. It’s probably not so extreme for older generations now, but there is still a long-term view that involves gathering. We work and work and accumulate and we seek to create security, a buffer against the rainy day, a buffer against illness, oldage; a buffer for our children after we are gone.
While it’s fair to say that young people always took time to come around to that long-term way of looking at the world, it seems that this generation of young people — the younger millennials — will never think long term to the extent that previous generations did. This is a generation that places more store in mindfulness than Catholicism. It’s all about the present moment and less about mortgaging your future. And, of course, this generation have seen what happened to the generation before them. When the best laid plans, the responsible attitude, the investing in the future, all ended in disaster.
And this is perhaps why it is the younger generation who are driving consumer spending, optimism and a loosening of the purse strings. Today’s Kantar/Millward Brown poll shows us that there has been a sharp drop in belt tightening in the last five years, and it is driven by younger people. It is also driven by Dubliners. That’s the other great divide in this country. There are young people, who live in a different country from the rest of us. And there are Dubliners, who increasingly live in a different country to the rest of Ireland.
It’s all in the little things. Take treats. By treats, we mean takeaway coffees, lottery tickets, confectionery, magazines, cosmetics. Five years ago, DVDs were included as well. But that’s another story of the revolution.
The number of people intending to buy more treats over the next year has practically trebled since the last time this survey was done, from 7pc to 19pc. One-third of 18-to-24-year-olds intend to buy more treats this coming year. 27pc of Dubliners do. Leonard Lauder’s lipstick index, the suggestion that people buy more affordable indulgences in harder times, has largely been discredited, because people buy more cosmetics when times are good, too. But it is no stretch here to say that the treat index in Ireland suggests optimism.
Belt-tightening is falling out of fashion too. And again, it’s driven by young people and Dubliners. The proportion of people who plan to spend more on foreign holidays in the next year has more than quadrupled since the last survey. As has the amount of people planning to spend more on weekend breaks in Ireland. The amount of people planning on increasing their savings in the next year has nearly trebled. The number of people planning to spend more on clothes in the next year has increased sevenfold. And those planning on spending more on their homes — decor, etc — has trebled. Among younger people, the figures are even more exuberant. 30pc of 18-to-24-year-olds plan to spend more on foreign holidays in the next year; 24pc on weekend breaks in Ireland.
So there is a new generation of consumers out there, and they are living for now, perhaps because they know how precarious futures are, because they dream less of investing everything in owning property, because they are different to us.
Will they stay different? That’s another question. Maybe marriage and kids, if they go that route, will change their priorities.
But across all ages, there is no doubt that there is more exuberance out there, there are people who have some confidence in the short-term future, people who are not squirrelling everything away or using it to pay down debt. People are starting to live again.
As it was with the positive outlook of three-quarters of the population that this poll showed, which we reported on last week, official Ireland has possibly missed this mood. Marketing people and people in business have not missed it. They have not missed it because they deal in facts, in results, and in data, like this poll. But we in the media can tend to sometimes deal in agendas, driven by the loudest voices. And we can tend to gravitate towards more dramatic news, problems, things going wrong.
As a nation, too, we have perhaps been guilty of continuing a downbeat narrative long after it ceased to be entirely justified. It has almost become a pathology now. Public discourse is moaning, or anger, or handwringing. Any kind of optimism is viewed with distrust and is countered with stories of those who aren’t doing well.
It was as if the downturn gave a shot in the arm to the strain of Catholic guilt that runs through us. And, in some weird way, we thrive on guilt. As much as we lashed out and blamed everyone, from Europe to people who went to charity auctions, for the boom and bust, we gave ourselves a good beating up about it too. The fact that we have been told non-stop since that it was all an illusion has made us careful about straying from the safety of pessimism.
But clearly there is a new generation coming through, and they don’t have our baggage. For them, an economic upturn is not something to be feared; optimism is not something that will all end in tears; life is short and it’s for living. And right now they are affecting gradual change.
But as demographics shift, that change could become very sudden. And maybe that generation will learn their lessons too. But they will have to learn them for themselves. And right now, let them enjoy their innocence.
‘Downturn gave a shot in the arm to the Catholic guilt that runs through us’