A land where the fundamentals are fatally flawed

IF you were watching the racing at Leopardstown last week, or indeed any other racing on any other week, you will have seen the owners or trainers of winning horses being interviewed in the parade ring just after the race, explaining how it was done.

Sometimes the explanation will be simple — the winner seemed to have the best form going into the race, and was indeed the favourite, so it was all pretty obvious.

But the fascinating thing, is how obvious it seems to so many of the winning owners and trainers, even the ones whose horses didn’t seem to have the best form, which was reflected in the fact that they started at quite a big price.

Listening to some of these characters explaining what a great chance they’d had all the time, if you’d looked at the form a certain way, you’d start to wonder why the rest of the field bothered to take part at all. Or why indeed the management at Leopardstown even went to the trouble of holding the race, when the outcome was so predictable?

Of course they are pumped up by the endorphins which come in the immediate afterglow of victory, but still their explanations seem quite logical, and indeed the only mystery is this: why didn’t they tell us all this before the race? And if it was so obvious, why didn’t everyone see this?

I suppose we are in the presence here of one of the eternal verities, the fact that there is no single monolith that we can call “the form”, that there are only various lines of form, and that somehow we must work out which is the right line — even if many of the top tipsters are putting their faith in a different line of form, again for reasons which seem quite logical at the time.

Tipping horses, of course, is virtually an exact science compared to forecasting the results of the economy in general. And yet some of the basic principles are the same.

The line of form that is followed by the majority may sound highly plausible — “the fundamentals are sound”, for example, was the hot favourite for a while during the last boom, and the smart money seemed to be going on it. “There will be a soft landing” was also there or thereabouts, as they say.

But when it was all over, and the likes of Richard Curran or David McWilliams or Morgan Kelly were explaining how right they had been, when they pointed out that the fundamentals were not sound, and there would not be a soft landing, everything they said now sounded so perfectly sensible... ah, how did we not see it? How did we miss that line of form? How did we not know that this was the one to watch?

Which brings us to Barbara McCarthy.

A couple of weeks before Christmas, there was an article in this paper by Barbara McCarthy, under the headline, “A rental refugee from Dublin flees to Cape Town, a low-cost sanctuary”. It explained how Barbara, who is a single parent with a three yearold daughter, “didn’t earn enough to live in Dublin, no matter how hard I tried”. How she had “followed the formula” and “completed post-graduate education, learnt unique skills and [I] have a CV the length of my arm, yet Ireland has rejected me, spat me out if you will”.

And she wrote of “friends who didn’t make big careers for themselves in their 30s, just doing odd jobs or contract work. Now, when I call them, they tell me they haven’t eaten in two days and are facing homelessness for Christmas. My friend, who works in hospitality, told me she earned €160 last week. Her hair is starting to fall out due to stress and she hasn’t had a hot meal in a week. Is that OK?”

Clearly it is not OK, especially in a country that is said to be doing so well, according to a certain line of form — the most popular line indeed, which tells us that Ireland is doing better than it has done since the last time it was doing so well.

So it is not OK, or at least it wouldn’t be OK, if you were applying certain criteria — if you still had this sense that there is such a thing as the common good which is not best served by forcing bright and hardworking people to move to South Africa.

Nor would it be OK, if there was a recognition that such things mattered, that there was a value in running an economy in such a way that it didn’t make people’s hair fall out, due to worrying all the time about earning enough money to have somewhere to live, and perhaps even something to eat.

It would not be OK at all, if you were looking at it with such sentimental attitudes — but the thing is, those attitudes no longer seem to apply.

So here is the truthful answer to that apparently rhetorical question posed by Barbara McCarthy: yes, the way we do things now, it is OK that your friend earned €160 last week and that she hasn’t had a hot meal in a week and all that. It is also, in fact, perfectly OK that you felt obliged to move from Dublin to Cape Town in order to feel that there was some purpose to your life.

Really, nobody seriously questions these things any more. The rent demanded of the individual worker is a matter of little consequence in the great scheme — and you can’t expect the Government to do anything about it, because most of us have now accepted that that’s not what governments do.

What is it that they do? Well, they “create the conditions” or something of that nature, though it seems clear that whatever conditions they are creating have a tendency to induce premature hair loss, or actual hunger, in those who live and work there — with the ones whose spirits are not completely broken, glad to be moving to another continent to start again.

So that is why this piece by Barbara McCarthy stayed with me for days, for weeks afterwards. In this story of one woman and her daughter, we could discern the shape of the lives of multitudes of well-educated working people who are worrying incessantly about paying the rent. Meanwhile, governments are worrying with equal fervour that corporations might perhaps be paying too much tax, or that there might be something else that can be done to help them and their executives, that hasn’t been thought of yet.

Here, I felt, was a compelling line of form, one for the notebook. One for the day when we’re looking back on this strange time in our island story, wondering if there was anything we missed back then, our awareness of which might have led to a better outcome all round. Anything at all, such as, say, the gradual disappearance from our culture of what used to be known as a proper job which gave you “a roof over your head”.

Would that by any chance be the one to watch?