Life’s not perfect, but a bit of confidence is a big plus
The recovery kept going all right and everything is better for many now — but it’s all arriving just that bit too late for Enda Kenny, writes Brendan O’Connor
NORWEGIAN Air announced flights from Ireland to New York and Boston last week. The first tranche of 5,000 flights sold out in six hours. Norwegian Air thinks it’s their fastest launch sale ever. Admittedly this first tranche were at a knock-down price, but still, we can only assume that a lot of them were sold to people who decided on impulse to take off to the US, or people who were thinking of a trip and took this opportunity to commit. There’s no doubt that things like this give us the heebie-jeebies a bit. We still look back and laugh nervously at that era when Irish people would fly off to New York for the weekend with empty bags and come back with the same bags full to bursting with stuff from Woodbury Common Outlet village or Macy’s, justifying it by saying that the savings on the jeans paid for the tickets.
If that gave us the heebie-jeebies, what about people queueing overnight to buy houses in Portmarnock? That would give you the full-on willies.
The CSO’s basket of goods used to calculate the consumer price index was updated last week. It seems that having gone off the menu in 2012 along with fine wines, Champagne is now back on the shopping list for Irish people. Craft beers, which ain’t cheap, now constitute a significant enough part of the weekly shop to be included now, too. There’s a category for large TVs as well now, and our new ways of eating are represented by hake, avocado and sweet potatoes being added to the list. Remember these decisions are not made by the CSO in an arbitrary fashion. They add them to the list because this is what Irish people are buying.
These vignettes will drive those on lower incomes and those on the left insane. It will bug a lot of people the way Fine Gael’s slogan in the last general election did. ‘Keep the recovery going’ was viewed as a bit premature for most people, and as it got closer to the election day, the message was changed to make it more about getting the recovery to reach everybody.
We are still told every day and every week that the recovery has not reached most people. We are told that new jobs are being created only in Dublin, and that the recovery is non-existent outside the Pale.
Economist Dan O’Brien has been pointing out for a while now that this simply isn’t true, certainly not in job terms. He’s better at this than I am, so I’ll take the liberty of borrowing some of his analysis here. Drilling down into the fact that the numbers in work are now the highest they ever were in this country, he points out that all 14 industry sectors added jobs in the last year, all eight regions of the country did, and even young and low-skilled adults, those hardest hit by the recession, are benefiting from the improving jobs market.
With the buzz of a rugby weekend around Dublin, and tickets for the match like gold-dust, you could be forgiven for thinking that there is some sense of recovery in the air, but perhaps there is another momentum to it now. Perhaps the recovery is starting to deepen through the regions and the various economic sectors and the various social groups.
We have seen recovery in Dublin over the past few years. Two years ago, it became a struggle to get into a Dublin restaurant at the weekend, and pubs were getting increasingly packed from Thursday night. A year or 18 months ago, taxi drivers and hairdressers saw things come back. More disposable income around and people less afraid to spend it. And gradually it is broadening out to the rest of Leinster; to Cork; to Galway; to Limerick. You could cautiously say that maybe it is starting to stick. And maybe we should try and see beyond the recession/depressive mindset we’ve been in for nearly a decade.
It is not easy to adjust. We went too far in one direction and we became deluded. This was bound to lead to an excess of caution. Indeed, that, along with a cash shortage, could be one of the reasons why it was foreigners who had the confidence to buy up the country when it was going cheap; a confidence many here lacked.
And while we are determined to be responsible forever now, and not to lose the run of ourselves, perhaps it would not be a bad thing to learn to recognise good things again; to feel some confidence. Despite what our irrational exuberance from before taught us, confidence is not always a bad thing. Consumer confidence jumped sharply in January, admittedly not to the levels of last January, but substantially up on the latter months of 2016.
In last week’s Sunday Independent/Kantar Millward Brown poll, there is evidence of confidence rising substantially: 23pc of people think they are better off than they were this time last year. This is up from 16pc since October, which is a 7pc increase. This is the highest number of people ‘feeling better off’ since the boom years and it is six times the number of people who felt they were ‘getting more well off ’ in early 2011. The number of people who ‘feel worse off than a year ago’ is 21pc. This is the first time since the boom that more people have ‘felt they were getting better off’ than ‘felt worse off’. The number of people who ‘feel worse off than a year before’ is a less than a third of what it was in January 2011.
There is optimism, too: 27pc of people feel will they be personally better off in a year’s time; the highest that figure has been since 2008, and three times what it was at the end of 2012.
The indications are that confidence is creeping in — whether we like it or not!
Like anyone, I can give you a litany of reasons why you might say there is no recovery. Homelessness, hospital waiting lists and so on. And it’s true there are many things wrong, and we are still having to make difficult choices with scarce resources. Equally it is true that there are many threats ahead. America is unpredictable, as is Brexit. Last Friday, the Irish Independent heralded potential increases in interest rates, which at the very least, will affect disposable income for many people. On the plus side, for a country as personally and nationally in debt as we are, a bit of inflation would be no harm at all to shrink our debts in real terms.
But if we are going to wait for things to be perfect before we accept that there is not a crisis, then we will need to maintain a crisis mentality forever more.
There is no doubt that recovery is rumbling out there and if it keeps going, fighting an election on the slogan ‘Keep the Recovery Going’ might not seem like political suicide at all. While it is always impossible to know what goes on in Enda Kenny’s mind, but you’d have to wonder, as he jets frantically around the place now, does he ever have the bitter thought that just as all his hard work was finally starting to show, his party are gagging to get rid of him. If he could have hung in another year would he have bowed out as a Taoiseach who brought back the good times? Did the recovery keep going, just too slowly for Fine Gael?
‘We have seen a recovery in Dublin and gradually it is broadening out to Cork, Galway and Limerick’