Hard time killin' floor blues

No wonder there is so much anger out there. The revelations to which we have been treated over the past month or so regarding the Irish banking system would be enough to drive even a normally docile person berserk. The latest in a long and shocking line is that there are fifteen individuals who owe Anglo Irish Bank €500 million apiece. That’s €7.5 billion between them. Some of these guys were involved in dubious transactions designed to prop up the share value of the bank. There is, in other words, more to come on this.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out that many if not all of these characters – who may incidentally be very nice fellows indeed, personally – are unlikely to be able to repay the money, now that the value of whatever assets they own has gone through the floor. Well, if they do default in full on their debts to what is now a State-owned bank, that alone will represent a hit of €2,000, more or less, on everyone in the entire Republic of Ireland, just to mop up the debts of fifteen people to one bank!
It is the scale of the borrowings that boggles the mind. What sort of lives must these guys have been leading? Fine, many of them may be entrepreneurs, who have been going out and taking risks and making things happen. But, as has become very clear, none of it made business sense. The whole pyramid was based on inflating the value of property and of assets, and of borrowing more and more against those inflated values, in an upward spiral of debt.
What is scary is that so many people seemed to be happy to go along with it, to borrow to unconscionable levels – presumably so that, in the short term at least, they could live like kings. If you borrow €500 million, the million or two you spend in a year on yourself hardly counts, does it?
I really don’t know how many people in Ireland were batting in that kind of league. I don’t know how many were taking home fat cat salaries either. In truth, the numbers have to be relatively small. But the impression is created nonetheless that there were lots of people playing around with monopoly money, which doubly sticks in the craw now that taxpayers are having to pay for the government’s decision to bail out the banks.
No wonder there is a lot of anger indeed, especially among public servants. They are the target of a levy of 7.5%, which is being extracted as an additional contribution to their pensions. The levy is certainly unfair on lower-paid public servants, many of whom are earning less than €25,000. However, a bit of perspective is essential in relation to all of this.
What full-time public servants can’t, don’t and – unless things go utterly pear shaped – won’t experience is the deep fear of being out of a job that is currently gripping people throughout the ‘private’ sector. It is there in building. It is there in retail. It is there in manufacturing. It is there in IT. It is there in services industries like law and accountancy. It is there in publishing and in the media generally.
The Event Guide, which has been around almost as long as Hot Press, has sadly gone out of business. Others are quietly pulling back and shelving projects and titles. I met the MD of one well-known media business last week and he greeted me with a cheery but nonetheless doomed admission: “We’re fucked.” He wasn’t joking either. Independent News And Media are selling off assets to keep the core business going. The Irish Times is going through turbulence which has resulted in 60 redundancies and will almost certainly result in more job losses. I could go on, but I won’t.
It is there in the music industry. It isn’t long since the UK and Irish music retail chain, Zavvi, hit the rapids. Luckily HMV have been able to rescue over 100 jobs in Ireland by taking over five of the shops: if they hadn’t stepped in, the impact of Zavvi’s difficulties would have been far more damaging. As if that wasn’t enough, last week, it emerged that Golden Discs were going into examinership. They have debts of €9.5 million. They are not the only ones in the retail arena who are struggling: Road Records is just one indie that is on the ropes.
Small businesses are finding it almost impossible. They are being hit from every side – by the banks looking to claw back cash off overdraft levels; by the revenue commissioners, who are mandated to charge punitive interest from the moment a business runs late with its tax payments; by local authorities in ever increasing bureaucratic demands and service charges; by clients cutting back on activity and outgoings; by customers holding onto money rather than spending and, especially in retail, by the collapse of sterling, which is making it so much more attractive for people to shop in the UK, or across the border in Northern Ireland.
I spoke to another media company operator last week and she was open about the fear she felt watching other businesses in the PR sector begin to implode. “We’ve been lucky, in that we have very good clients, who are still active, doing things,” she said. “But other PR companies are really struggling. Everyone is counting the pennies. You wonder where it’s going to end.”
The intention here wasn’t and isn’t to further deepen the depression that has been rising like a flood tide, till people are nearly drowning in it. But a bit of fresh thinking is required, if we are going to battle our way out of the trough in which the bankers and the politicians have dumped us.
Obviously there is a political issue: the system has failed. We need to move on, to forge a better, more egalitarian one that’s not driven by the kind of naked greed (or stupidity or conservatism, please) that underscored what has been happening in Ireland, and elsewhere, over the past ten years. An election is three years away. In the meantime, is there anything that can be done?
There is a unique opportunity here for the Left. Can that opportunity be harnessed without resorting to mere political opportunism, of a type that will ultimately damage the ordinary people even more than they have been damaged already? By all means, work at bringing the Government down. That is the nature of adversarial politics in a parliamentary democracy. But whoever is next in line had better be ready with policies that will work.
More immediately, what can be done to minimise the fall-out for Irish people in general? There are encouraging signs, looking at the music industry, that individuals and businesses are pressing ahead, trying to do the right thing, focussing on new ideas and fresh developments on the basis that the market for them is never banjaxed. This has to be encouraged. We have great singers, songwriters, bands and musicians. We have wonderful writers, actors and film makers. We can do soundtracks. We can compose to beat the band. We have guitar makers. We have sound designers, production crew, recording studios and engineers, sound men and women who are as good as the best in the world. There is an incredible talent bank here in music and the arts, of people who are capable of operating at the top end of the entertainment game internationally.
And yet, instead of nurturing and encouraging people in the cultural sphere, obstacles have been erected by the Government which are putting people out of business or sending them abroad. You want tourists to come? You want Ireland to retain its reputation as a place where there is a sense of fun and enjoyment? You want to capitalise on the reputation our musicians and bands have been making for Ireland all over the world?
Put a proper licensing system in place that allows clubs to operate till three, four or five in the morning. Get rid of the system where they have to pay through the nose for late licenses every time they want to open past midnight. Go out and sell Ireland as a young people’s destination. Stop acting like a bunch of oul wans. As the campaign slogan says: Give Us The Night. Encourage people to party and enjoy themselves (and let the musicians of the world come here to do it and to record, in the way that Steve Martin did recently with Mary Black).
They do it in Barcelona. They do it in Prague. They do it in London. So why did we allow a bunch of bigots with an agenda against youth (and alcohol) to impose a granny culture on the lot of us, to the detriment of every aspect of the music and entertainment industry?
Incentivise music activity. Do more to encourage film making. Get over the jealousy that the tax free status accorded to artists inspired. And put music, culture, fun and the ability to express ourselves at the centre of things again.
At least that way we’ll remember how to enjoy ourselves, the better to withstand the worst of the hard times that are upon us.