A young Filippina woman offered me her seat on the bus. I demurred. She insisted.
Do I look pregnant or elderly?
Which is worse?
Ireland
Feeling my age, again
Ireland is awash with angry workers. This morning, I asked my 28 year old colleague whether she had ever seen a strike before. “No,” she said “and I thought to myself as I walked past a man with a placard, this must be what industrial unrest looks like.”
Oh Celtic Tiger cubs, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Exciting neighbourhood
My brother, driving me home from dinner, said “I know you’re a great believer in the classless society and all that but, for the sake of the kids, would you not move somewhere more normal?”
It’s not rough here, it’s just very…urban.
Sodden Oxen
Daniel and I explored the customs surrounding Chinese new year on Saturday. We went to a hairdresser in the north inner city where all the customers and all the hairdressers were Chinese. Ni hao to you too. Daniel made friends with a little Chinese girl and she filled us in on what happens. “People will throw money at me,” she informed us gleefully in her Dublin accent.  There are about 11,000 Chinese people in Ireland according to the last census figures. The barber whom Mr. Waffle patronises dismisses this. He says that there are 11,000 on Parnell Street alone. He is clearly bitter about the competition.
Continuing our authentic Chinese theme, Mr. Waffle and I went for dinner to a Chinese restaurant in Parnell Street on Saturday night. It was not very nice, alas. We parked nearby and while Mr. Waffle went to get a parking ticket, I went and peered into a large somewhat delapidated Georgian house where a big van parked outside, bright lights and a wide open door in the pouring rain indicated that they might be making a film. I hoved up to the three lads standing in the doorway and asked. In fact, no, they were making a music video for Emmett Scanlon. “Who’s he?” I asked. “Me,” said the one in a shirt with ruffles. “Don’t you recognise him?” asked one of the others. “He’s going to be famous.” Not famous yet though. He directed me to his website and as an act of human charity, I am going to put in a link to it because Emmet and his mates seemed to be quite a nice bunch.
Finally, we went to inspect the Chinese new year celebrations in the city on Sunday.  We brought my sister too because bonding with her niece and nephews is very good for her. The kids made kites. The driving rain made it difficult to get them to fly. The children would have been happy to watch the Silk and Bamboo trio all afternoon but the adults were getting wet and dragged them away. They did get to shake hands with a person dressed as an ox, so this softened the blow of not being able to see the dragon over the top of the Chinese ambassador’s umbrella.
Apparently the ox is known for fortitude. Well, I’d say that he’ll need it this year.
Waking the Celtic Tiger
It’s all a bit hysterical here at the moment. Â You can’t turn on the radio without somebody telling you that we are all DOOMED!
I asked Mr. Waffle (fount of all knowledge, as you know) what happened to the soft landing we were promised and he tells me that “it turns out that the fundamentals weren’t sound after all”. That’s alright then.
I had lunch during the week with a very pessimistic friend. He has just remortgaged his beautiful house so that he can make it even more beautiful (extension, underfloor heating, walls taken apart to put in insulation – couldn’t he just have put on another jumper, seriously?). He is worried about what will happen should Ireland go bankrupt. What will happen to his beautiful house? He gloomily prophesied that Mr. Waffle would have to go back to Brussels and send remittances to keep us all afloat.
I had a friend for the Princess round. She is a little German girl (if you were German, would you put your child in an Irish language school?). Her parents came too. We talked about the economy (what can I say, it is all pervasive). They were recruited from Germany for the boom. Ah, I joked, you should move to Poland now; apparently, Poland is the new Ireland. “Actually, our company is moving to Poland,” they said. He has taken redundancy and they are moving back to Berlin as soon as he finds a job there. And how, we ask ourselves, is their daughter going to keep up her Irish?
Dell had a big plant in Limerick and they are moving to Poland. My cousin will lose his job. The Irish Times had a big feature on workers in Lodz and how they are taking the news. I must say they seemed very realistic about it all. Dell will probably move somewhere else in ten years. They are leaving Ireland now, later they will leave Poland. In some way, I think we fooled ourselves about foreign direct investment. The Americans love Ireland we said to ourselves and we all speak English, their companies will stay forever. I suppose if they were that indifferent to cost and related considerations, they could just have stayed at home. Anyhow, I don’t see the Poles saying “there’s a big Polish community in Chicago, they’re bound to stay here because of their traditional links with Poland”. Meanwhile, a man made redundant by Dell was showing extreme stoicism to the Irish Times “Nobody will starve to death”. I suppose not.
It’s funny because it doesn’t feel like a recession to me, not like the 1980s. My sister and I went to dinner on Wednesday night. It was raining. I had booked a table for two. When I went in, the restaurant was empty. Aha, I thought, the recession strikes. Fifteen minutes later, the place was heaving. In the early 90s we had “jobless growth”. We kept getting told that things were getting better but unemployment was not falling and it didn’t seem like things were getting better. Now we have jobless growth in reverse.
I listen a bit to Radio 4 and there the talk is also of recession but in a much more relaxed manner – has Gordon Brown’s spokesman rung in the middle of any show to ask them to stop creating panic – I think not (probably too busy analysing poll data). I read an article somewhere that said that poor people who get richer lack the “inter-generational security” of the middle classes. Ireland lacks the inter-generational security of the middle classes. We’ve only been rich for ten years and we just have the national pension fund to call on when times get tough.
I have started reading an Irish economics website. I’m not sure why since it only depresses me. However, there was recently some much needed relief from the storm clouds that the website likes to whip up (collective noun for economists anyone – a correction of economists, a downturn of economists, a recession of economists, a depression of economists?). A contributor called Jim O’Leary was marking papers and generously gave us the following gem from one of the next generation of economists:
From the frontiers of knowledge (yes, it’s grading time again): “Fiscal contraction was first noticed in the 1960s by a man by the name of Fiscal and it was him who derived the short, medium and long run effects of it and how they would occur and the reasons for it…†Â
Thank you, Jim, for drawing this to the nation’s attention when we needed it most.
Land of (equal) opportunity
Equal pay was forced upon Ireland by the EU (how can you not love it?) on accession in 1973. Despite the then Government’s fighting a dastardly rear action to protect unequal pay for equal work, the EU won the day. The Government, resigned to its fate, decided to appoint a number of equality officers to ensure that the principle was observed. However, as you can imagine, it took a while for the new arrangements to be implemented and for some time there were transitional arrangements in place.
The outcome of this was that when the equality officer posts were advertised, they were advertised on the transitional scales with lower pay rates for women than for men.
[Insert relevant cliche here – perhaps “you couldn’t make it up”]
