David McWilliam's column in the Sunday Business Post last weekend (also available here) is a useful reminder of the chronic insecurity that lies below the surface of the current boom.
The centre ground of the country is divided into two distinct middle classes - those who bought their houses before the boom and those who are increasingly chasing an exploding housing market. The divide is demographic. The first group, mainly any homeowner over 45 or 50, is getting rich by doing nothing. The other, the under-30s, are pinned to their collars having to find ludicrous amounts of cash, simply to put a roof over their heads.
For McWilliams the boom is unsustainable and is coming to an end anyway. In the meantime it is having highly deleterious consequences for both economy and society. The Sunday Business Post also ran a series of articles on the rising levels of personal debt (see here, here and here). While property holders of a certain age are "getting rich by doing nothing" they appear to be getting into frightful levels of personal debt. It is notable that 40 per cent of the clients of MABS, the Money Advice and Budgeting Service are considered to be middle class. These could be people earning about €80,000 per year and have taken out huge loans to pursue aspirational lifestyles. Meanwhile younger people struggle with crippling levels of debt merely to house themselves.
Will debt become an election issue? Only tangentially, I suspect, insofar as state assistance in the form of better social provisions may partially compensate for the bleak situation faced by many. Childcare is an obvious example. But it will not be part of the central narrative of any of the mainstream political parties. Political parties will not want to tell the voters that their lives are under such severe strain. This is obvious in the case of the government parties who have presided complacently over the wasted years since 1997. But Fine Gael and Labour will not really want to frighten voters with hints of having to take drastic action. Instead they'll want to reassure the electorate that they have the vision and the policies to govern the country after the next election. At the same time they will want to keep specific commitments to a minimum and hope a failing and unpopular government hand them victory by default.
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