This week, we got the bad news that inflation in Ireland is at a record high, surging past the already dismal expectations to hit a peak we haven’t seen in 38 years. Some believe that it may hit double figures sooner rather than later.
Clearly the situation is out of control, and the government seems evermore inept in the face of looming recession. But in some ways, the inflation crisis seems no more than the mouldy cherry on top of the bad news cake.
The country increasingly feels like it’s falling apart at the seams.
It seems like the metrics growing most reliably are those we’d rather avoid – the ever-mounting debt, waiting lists for everything, crime rates, homelessness, queuing times at the airport, etc etc.
There’s the housing shortage, which has now become a never-ending crisis, so that, in fact, it’s a not really a crisis at all but just another permanent feature of a dysfunctional landscape in a country that likes to boast that’s it’s the best little place to do business but can’t even house its own people.
We allow cuckoo funds to outbid families for homes – and then the same funds charge the taxpayer through the nose to provide housing to families. New figures show that more than €1.22 billion was spent by the government in 2021 on providing rent support payments to people who rely on private rental or long-term leasing of social homes. We are, in effect, providing huge profits for investment funds, and huge incentives for them to persist in bleeding the Irish taxpayer dry. How can this scenario be allowed to continue?
Then there’s the chaotic health service which no-one seems willing or able to fix despite the enormous salaries paid to people like HSE chief Paul Reid.
A staggering 1.3 million people – one in every four of the population of the state – are on some form of waiting list for health services. 851,700 people are now on a wait list for treatment, or a first meeting with a consultant for an outpatient appointment.
The numbers are flabbergasting. They’ve become so enormous that we’ve lost all sense of the mess we’re in.
It is quite incredible that, every week, older people are compelled to rise in the middle of the night to climb on board buses organised by independent TDs like Michael Collins and make a long trek to Belfast for a simple operation without which they will go blind. Thousands have now made that journey. Others have gone blind. Have we no shame, no sense of national pride that we allow this ridiculous situation to continue?
Perhaps the system has gotten so slow, and failed so many people, that we imagine it must be because we simply can’t afford good public healthcare, but that’s not the case.
The Fiscal Council tells us that “Ireland is ranked 6th highest for government spending on healthcare as a share of national income out of 33 OECD economies”.
The budget for healthcare for 2022 was set at €21 billion, representing “the biggest ever investment in Ireland’s health and social care services”, or so Stephen Donnelly’s department boasted. €250m of that spend was earmarked “to reduce acute hospital and community waiting lists.” Yet 8 months later we are inexorably climbing towards 1 million people waiting on a list for treatment.
This is rank mismanagement – but nobody, it seems, is ever held to account for the chaos. The inflated wages keep being paid to the managerial class, while people whose cancers are missed keep dying, or whose cataracts are left untreated go blind, and that’s even before we look at the failure in mental health services.
The money, in any case, is about to run out. Already we are being told there is no ‘magic money tree’ by the same people who were splashing around cash like it was going out of fashion to keep us locked down longer than any other country in Europe.
Not alone can we not afford homes that we own, we’re now worried about the cost of driving to work, or of turning the heating on, or the price of everything in the weekly shop, to the point where charities like St Vincent de Paul say it has received over 78,000 calls for help so far this year. According to the CSO, electricity prices increased by a whopping 41% in the last year – and home heating oil jumped by 100%. Diesel is up by 42% and petrol by 26%.
We’re tied into EU rules of course, and into the European Central Bank’s response to inflation. Their nudge approach to interest rates won’t do much to tamper the runaway rise in the cost of living, and their Green energy policies are driving that crisis to an extent that most commentators would rather ignore.
But it’s not just health and housing and cost of living, nothing seems to work properly anymore.
The delay in issuing passports is absurd, the queues in Dublin airport ridiculous, the fact that Kerry footballers can’t find hotel accommodation is risible. No-one can get hotel rooms actually, social media is full of posts from people who need to book a place to stay in Dublin while they undergo essential medical treatment and can’t afford the eye-popping rates.
The main thoroughfare in our capital, O’Connell Street, is a kip and an embarrassment with one TD saying there was a “dangerous level of unprovoked and gratuitous violence” being perpetrated against people minding their own business. Some of this is likely being driven by the surge in the use of crack cocaine – with a 400% rise in the number of people seeking treatment for addiction to the drug in recent years according to the Health Research Board .
The government, of course, can’t fix any of this. It doesn’t seem to actually fix anything any more. It just delivers an endless succession of virtue signalling measures like insisting we can take 200,000 Ukrainians and give every refugee their own-key accommodation, even as our own homeless people die in tents or freeze to death metres from the Dáil.
The country feels less safe too, less kind, more dangerous. In the past six months alone, a beautiful young woman, Ashling Murphy was brutally murdered in broad daylight in a country town. Two men, Aidan Moffitt and Michael Snee, were violently hacked to death in Sligo. An elderly pensioner, Tom Niland, was ‘beaten to a pulp’ by a masked gang who attacked him in his own home during a burglary. His cousin told local media: “I think they stamped on his head, the injuries are grotesque.”
Rape and sexual assault figures have persistently climbed since 2015. There are endless media discussions around consent and women’s safety but we are not feeling safer. Most of the depraved young men who were found guilty of a gang rape of a 17-year old girl in Offaly pleaded their innocence. They didn’t seem to think they had done anything wrong. That was perhaps the most terrifying insight from the trial.
And we are paying through the nose for the privilege of living in a country that seems to be slowly unravelling. The national debt is an eye-watering €240 billion – almost €50,000 for every man, woman and child, or €68,500 for each taxpayer.
Bailing out the banks added €68 billion to the national debt in 2008, adopting the most cautious approach possible to Covid slapped another €33 billion to the running total, and we’re told that supporting Ukrainian refugees will mean spending another €3 billion.
Yet now families, some of whom are becoming increasingly desperate, are being told by Heather Humphries that there is no magic money tree. Suddenly, fiscal rectitude is the new mantra.
Its as if no-one is really in charge – at least not thinking adults who might make a plan beyond the next election
There’s a sense, too, that things might even get worse. This week on RTÉ, one presenter warned that a “winter of discontent” might lie ahead as workers understandably threaten strike when faced with a pay rise of 2% while a loaf of bread is up 20%.
At this point, it would seem unsurprising if the government told us to eat cake instead.
The country feels like it is falling apart at the seams. At this point the real question is who will fix it? Neither the government nor opposition would give cause for optimism. Perhaps the answer lies with the people.