Sunday, March 2, 2014

Conventional wisdom on demise of Celtic Tiger suspect.

Before Christmas I spent a week in Somerset and Wales,the first time I was outside the country in decades.
Two aspects of what I witnessed there gave me pause for thought.
Firstly I blew a headlight in my car on the way to Frome in Somerset and went to get it replaced there in the nearest garage,which happened to be in an industrial estate.To my great surprise each and every unit was buzzing in the estate on a Saturday and I was looked after immediately.Total charge for supplying and fitting the bulb was a fiver.
Frome is about the same size as Navan and is in the  middle of farming country.It still has a seed factory in the middle of the town.It has a Farmer's market and other artisan markets where a wide range of locally grown foodstuffs can be purchased.Many and varied shops are open there and there is a good buzz about the place.
The surprise to me was that all the units in the industrial estate were open and buzzing ,unlike here where the industrial units are largely empty.The other aspect of the place that struck me was that the standard of the buildings are much inferior to what we have here.This is no surprise perhaps as a many date back to Roman times.
£25,000.00 is a very good yearly wage.
The second thing that struck me is the current price of housing.A decent three /four bed family home is £300,00.00 upwards ,which when converted to Euros is similar to the prices obtaining here  for similar homes at the height of the bubble here.
There are clearly purchasers for these even given the prevailing salaries of £25,000.00.How its done I don't know.
The lesson I drew from this is that it was not the price of houses that caused the rise and demise of the Celtic Tiger but the outrageous level of wages and all that went with it.
I have  no doubt but that these astronomical wages and salaries percolated downwards from the professional class whose greed knew no boundaries and a legitimate expectation amongst the population grew that they too could aspire and become entitled parry passu.
What a just and fair Government would do is to help people keep the roofs over their heads,totally ban evictions from family homes,full stop,ensure that everybody has enough to survive ,stimulate employment,eliminate suicide and mass emigration and abolish the dead hand of the excessive bureacrats so that those with the drive to self help are not twarthed at every hand'd turn.
But we have not got that Government
.Quite the opposite.
 

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