Home thoughts from abroad

I was good at Economics when I was at school. You had to be when your mother gave you a pound a week pocket money and strawberry milkshakes (which at one stage eclipsed women in the pantheon of my affections) cost 70p while my home town football team charged me 50p every fortnight for admission to their games.

Follow that regime for a year and you’ll become an expert in deficits, budgeting and the cruel realities of supply and demand.

I was so good at Economics in fact, that my teacher, Mr Dunne, was astonished when I tried to drop the subject before my final exams. The school principal had designed a timetable entirely focused on providing the teachers with as much time as possible in the staff room. As a result, I was faced with the sort of choice that no sixteen year old should have to take. One that shapes the rest of your life. I had to choose between History and Economics. Choose the former and I would have a lifetime of reading interesting books and engaging in exciting dinner table conversation. Choose the latter and I would spend years searching for a personality, but would have a greater understanding of the crisis the world now finds itself in.

In the end my decision was easy. Mr Dunne pleaded with me to stay in his class, but made it clear that he was doing so for his own needs. I went to a mixed school. Not in the religious or gender sense, we were strictly an all boy’s Catholic institution, staffed by musty brothers with barely suppressed urges. Our school was mixed in that 50% of the pupils were idiots and they thought the other 70% were smart kids. Without being too big-headed, I fell into the smart kid category while Mr Dunne had been cursed with a high percentage of the simply bewildered. He needed me to get his numbers up. In economic terms, our class was in long term recession and I was a loan from the International Monetary Fund.

Thankfully, I had a spark of romance in me at that age and wasn’t going to allow myself to become a commodity. I spent the next twelve happy months in the bosom of my history buddies. I ended up with a much worse result in History than I would have achieved in Economics but it’s a small price to pay for principle.

Now in 2009, I wonder which subject would serve me better. My homeland is in a mess of Dante proportions and finds itself in the unenviable position of being the worse performer in a school for dunces. The whole world is suffering but there is a temptation to focus on the most extreme case so that everyone else can feel better in comparison. It’s a game we Irish have been playing for centuries, when no matter how bad things got, we could always say, “well at least we’re not English”.

The rest of the world is now saying, “Well at least we’re not Irish”.

As a student of History, I could see that the current crash was entirely predicable. The past is filled with tales of bursting bubbles and queens who insist the rabble at the gate should eat cake. Every period of excess and greed has been followed with sackcloth and ashes, as though the Gods conspire to bring a little ying and yang.

A better understanding of Economics would, I suspect, bring me to the same conclusion. We live in a finite world but yet we fool ourselves that some things like growth and prosperity can be eternal. And when anyone tries to tell us otherwise, we shun them and call them doom seekers.

There were people in the dog days of Ireland’s boom years who warned of the impending crash. But the Irish were too busy buying apartments in Bulgaria or test driving the latest BMW to notice. As a nation, we adopted the pose of the three monkeys who wanted to see no evil, hear no evil or speak no evil. Now those monkeys are being mocked by the rest of the world.

In the past week I’ve watched a feature on Australian TV about Ireland’s economic woes and read a report on how the Germans are shocked that we blew all the money they gave us to build motorways on beer and fast women. The world is watching Ireland at the moment like a bitter old nun taking pleasure in the news that the kids who smoked behind the bike shed have now got lung cancer. There were many who resented our prosperity, who saw us as brash new kids on the block that acted like lottery millionaires from a council estate. They are lining up now to put the boot in, even though their own economies are in a similar mess.

I escaped of course before the whole thing went belly up and now feel like those passengers who got on the Titanic at Southampton and then got off at it’s last stop before New York (Cobh on Ireland’s South coast) because they felt a bit sea sick. I left Ireland for Australia for many reasons, but chief among them was a feeling that the country was heading for an ice-berg. While I occasionally feel smug that my predictions have come true, it really is no fun to watch your country implode in the way Ireland is now. I used to surf Irish websites to check on football scores and to enjoy the eclectic pleasures of the Irish Times letters page. But lately, it has become impossible to log-on without being bombarded with stories of redundancies and foreclosures.

I’ve decided to leave those stories to the overseas journalists who are now dancing on Irish graves. I’ll keep checking out the History ones. They are my first love after all and somehow the past is a much more pleasant place to be at the moment than the present.