Money, Jobs, Big Cars: How's an Irishman to Cope?

July 17, 2000

Money, Jobs, Big Cars: How's an Irishman to Cope?

By WARREN HOGE

Derek Speirs for the New York Times

As salaries skyrocket, Frank Madden says he's selling Mercedes-Benzes at 10 times the rate of a decade ago.

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• Irish Now Confront the Other Side of Immigration (July 8, 2000)

UBLIN -- Ireland's economy has been growing faster than any other in the Western world, and the country whose master playwright, Sean O'Casey, once said, "I'd rather be inspired by idleness than bullied by 'busyness' " now has some of the hardest-working citizens in Europe.
For the first time in its history, Ireland has a problem with too much money, not too little -- with too few people living here, not too many.
The subject of what to keep, what to shed and what to adapt for modern times is on lots of Irish minds as the country -- a proven force in developing sustaining myths to overcome failure, poverty and melancholy -- turns to coping with the novelty of prosperity.
"You have tourists giving out about us that we've lost our courtesy, that we don't have time to talk to one another anymore, that our Irish identity is slipping away," said Maureen Gaffney, head of The National Economic and Social Forum, a consultative group partly funded by the government. "We're very disturbed by that, and I'm not a Cassandra, but I think we have the vibrancy here to handle it."
From the cranes that lumber across the Dublin skyline to the traffic jams that pile up along the Liffey as early as 6:30 a.m., progress is intruding. With so many opportunities at home, Ireland's young professionals no longer leave and those that did a generation ago have now come back. But one disruptive consequence of this happy turnaround is a 20 percent-a-year spiral in the cost of housing that is pricing the middle class out of city living.
The look of new Dublin pubs seems to have more to do with the East Coast of the United States than the West Coast of Ireland. Typifying the trend, a former flower stand just off the landmark Ha'penny Bridge has been turned into a minimalist cafe called Pravda with Cyrillic lettering design features and a menu featuring Thai wraps, tortillas and spicy chicken wings.
There are 20,000 job openings, and an estimated 200,000 more coming up in the next five years that will have to be filled by foreigners. Executives are often out of town on recruitment trips, and businesses have dropped their earlier insistence that applicants speak English.
Yet in a development that is bringing shame to Ireland, the country that sent millions of people abroad as poor immigrants is proving inhospitable to needy outsiders who are arriving here. Despite the jobs in Dublin going wanting, asylum seekers, who now number 1,000 a month, are being dispersed around the country and barred from working. "We thrived on tales of the Boston Brahmins and 'No Irish need apply,' " said Maurice Hayes, a member of the Irish Senate and chairman of The Ireland Funds, the country's largest charity. "Now we think the only immigrants we want are people who otherwise would have gone directly to Silicon Valley."
Car sales are up 40 percent this year over 1999, and traffic congestion projected for the year 2010 has already arrived, but highway construction to accommodate all the new vehicles lags. Rural areas even 40 miles out of Dublin are becoming bedroom communities, with country lanes pressed into service to handle the new commuting class. "Nobody thought ahead about this, and you can't just go out and buy a mile of road down at Woolworth's," said Colm McCarthy of DKM Economic Consultants Ltd.
Public services in particular are suffering from underfunding and a lack of planning, and their downtroddeness stands out starkly against the shine and efficiency of the booming private sector. Last year, nurses went on strike for higher wages.
"Our nurses were working so hard they were really and truly bent," said Mary Tynan, 48, the head emergency room nurse at Beaumont Hospital. Describing the nurses' desperation, she said the value of the house she bought for $12,000 in 1979 was now $265,000, and people on public salaries could not afford to buy homes anymore.
Inflation is running at 5.2 percent, three times the average of the other 10 countries that have adopted the euro currency and therefore a centralized interest rate. That rate today is 4.25 percent, at least four points lower than where analysts say the Irish central bank would peg it if it were still operating independently. While participation in Europe over all has been enormously beneficial to Ireland, bringing subsidies that helped spur the boom, the government finds its hands tied in coping with inflation without the customary rate-increase mechanism at its disposal. "It's like playing tennis without a racket," Mr. McCarthy said.
With inflation threatening to overtake negotiated wage increases of 5.5 percent, union leaders are questioning the national business-labor agreement that since 1987 has brought wage restraint in exchange for job growth. An emphasis on computer literacy and information technologies, however, is creating a permanent underclass as it spreads affluence, and the abundance of things is spawning what Senator Hayes called relative deprivation. "People who were poor now have more to eat," he said, "but they don't have a television, and everyone down at the pub is talking about what they saw on TV."
Social habits are changing, breaking down traditional patterns of association. "You used to be part of an extended family or a village," said Brendan Keenan, 55, business editor of The Independent. "Even after you came to Dublin, you were a Corkman or a Galwayman, and that's who you socialized and drank with. Now you might have one set of friends at work and another at home, and home isn't around the corner, it might be in a suburb."
The government has attracted admiration for its success in steering the process that has brought the promise of an end to a century's sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland, but it is squandering its reputation through revelations from tribunals of cronyism and corruption that still permeate Ireland's public life.
Frank Madden, 38, of Ballsbridge Motors in one of Dublin's upscale neighborhoods, is a salesman with a prospering clientele who want to swan around in eye-catching cars and stock their garages with extra ones from the sports and convertible lines. "When I began in this business, people bought cars as a necessity," he said. "Now they buy them as indulgences."
Mr. Madden is making more money than he ever dreamed possible, and his company will move 6,000 Mercedes-Benzes off its jammed lots this year. "Ten years ago," he said, "we'd have had a celebration if we sold 600."
But seated in his busy showroom, he was not in a party mood. "I'm here from 8 in the morning to 8 at night, and I can genuinely say it's not healthy for me or my family. I cannot be the husband and father I want to be at night after days like these, and I hear my colleagues around the floor say the same thing. We don't feel self-rewarded by the good times we're in."
There is a consensus that the two biggest changes in Ireland are the fall of the Roman Catholic Church as social arbiter and the rise of women as active participants in society. Brendan Kennelly, a leading poet and professor of modern literature at Trinity College, Dublin, said the most important development in Irish letters was the emergence of talented women among writers. "From being adored symbols on pedestals, women have come down to become articulate voices, no longer passive receivers of homage but expressive of their own problems and the problems in the culture," he said
One of Ireland's new generation of outspoken women is Ivana Bacik, 32, who as the Reid professor of criminal law at Trinity occupies the same post once held by the current president of Ireland, Mary McAleese, and by her predecessor, Mary Robinson. "I grew up in Cork in the 1970's, and Ireland was a horrible place to be," she said. "People are misconceiving the past. There has always been huge poverty and huge hypocrisy, but now you can talk openly about them. When I was a student here in the early 1990's, it was radical to be in favor of even giving information to women."
The boom has happened so speedily that some people are not yet convinced that it is here to stay. "Irish history has been one of uninterrupted failure since the beginning of the 19th century, and this has impinged on our psychology," Mr. Keenan said. "The big question for many people now is when is it going to end, because they remember that everything else eventually went wrong. The question for them is not what are the consequences but where's the catch?"
Mr. Keenan believes it will last. "It's simple," he said. "In the euro zone, having a young, well-educated population is like having oil."
Another reason Ireland seems to be weathering the rapid and profound cultural shock of the past decade reasonably well is the solidarity built up over centuries from being small, compact, homogeneous and deprived. "Say what you will about the Catholic Church," Senator Hayes said, "there was something important for us in having been told over and over of being all together and equal before God."
Fintan O'Toole, a columnist and author who travels to New York once a month to do theater reviews for The Daily News, credited Ireland's particular ease with America. "Ireland is a culture besotted with American images," he said. "What's happened with all this American investment is that you have come to us, and instead of making us change, it gives us a way to continue with our old life."
Ireland was not as comfortable with its stereotype as it pretended to be for its own survival, he said, and there is little nostalgia for the misty past.
Mr. Keenan said: "No one wants dear old Ireland back. Dear old Ireland was nice for the tourists, but not for us."
There is also little gloating at how well things seem to have worked out. "There is real pleasure in the fact that economists and politicians now come over here to find out how we did it and in the realization that we are world class because we were always considered second rate," Mr. Keenan said.
Ms. Gaffney said she thought that the Irish today drew strength from the unity gained, paradoxically, from having been dispersed around the globe. "'We were supposed to represent our country as well as ourselves and not just competently but with skill and confidence," she said. "There was a tremendous emphasis on the presentation of ourselves to the world."
Ireland got through hard times on this ability to compose its own narrative, and that same talent may keep it secure and distinct through the good times. "You know, in Gaelic, when you greet someone, the actual words mean, 'What's your news?,' " Mr. Kennelly said. "We live on stories. I always think of that phrase, 'I am the way, the truth and the light.' You see, the truth comes second; it's the way that matters. It's how you tell things. And that is the oldest Irish tradition."

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