The Day it all went Wrong - Friday 11th Nov 2005...

Danno

So, how exactly did this country begin to go down the tubes? Well, anyone who watches a good game of hurling or football will often pick out a seemingly insignificant moment of the match where the eventual winners get that lucky pass or that descicive intervention that rallys their team onto success.

As with everything there is an opposite side. That same moment in the match can also be used to highlight where the loosing team went wrong, where they threw it away or failed to deal with the opposition. Is it the glass half full or the glass half empty? It is still a damn glass with 50% contents though.

Go back the end of 2005 and our grand fellow Taoiseach Bertie Ahern addresses the Annual Tourism Forum at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, November 11th was the date, a Friday to be exact. In his long waffeling speech he declared that "Ireland is no longer a low-cost economy." This my fellow Irish citizens, for me, is that moment of time that the game was lost for Team Ireland Inc.

In the height of the "Rip-Off-Ireland" era, this was what our great leader had to say. He did not choose some oppertunity such as giving an excuse for some stealth tax rise to say this, no, he chose the Annual Tourism Forum to do it, announce it to the world so to speak. Here was Bertie, bould as brass telling the Joe Irish Public and the rest of the world to go with regards to our cost base.

This announcement was a rallying call to all big business to stick in the boot and extract as much €€€s as possible from every sale and transaction. Banks, lawyers, planners, developers, suppliers et all pushed on pushing up prices and inflating the bubble even more. Well done Bertie, you got out at the right time cause everybody that is left behind is picking up the pieces from the burst and today, April 7th is just the second installement.

Oh, and for the superstitious amongst us...
11/11
9/11
4/7
There is just something unlucky about 11 for events, huh?

DANNO.

jimmmy

Danno wrote: »

In his long waffeling speech he declared that "Ireland is no longer a low-cost economy." This my fellow Irish citizens, for me, is that moment of time that the game was lost for Team Ireland Inc.

It was not the moment the game was lost...the game was lost when he started giving all those hundreds of thousands of public servants big increases. George Lee said on RTE the average public sector wage is now € 966 per week, plus perks.

InReality

Basically it was the election before the last one.

We now are losing about 16bln a year. - the "structural deficit".

This is due to 1 simple fact -assuming property related taxes would continue increasing & then increasing spending to match it.

However everyone is paying less tax now than in the past.

See the

"(iii) AVERAGE TAX RATES ON ANNUAL EARNINGS IN % TERMS*"

section, in this pdf.


http://www.budget.gov.ie/2009SupApril09/download/Annex%20A%20-%20Details%20of%20Income%20Levy%20Health%20Levy%20&%20PRSI%20changes.pdf

jmayo

The die had been cast long before any speech to some forum or other in 2005 and if you believe that as a major point in time you have missed the whole expansion of the public sector and benchmarking awards dating way to when bertie first became taoiseach.
As long as jobs were plentiful and revenues were piling into the exchequer these could be masked, but now that revenues are falling through the floor it is there for all to see how massive our public sector wage bill is and how bloated our public sector workforce really is.
42,000 admin staff in HSE, does that figure not seem extraordinary :eek:

To make matters worse they decided that property was the way to go since arrival of real cheap credit post 2001, thus the loss of manufacturing and service related export earning jobs was masked by massive growth in construction and retail related jobs.
FFS we lost high tech jobs last year in Motorola Cork and few weeks later minister dipsh** from Donegal was out braying how they were going to be 400/500 new jobs created in Dundrum Town centre :mad:
These f***ing idiots can't see the difference between highly paid technical export earning jobs and someone working in Next or Dunnes :rolleyes:

road_2_damascus

I totally agree... it was all political spin. 'The Taniste welcomes today's announcement...' 'in a statement today, the minister said she welcomed the decision'... In an interview with her a few weeks ago, she said the word 'important' over 30 times. One week later in a different interview, important was replaced with 'framework' which she said over 20 times.

The chief responsabilities attached to high ministerial posts, are to swan around the country welcoming jobs announcements, in a bid to grab every possible photo opportunity ... associate yourself with every large possitive headline you can; it will look good for you and for the party... even though your own personal input is zero.

For me, its hard to name one event which marked the turning point. I did get the feeling that we were under the rule of a bunch of self-serving weasels when I heard about the activities of the Millenium Committee back in 1999...
http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:ZmCoulukIAAJ:www.eoincostello.ie/pdf_doc/local_issues_pdf/Millennium_Committee_Millions_Insult.pdf+the+millenium+committee+dublin&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ie

Danno

Perhaps I should say that the domestic game was lost instead?

Kristopherus

jmayo wrote: »

The die had been cast long before any speech to some forum or other in 2005 and if you believe that as a major point in time you have missed the whole expansion of the public sector and benchmarking awards dating way to when bertie first became taoiseach.
As long as jobs were plentiful and revenues were piling into the exchequer these could be masked, but now that revenues are falling through the floor it is there for all to see how massive our public sector wage bill is and how bloated our public sector workforce really is.
42,000 admin staff in HSE, does that figure not seem extraordinary :eek:

To make matters worse they decided that property was the way to go since arrival of real cheap credit post 2001, thus the loss of manufacturing and service related export earning jobs was masked by massive growth in construction and retail related jobs.
FFS we lost high tech jobs last year in Motorola Cork and few weeks later minister dipsh** from Donegal was out braying how they were going to be 400/500 new jobs created in Dundrum Town centre :mad:
These f***ing idiots can't see the difference between highly paid technical export earning jobs and someone working in Next or Dunnes :rolleyes:

Where did you get that figure of 42000. There are just under half that amount last time I checked.

Humria

The turning point was definitely before 2005. Honestly, the fact the FF have been allowed to get away with corruption and bad management for so long meant that it was pretty much destined that they would ruin us. This may seem over-dramatic but if a political party in office doesn't have to pay the consequences for doing wrong then eventually they will push the limits too far. So in that sense I'd put it back to 1997!

If we are being specific, one turning point was when the government began to rely on the property market as a permanent source of income. This was around the turn of the century (correct me if I'm wrong). As we all know by this stage, with such as reliance on the property market our economy was like a stack of card that was going to fall down after the first proper gust of wind.

A more fixed date that heralded our impending doom was the 2002 election. They had a give away budget just before the election and bought their way back into power. It showed that if a problem arose, their solution was to throw money at it.

By 2005 we were already stuck in a pattern and heading in a bad direction. It's like we were a goal and a point down with twenty minutes. If we woke up and played well we still had a chance but we couldn't just go on as we were if we wanted to win.

MoominPapa

6th June 1997 tbh

ednwireland

just reading this from the doom sayer (as he was called - oh it'll never happen) david mcwilliams, always had a lot of time for his views they always sounded sensible but he says in the indo
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/david-mcwilliams/let-us-not-forget-the-current-government-caused-this-mess-1701881.html

This credit binge, not government policy, made the coffers overflow, and the pathetic thing is that the Minister for Finance at the time, Brian Cowen, did not appear to understand this basic economic fact.

What's worse, the Department of Finance mandarins didn't understand it either. (In fact, I remember making this crucial point on 'Questions And Answers' in 2005, ahead of the Budget, with the then Minister for Finance on the panel, and being told by the host, John Bowman, that he'd had 'enough of the economics lecture'. This just shows the level of questioning entertained in public in Ireland during the boom years). Now we are paying for our lack of economic rigour.

i think john bowman should have been thrown off q&a just for making that comment myself.
i agree with the op i think 2005 you could have still saved the economy it wouldnt have run at double digit growth but when is that ever a good idea in truth. but no FF had no ideas apart from boosting the property bubble even further. thank god i have a job and a small mortgage - in fact me and the other half always said we wanted to maintain debts that we could pay off one income which since we bought in 97 we have managed to do and living in donegal we thought it prudent. if i was looking to move to ireland or buy a house from about 2000 on it wouldnt have happened, the joke is the valuetr thought we overpaid at the time.

jmayo

Kristopherus wrote: »

Where did you get that figure of 42000. There are just under half that amount last time I checked.

AFAIK that figure was mentioned dya before budget.
There is definetly more than 21,000 admin staff and backgroun dstaff of all sorts.
Of course you can go drag up every Tom Dick and Harry and find a compulsive reason why they are all employed at great expense to both the HSE's clients and the taxpayers.

lala stone

Oh, and for the superstitious amongst us...
11/11
9/11
4/7
There is just something unlucky about 11 for events, huh?


DAA DAAN DAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!:eek:

dresden8

jimmmy wrote: »

It was not the moment the game was lost...the game was lost when he started giving all those hundreds of thousands of public servants big increases. George Lee said on RTE the average public sector wage is now € 966 per week, plus perks.

Surely it was when bankers started paying themselve 2 million a year for destroying the country.

The private sector earn 2 million a year, plus perks. It was on RTE. Time for private sector earnings to be slashed

_Nuno_

dresden8 wrote: »

The private sector earn 2 million a year, plus perks. It was on RTE. Time for private sector earnings to be slashed

So how come the average salary in the private sector is so much lower than in the public sector?

*shadow*

Ok well what happened was the pound signs started flashing, the government got way ahead of themselves and thought hey lets waste the county's money, politicians in Ireland are the highest paid in Europe which just does not make sense, civil servents are also some of the highest paid in Europe. Look arround at the county, some parts have been left untouched by the 'boom', Our Communication sevices are a disgrace, We have trains that will only run to Dublin, some people have never even experienced broadband and then there's health service which I'm not even going to get started on. It would be all good and well if the government had actually done something while there was money in the county, but hey No they thought..lets line our own pockets and worry about the rest later, and the people of Ireland were still foolish enough to vote them in time and time again because nobody had any foresight, now the money is gone, the rich are richer and the rest of us who had just about managed to pull are selves up from the slums are just right back where we started. The bankers, the developers and the GOVERNMENT caused this but we the ordinary people of Ireland are the one's that must suffer the consequences of THEIR actions.

*shadow*

_Nuno_ wrote: »

So how come the average salary in the private sector is so much lower than in the public sector?

I agree..also public sector workers have state gauranteed pensions and they in the norm cannot simply be fired in the morning. Private sector workers have always had to pay into their own pensions which are not state gauranteed and they can lose their jobs first thing in the morning without a word of warning

dresden8

No, the RTE programme showed us that the private sector are paid 2 million a year.

Ask Jimmmy, he laps up everything RTE tells him.