Is this the worst recession ever?

There are a lot of very ill-informed people posting in this thread.

So far the current recession hasn't been felt as harshly or as widely as the one in the 80's but it has the potential to cause much greater damage to our country and our society if we continue with the current administration's headless chicken strategy. On paper it is more serious by far than the one in the 80's was, but that's because the country and the international finance environment has changed.

Some important points:

1-The backup situation of going abroad to find work if things go down the tubes here isn't nearly as viable as it was 30 years ago. This is a global recession, and jobs are scarce everywhere. The option to jump on the boat to england or australia where it's booming doesn't apply anymore. We are "in for a penny, in for a pound" this time.

2-Ireland is carrying huge levels of personal debt, which it wasn't 30 years ago. In essence, because we were all duped into big mortgages, car loans, credit card bills, etc, and are in the red up to our necks, the level of the bread line has risen significantly. Any major financial upheaval that might befall ireland, such as a sudden inability to raise finance on the international markets to pay the public sector wage bill etc has the ability to push the country over the brink very very quickly through chain reaction. A lot of people have a much better standard of life than they had in the 80's, but many are still living it paycheque to paycheque, like they were then, and they have MUCH more to lose than they did last time.

3-We now rely, for better or for worse, on the international finance markets to survive, where we didn't in the 80's before deregulation of those markets. At the moment we're broke, and they are our life blood. They are the only thing that is stopping us from having an inability to pay the public service wage bill for the hospitals, the gardai, the people who keep the streets lit and the electricity on. In short we, as a nation, are the peniless housewife that has gone to the only moneylender in town to get enough cash to pay the electricity bill so it doesn't get cut off after her husband has drunk the entire week's paycheque. If the government can't raise money from the international markets at a reasonable rate in the new year before the 3-6 month surplus pile of borrowed cash we have runs out, then their only other option short of total meltdown and chaos on the streets because they can't pay the bills is to give up our financial soveignty and allow the IMF and/or ECB to come in with their sack of cash and run the country's finances. If that happens, the IMF will be merciless, incompassionate, and will act without regard to quality of life within the state. They will look at the figures coldly, care only about the bottom line, and will raise taxes, cut social welfare, cut spending, close schools and hospitals, and do anything they deem necessary to bring ireland's finances back into line regardless of the social pain it will cause. Corporate tax rates will be under threat from europe, multinational corporations will flee, thousands of businesses will go to the wall, scores of thousands of jobs will be lost in public and private sector, and we will feel the personal social consequenses far more sharply and for a longer term than we ever did in the eighties.

It sounds very pessimistic and negative, but the reality is this country is closer to the brink than it has ever been since the foundation of the free state, and the next 6-12 months is a key period in it's history. We are perilously close to going from the jewel in the european economic crown to a country whose population may have to resort to going back to accepting food parcels for survival in the near future.