Mary Robinson tells it like it is

Lumen wrote: »

I have paid my taxes, met all my private financial obligations, brought money into the state and employed a number of people. I am surely not alone in meeting these perfectly ordinary responsibilities. I also advised any friends who would listen not to speculate on the property market..

So did I, paid all my taxes, owe nothing, put money aside to make a nice little nest egg now, what's your point? It's called a generalisation for a reason.

Lumen wrote: »

Mary R can shove her generalisations up her arse.

Well, I didn't binge either, and bought no property, but I simply read her remarks as not applying to me. Politicians speak in generalisations - that's what they do, the level on which they operate, so there's no point taking personal offence at anything a politician says. :rolleyes:

prinz wrote: »

It's nothing to do with being meek. The problem is those "flash people" you talk about are shoulder to shoulder with the rest laying 100% of the blame on the banker et al. Of course the "flash person" mentality was partially to blame, and if we ignore it, we will repeat it.

It's not mutually exclusive who to blame for the mess. It's not about a deference to authority or any of that shíte. It's about having the cop on to know that the country went a bit mad. It doesn't take anything away from the bastardos who were supposed to be regulating and prudent. Nothing whatsoever.

True enough. You can blame bankers all you like, but there is a relationship between the person who gives the loan and the person that accepts it. A 1:1 relationship. Sh*te financial regulation/government decisions caused a huge amount of the mess, but there was huge greed, too.

Get on the property ladder, get a new this year's reg car...I mean, for f*ck sake. The most stupid thing you can do if you are an average earner is to buy a brand spanking new car...it loses a chunk of value the moment you drive it out the dealers. Bought on credit, that chunk of credit is gone down the swanny immediately. But no...need to have this year's reg...this year's hot holiday destinations...it's all about image.

Ever see the size of the property supplements in the Sindo during the bubble? Now, it's about 2-4 pages but in the Bubble, it was meaty. Somebody was buying property in the Balkans, Bulgaria and Turkey...whether they were actually planning to live there themselves full time is the litmus test.

Biggins wrote: »

...But hey, lets take the easy route and blame everyone! Yea, that will wash!

...thats actually the hard route actually. The easy route is to blame only those who made the obvious mistakes (FF/bankers/regulaters etc...), and to absolve the rest of us of blame. And then, the next time when the country's fortune improves again and the Gov starts with give-away budgets, dont expect Joe Punter to open his mouth about wasted expenditure, or about an overinflated economy where proces are higher than almost anywhere else in Europe, or about bloated wages in the public and private sector, or about spending too much on social welfare, or health or anything else.

Listen, aside from making a fairly big error of buying a house in 2006 (:eek:) when I got married and wanted to raise a family, I am a pretty frugal person. Other than that i have never had any debt in my life and pay my CC on time. I havent worked in the public sector since 2001. I never voted for FF . I told my politicians that spending was excessive, that tax decreases were excessive. Even with a ginormous mortgage bill, im paying my debts and earn enough that if i default, it probably means that the country is rightly fcuked.....;):D

So, do I deserve any blame? I could say no, fcuk you, im paying my way...etc etc ....blah blah. But I know that I partly rode the tiger; i charged significant fees when i was self-employed, i benifitted from serious over-ther-top corporate entertainment when i moved to being an employee; i never yelled stop.

So, yes, I was partly to blame; we all were. If we pretend that FF, and a handful of bankers were the sole source of our problems, we learn nothing. That doesnt mean FF and certain bankers should not be in the dock, but it does mean that we all need to look at our own behaviour and attitudes over the past decade and remember not to make the same mistakes again.

prinz wrote: »

I do. I also hold to account friends of mine who laughed at me because I pointedly refused to go to certain pubs and clubs, got called a scab because I refused to pay over €10 for a cinema ticket etc. Plenty of ordinary Joe's bought into, literally, the bubble, not only of property prices, but of the cost of living for lifestyle expenditure. These are the people who turn around now and say the Govt is to blame, and the banks are to blame, because they can't afford to keep up the living they had become accustomed to. They are also to blame.

No. I can pay €1000 for a cinema ticket if I want to, if I'm paying with money that I've earned. That in no way makes me responsible for the structural budget defecit or the banking liabilities.

Correlation != causation.

Dudess wrote: »

Good point. I wouldn't be a fan of excessive flashness in general, but living beyond your means, i.e. spending money you don't have is obviously not the same as spending money you DO have... yet they're being put in the same category by many folks now...

Yes because instead of saving etc, you put the money back into the economy that was built on an unsustainable boom across all sectors. Throwing fuel on the fire. Spending the money you DO have is great as long as you keep having the same amount of money if you want to enjoy the same lifestyle.

Lumen wrote: »

NO!

Or at least not yet. If you default on your mortgage you will be made to suffer for a long time. Unlike those actually responsible for the current problems.

I disagree; every one of us who spent too much on a house, or too much on anything for that matter, or demanded too much in wages or social welfare, helped to inflate a rapidly inflating market.

That deserves a portion of the blame.

How come the German populus managed to elect politicians who followed policies that reigned in spending, that encouraged saving and disincentivised excessive consumer spending? How come we did the polar opposite?

For those of you who think, 'its nothing to do with me; i bought my €7 pints, and my holidays, and my shoes, out of my money that i earned'; consider that it was that attitude which got us politicians that ran the country as they did; we should have been telling them to stop; we didnt. This is all going to happen again unless those of you who cant see that simple fact open your eyes.

FlutterinBantam wrote: »

Unfortunately is is somebodies else's business.

By spending unwisely you influence the economy which leads to a situation where prices are distorted relating to value.

You fuel an expectation that a service or product is value for money.

The national economy is an intermeshed and complex process which reacts to market forces, so don't for a minute think how you spend your money doesn't matter.

OK. An analogy...

I'm sitting in a pub, nursing my Guinness whilst a bloke at the bar shoves 18 pints of wifebeater down his neck with money he stole from some old woman down the road. He then goes outside, starts a fight then burns down the pub.

By your reasoning my presence in the bar is enough to make me partly responsible for all this crap. We were spending the same money on the same sort of stuff, and my support of the facilities which we shared and he abused makes me somehow complicit. I saw what he was doing, didn't ask where he got the money, and didn't make any attempt to stop him, on the basis that it wasn't any of my business, and I am neither the publican, the gardai, or his mother.