I’ve been thinking about how many of our Institutions here in Ireland – Catholic Church, Health Service, Government and Banks, have let us down. My last post covered the Catholic Church.
Many Irish people have reacted strongly to the findings of the Ryan commission report on institutional child abuse, however I believe modern Ireland is still carrying on child abuse, albeit a different form to that revealed in the Ryan report.
- Children begging on the streets are not an uncommon sight in 2009.
- Services for children with physical and intellectual disabilities are chaotic. Many children are left without necessary services.
- 900 children in the care of the HSE do not have a social worker.
- Child psychiatric services are totally inadequate.
- Counseling services for children/teenagers at risk of suicide are totally inadequate.
All of the above, focussing on children, come within the remit of our health service.
I realise that countries get the health service for which they are prepared to pay and Ireland spends less on health than most other OECD countries. Total health spending accounted for 7.5% of GDP in Ireland in 2006, compared with 15.3% America, 11.3% Switzerland, 11.1% France and an average of 8.9% for all OECD countries. Ireland came 24th out of on 31 countries on total health spend as a % GDP in 2006. Switzerland and France’s spend was 1.5 times that of Ireland’s. (Source OECD health data)
There have been variations of the following saying attributed to different people –
“A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members.” Mahatma Ghandi
How would you rate Ireland?
Apart from the fact that our health spend is lower than our OECD counterparts, I, like many others believe the health service delivers really poor value for the money that is actually spent. Our answer invariably to problems which arise is to commission expensive reports. The health service is just crying out for process improvement, to achieve real value for money, to get real ‘bang for buck’. As a country, Ireland is now effectively broke. The government’s solution now is to cut expenditure on health, with little regard for the consequences of decisions.
I despair.
Irish people are being badly let down by our government. We are unfortunate in that for over the last ten years the same party has been in power. The chickens are really coming home to roost.
Collectively government policy, the banks and property developers contributed to a massive property bubble. Ireland went on a property building spree. This created huge job numbers, huge tax receipts. 80,957 new houses were completed in 2005, 93,419 were completed in 2006, and 78,027 in 2007, (source Central Statistics Office, CSO).
Just to put these numbers in context, this week about 60,000 secondary school students will commence their Leaving Cert., (latest official figures available are for 2005 when 57,391 students completed Leaving Cert., source CSO). Even assuming 20% of students don’t stay to complete secondary school, the figures above for new house building show that even still in the boom years, Ireland was building more houses (many of which bought by couples) per year, than the number of individual students completing secondary education. Who did we think was going to buy all of these houses? There are varying estimates of the number of unsold houses around the country and whilst I couldn’t find an official figure, it has been stated as in the order of one year’s build.
Add this to the amount of commercial property building that went on. We have offices in the National Technology Park in Limerick. This would be a premier address for companies in Limerick, and includes University of Limerick. The park is now full of unoccupied manufacturing/office space. This has happened so quickly, it is frightening.
Irish banks have almost bankrupted the country though their reckless lending. The banks were falling over themselves lending to people, many of whom now struggle to pay off 100% mortgages for properties bought at the peak of the market. Many are now in negative equity. Developers bought up land banks, funded by bank loans, land that is now worth a fraction of its original purchase price.
Ireland had virtually full employment during the Celtic Tiger years. Labour shortages were somewhat minimised by the influx of foreign workers, however demand for many services outstripped supply, price inflation spiraled out of control and competitiveness was lost.
The party couldn’t and didn’t last.
Now the bottom has fallen out of construction. Tax revenues hugely reliant on this construction boom have nose-dived. The government is struggling to balance the books and doing so by raising taxes and cutting expenditure in key areas like health. Many manufacturing jobs are being lost to lower cost economies. Unemployment is rising rapidly.
One difference between this recession and previous ones, is the number of highly qualified and experienced professionals who are now joining the dole queues. Another difference is that in previous recessions, there was always somewhere to which to emigrate. This current recession is global and the opportunities overseas are far fewer.
How did our government get it so wrong?
Fianna Fail, the party whose policies contributed to us getting into this mess is now struggling to get us out of it. How can we be so trusting of them with this task? Personally I am not confident. Fianna Fail politicians keep mentioning the global recession as the cause of our current problems. Yes there is a global recession out there but we added to our own woes by fueling a property bubble and allowing price inflation to spiral out of control. It just makes my blood boil when I hear politician after politician blaming the global recession for our plight. There is no doubt Ireland would have been effected by the downturn like all developed nations but we, through our own fault, have made the problem much worse.
To shore up the banking system the government has invested borrowed billions. As someone commented recently, the news is now full of billion this, billion that, as if a billon was something we ordinary folk dealt with daily.
The irony of it is that most people are feeling the pain of this recession, though many did not share in the gains of the Celtic Tiger.
I am no economist. I’m purely a wife, mother, business owner and citizen of this country.
But I can’t see where it is all going to end!
…
(Normal happy blogposts will resume, honestly)
