Consumerism, conscience, Christmas

The jingle bells were muffled on Dublin's Grafton Street yesterday as the last full shopping weekend before Christmas ended on a slightly subdued note.

There was a suspicion that most women had already finished buying presents and that it was still too soon for most men to start. But even the early launch of January sales produced mixed results.

Clarks shoe shop, where the sale began on Friday, reported that after a busy November, it was now "very, very quiet" compared with previous years.

Up the street in Next, where the regular St Stephen's Day sale - once the earliest on the block - is still a week away, a floor manager reported it was "mad in men's" but "very dead" in the women's department.

Meanwhile in BT2, a spokesman denied that the 50 per cent reductions on some lines amounted to an actual sale, although whatever it was called, it was having the desired effect.

"We're having a very good time, today and yesterday," the spokesman said.

Subdued Sunday or not, the Chambers of Commerce of Ireland expects overall Christmas business to be up 4 to 5 per cent on last year.

The group's head of research, Seán Murphy, said a "solid budget" and general confidence about job prospects in 2006 would be reflected in the tills.

He was a little concerned about the phenomenon of pre-Christmas sales, which first appeared last year and threatens to "cannibalise" the traditional post-Christmas splurge.

But apart from that and the continued high rate of shoplifting in Ireland - twice the rate in Britain, he claimed - the only blot on the horizon was "the end of the era of low interest rates".

While some were tempting shoppers with lower prices yesterday, others were appealing to the public's conscience.

Targeting last-minute present buyers - who according to an Oxfam survey spend an average €48 on things like ties and toiletries - the Dublin City Council Fair Trade group urged them to spend some of it on a Fairtrade hamper instead.

Labour councillor and group spokesman Eric Byrne said people could combine Fairtrade tea, coffee, chocolate bars and biscuits into a present that would not only be welcome to the recipient but help producers in the developing world too.

And back on Grafton Street, in the fiercely competitive carol singing market, a group of nuns were making a final fundraising push for their missions in Africa, India and South America.

It was the Loreto Sisters' last singing day before Christmas - they do the four Sundays of Advent each year - and, although they were not expecting any increase on the five-figure sum raised last year, the zero-growth rate would still be a good result.

A spokeswoman preferred not to give exact figures, "in case the Revenue start chasing us". But she said that all the money would go directly to their work with Aids sufferers and other needy groups, including a new project in Sudan next year.