Is this the year we tighten our belts and start checking our change? When we start demanding ethics from businesses and politicians? Is it time, asks Kathy Sheridan, to turn off that phone
Will Croatia be the new Tuscany? Will high rise become the hip way to live? Will local government become a hot topic? Is the Big Mac headed for the great barbecue in the sky? Will being out-of-contact be the New Cool? Will the concept of shame be re-born? Is this the year we start to check our change again?
One thing is for sure. None of the above is to the fore of your average Iraqi's conversation right now. While 2003 is shaping up to be an anxious time for many of us, for anyone in the path of Dubya's daisycutters, it may well be terminal. As we ponder the fall-out for oil prices and whether this is the year for a touch more adventurousness in our summer holidays, real families will die horribly for a cause still opaque to many.
Only three years into the new millennium, and the threat to world peace makes the very consideration of cool seem silly - unless it's the New Cool, i.e. a reversal of almost everything we have grabbed onto in recent years. We are on a cusp.
"We've got enough televisions, enough clothes, enough cars, enough kit," says Martin Hayward, a strategic marketing consultant at the London Henley Centre. "So now we spend more on gym memberships, more on pampering, more trips to special events. It used to be: 'He's got a nice car, I'd better get one'. Now it's: 'I went white-water rafting on the weekend - what did you do?'"
But is a corner being turned? It must be significant that pop stars and celebrity footballers were conspicuously absent from the UK New Year honours list. Is this the final kiss-off for conspicuous spending, sleazy behaviour and success by any means, fair, foul or elbows? The mindless, competitive affluence of recent years came at a price. It saw workers become unquestioningly obedient to the corporate demand for 24/7 contact, rowing against a tsunami of e-mail and mobile-phone messages and saw many sucked into the tawdry activities of rapacious entrepreneurs for whom the share price is king.
The greed, lies and slieveen-ism exposed during the crashes of egos and corporations in 2002 may have given pause to many. And the price to be paid by ordinary people is high. The legacy is one of gross uncertainty. Trust no one, is the new mantra.
Amid the confusion, skulduggery and well-aired threats of worse to come, it's hardly any wonder that Irish people feel more vulnerable now. Their biggest fear is unemployment. Many economists shrug it off as over-reaction - after all, the economy is continuing to grow, albeit at a slower pace, they say. But who trusts economists any more? And the fact is, says Gerard O'Neill of Amarach Consulting, that we have more to fear, as we are now doubly exposed.
"Ten years ago, unemployment was important because most households had only one income. Now it's even more important, because most households have two. So everything is doubled - you may have double the income, but you probably have double the out-goings. And that additional exposure to the employment market is what clouds everyone's views, particularly for women, who are mainly employed in the services sector and who don't have the same security of tenure."
But while people say they feel generally anxious, they seem unsure about the cause. "They're still blaming everything on the euro. They're not all that conscious of the fall-out in the economy," says Margaret Gilsenan, planning director at McConnell's Advertising. When growling about prices, they will focus on the cost of a trolley-load of groceries, rather than the cost of an individual item and so are not comparing like with like. If, say, a shopper has begun routinely to sling the elegant little premium biscuits into the trolley rather than the plain digestives, ready-meals rather than a collar of bacon, or ciabatta instead a family pan, the total trolley bill is bound to be substantially more.
But have we gone too far to cut back? The new caution may be evident only in the big decisions to begin with. Sales of house-paint will be buoyant this year, say analysts, because paint sells when people are cautious. Home owners who considered trading up may decide to stay put and upgrade the decor instead. Anyone toying with the notion of a new car or growing broody for another baby may leave it for a while.
"But no one will go back to the old days," says Gilsenan. "They will probably turn the dial back but not off. Things that were luxuries to us five years ago don't seem like that now. People are not prepared to give up the good times. They'll stick things on their credit cards. They're not prepared to wait for things any more, there's not much sense out there of pay-back time. The concern, of course, is that some may not be up to managing those extra levels of debt on their cards when things get tougher."
It's worth noting that 2002 was a record year for credit card applications. The number of credit cards in circulation went from two million to 2.3 million. In a single year, credit-card debt soared from €1 billion to €1.3 billion. Meanwhile, with interest rates at a historic low, credit card APR rates remained at 18 per cent. No one seemed to notice.
There's no doubt, however, that reality is kicking in. While stores try to talk up their figures, a source in one fashionable outlet reckons that pre-Christmas sales were the lowest in several years. It looks as if people did their sums and waited for the sales. It may be that it's no shame any more to admit to being a little strapped.
It may be that events outside our control were leading us towards this juncture anyway, nudging us to pause for an overview, to examine how far we've come and what we've learned. If 2002 taught us anything, it showed what happens when capitalism is untamed. Suddenly, even the most innumerate were made to see that "creative" accounting, golden circles and off-shore balance sheets were not the clever, victimless adventures that they had been led to believe. Real people saw their livelihoods vanish into the vast estates of executives who cashed in before the collapse. Education funds were destroyed and pensions decimated.
Back home, we saw echoes of it all in the DIRT scandal. We saw Elan fall to Earth when a journalist drew attention to its accounting methods. We saw Denis O'Brien, the pin-up boy of corporate Ireland, look a little less sure-footed in the witness box. We groaned impotently as Alfie Kane walked away with millions in the wake of the Eircom fiasco over which he had presided, and as corrupt politicians continued to draw massive State pensions.
But while the public yearns to see malefactors banged behind bars, it seems that something more radical is happening. A burgeoning movement towards ethical behaviour is underway, what some are calling an Age of Integrity.
The big idea is to be successful and good. And so it's time to seriously question whether knocking heaven over hell for more money to buy more stuff really makes us happy.
This is a time when the ideas of writers such as Naomi Klein (No Logo), Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), and Michael Moore (Stupid White Men), all of which advocate resistance against relentless consumerism and sameness, are finding an increasingly receptive audience. A time when the crashing downside of globalisation, as documented by Anne Daly and Ronan Tynan in their recent documentary Race to the Bottom, is more readily absorbed. It is interesting that McDonald's, with shares close to a seven-year low, has just announced its first loss in 47 years.
Ethical business is not a new notion of course, but there is a sense that post-2002, it's an idea whose time has come. It has reached such a pitch that giant corporations such as Shell have set up ethical committees, so that, as well as the annual report, we get a social responsibility report. Trinity College has recently introduced an ethics module to its MBA.
Doubtless, there are plenty of corporate types here who - on the basis that your first duty is to make money for your shareholders - find the whole concept highly amusing. But few people are naïve enough to imagine that mighty corporations are being suddenly altruistic in their new clean, caring incarnations. It's about enlightened self-interest.
They need the halo effect simply because it's good business. They need it because, as one shrewd Irish businessman puts it, "if people have a bit more money, and goods - like cars, say - are much the same, it's increasingly likely people will buy from the company whose ethical behaviour they respect. It could mean the only way to be successful in future is to be ethical". You see two jars of coffee, comparable in quality; one produced by a Third World co-operative, the other by a multinational with a patchy ethical record. Which will you buy? In the words of futurologist, Ralph Jensen: "Companies will gradually enter the market for convictions. The most important reason is that the customer wants it."
Back in Ireland, unsurprisingly, "trust" is the word that will dominate the year. "Last year, we lost faith in politicians, in the church, even in food and where it comes from", says one analyst. "So any business which can establish impeccable levels of trust will do well".
In such an ethical climate, will the roguish politician be quite so appealing? Will political parties continue to make baseless promises with impunity? Can the practice of appointing political hacks to State and semi-State boards survive the tribunal shriving and ethical spring-cleans?
Companies tendering for Government business are already encountering more stringent procedures, which will make it virtually impossible for board members to wield undue influence. In a pitch for a Government contract involving 40 bidders, one company which e-mailed a request for clarification of a question, was told it could not be answered at that stage because it would mean having to inform all the others of the question and of the answer.
"But I can accept that," says the executive concerned, "it means we have a level playing field at last." So will 2003 be the year when the age of nudge-and-wink draws finally to a close? He thinks so.
It could be that as a society, we are growing up in every sense. We are entering a period when the number of young people will decline year by year. In 30 years, the percentage of under-24s will have fallen by 10 per cent to 29 per cent of the population. By then, nearly half the population will be aged 45 and over, up from 32 per cent now. We are moving towards a "middle ageing" society, says Gerard O'Neill, and demographics are going to be the biggest drivers of change.
In the UK, a similar trend has manifested itself in the rising profile of the Saga brand and the boom in Third Age markets from annuities to cruises. The Grey Pound is the big topic at marketing conferences. In the past couple of weeks, the growing pensions crisis there has led to much rumination about the implications of a greying society, about ageism, forced retirement and how to finance the 20 to 25 years of living that many can expect after normal retirement age.
After a year when pension funds were among those which fell prey to the corrupt machinations of the corporate world, it's a question that should be demanding our close attention some time soon. For a start, as the boom fades into memory, who precisely stands to gain from Charlie McCreevy's cherished pension fund?
Futurologist Robert Tyrell, is sanguine about it all. The author of "Things Can Only Get . . . Different" writes that because our population is ageing, tomorrow's world will have different rhythms and different values, aptitudes and aspirations at its core - and that these will increasingly be the values, aptitudes and aspirations of older people.
He predicts a tendency towards more reflection, savouring time, appreciation of the finer things in life, belief in the value of maturity and experience and values that emphasise meaning, friendship and relationships. Even amid the frenetic concern with work and money-making, he already see signals towards the increasing prevalence of "older" values, including the search for a work-life balance and conscious choices to "downshift". "We need to learn to turn our phones off," says Martin Hayward of the Henley Centre. "It would be nice if the New Cool was not to be in contact."
"One thing about middle-age," says O'Neill, "is that we have to be masters of our own destiny." If being duped by politicians at election time is a measure of how we're doing, then we have a way to go. But we have made a beginning. The work of the tribunals demonstrates that we are less willing to engage in fudge. Those who are blatantly guilty by association have been forced to engage with a kind of public truth commission. While up to very recent times, the concept of OTA (openness, accountability and transparency) was apt to produce a knowing sneer, few are stupid enough to do their sneering in public any more.
This could be the year when we revert to common sense and become discriminating again. We may come to perceive an upside to the downturn; that a little dent in confidence can induce more honesty. In a boom atmosphere, it gets harder to distinguish style from substance. Like the swish restaurant that serves tripe-in-a-tower, the mediocrity is hidden behind the upmarket flourishes.
We may even begin to question prices, in appropriately loud, horrified voices. And check our change, shamelessly.
And in one of those happy co-incidences, this will also be the year that brings the Special Olympics to Ireland. It may, says O'Neill, "remind us of our humanity and of a lot of the positive aspects of Ireland and of our identity, that got lost or soiled in the rush for of the Celtic tiger. I think it will be powerful."
But will it leave a lasting legacy? This time next year, the real test will come. Will anything have changed?