The new dark age is depriving households of many things taken for granted – jobs, holidays, teeth braces and dog food, writes ORNA MULCAHY
THERE IS a new type of bore out there.
It is not the person who insists that their mortgage is bigger than yours, though there are plenty of them about at the moment, ready to top any story you might tell about bad investments and crushing overheads. No, I’m talking about the parents of young children and teenagers who are busy telling each other that this recession is NO BAD THING.
“Thank God they are this age,” you hear them tell one another, of their children aged anywhere between six months and 16. The thinking is that, with any luck, their darlings will be able to sit out the recession in school and college. By the time they get to graduate, the world might be back on its axis and they will be able to catch the curve on the way up again.
Economists might argue over whether the recession is V-shaped, U-shaped or a sinister L-shape that suggests Japan in the 1990s, but even if the bad times are to last for years and years, that’s okay for the 12-year-olds who, in the meantime, are learning a valuable lesson
– that is, that life is real and life is earnest and that money is a hard-earned thing.
Cue memories from their own no-frills childhood when only millionaires went skiing and there was no such thing as eating out, unless it was in a country hotel serving orange juice as a starter and leathery beef to follow. No wine of course, just Miwadi – and as for trendy clothes, well they just didn’t exist.
I’m prone to this kind of blather myself and, in the way that everyone has to have a group of people to feel sorry for, my sympathies are with the 50-plus brigade who may have the mortgage paid off, but whose well-educated children are now entering a jobs market where architects and lawyers are competing for posts in McDonald’s, and accountants are being let go from blue-chip international firms that any parent would have considered a blissfully safe haven for their child.
Emigration isn’t even the option that it once was, with word coming from Australia that there are no jobs there either.
In this ghastly economy we’re in, the one thing the Irish truly believed in, education, is no longer a passport to a comfortable middle-class existence funded by a job for life. A first-class honours degree is wonderful, but it might not be enough to get you into a job or stop you from being made redundant.
This new uncertainty is a body-blow to parents of children aged 21 upwards who may have strings of qualifications in the sexy subjects of the last decade – corporate law, international business, finance management, marketing – but very few prospects of a getting a real job, the kind that would meet family expectations.
Many of these fifty-somethings in turn come from parents who put every penny into their education – the kind of people who reckoned there was no better art in this world than a set of framed photographs of the six offspring wearing mortar boards and carrying scrolls and who gave rise to jokes along the lines of “My son, the engineer, is drowning!”
Meanwhile, the young ones – those blessed six- to 16-year-olds – don’t yet have to worry about jobs, though their parents may be fretting for them.
I am suffering a dose of status anxiety on behalf of my three as cutbacks have to be made. Cash no longer flows freely through the household and the Abercrombie and Ugg years are over. Orthodontics may have to be long-fingered (a friend of mine got her teeth fixed at 40 so what’s the hurry?).
The need for expensive language courses abroad is being reviewed, heck, even Irish college is looking expensive.
And even the dog is suffering.
For a week, I tried to switch his pricey anti-allergy food to a supermarket brand but he came out in a ferocious rash and started running around in circles. I’ve put him back on the Swiss formula but worry that I cannot keep it up.
After a decade of easy living, we’ve all got accustomed to nice things and developed our own little allergies to cheap brands.
I enjoyed buying nice things for the children, and I still do, but it’s time to get a lot more creative.
Hence my new obsession with house swapping. Who knew there were so many websites and that one could spend so much time cyber-loafing at work, trying to find someone, anyone, who wants to come to Ireland for their family holiday. Anyone with a nice house who wants to be off from New York or Tuscany or Sydney.
The best I’ve found is a house on the south coast of England where we would be expected to look after three cats and a wormery.
The children are horrified. What no villa?
No hotel? No room service?
It’s going to be painful.