The doom and gloom is familiar to anyone over 40. The good news is we somehow coped before and will cope again, writes AILISH CONNELLY
THE SIGN on the road to Sligo proclaims "Christ died for the Ungodly". All the way the rain pelts down, Matt Cooper's radio guests hurl apocalyptic stats at each other. While the eight-year-old ponders as to why the adults are sounding so narky, the 12-year-olds affect precocious nonchalance and the youngest, aged five, wonders aloud, "do spiders have snots?"
That's a bit like asking if a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Sometimes Mammy really doesn't have the answers. Mammy is in danger of severe depression from listening to the airwaves. I switch on a CD and the Kaiser Chiefs sing specially to me, "due to lack of interest, tomorrow is cancelled, let the clocks be reset and the pendulums held". I'm not paranoid, I'm right. Four horsemen gallop by.
It's becoming ridiculously retro. We arrive at the house with the swirly, mud-coloured carpets and "Naiad" brown bathroom suites, those same bathroom suites my mother had announced would do right well and would see her out. I contemplate the platforms and flared trousers in the suitcase that may not see the light of day if the dark clouds don't disperse and I realise time had warped on the N4, that we are now firmly back in the decades style forgot, aka the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Maybe I should be channelling a mullet hair-do, snow-washed jeans and a donkey jacket? Ah, but the skinny fashionistas were favouring this look two years ago. Is there something they knew that the good and great of the land should have been in on too?
In my bucolic bliss, I hear a goat bleating and I fret that I have finally lost the bit of grey matter I was born with. Not a bit of it - Indiana Jones, as the five-year-old dubs him, is alive and noisily well, tethered to next door's railings and chewing the common grass between. How the green lobby would love this; the holidaying in Ireland, the livestock instead of the lawnmower, watching cracking good tennis on the telly instead of poisoning the Earth by flying there to actually witness it. You'll understand if I'm not convinced.
I meet a cousin for tea, under the shadow of Ben Bulben and, instead of ordering dessert, a bar of Green and Black's organic chocolate comes skittering across the table. "Here," says she, "I believe there's a recession on."
It's all so annoyingly, dare I say it, boringly familiar for the 35-plus generations, this latest downturn. Perhaps that's why we don't really want to know the ins and outs of our new fiscal reality. If another earnest economist tells us belt-tightening is in order they'll get short shrift. Seriously, lads, we know already.
The grim hand of recession, which allegedly crept up on us, but in reality has been with us for quite some time now, was there for anyone who bothered to look. Sources in the hotel industry claim corporate bookings have been well down for over 12 months, tradesmen and builders have been much more readily available for at least a year now and will no longer look at you as if you have five heads for asking them to undertake a small job.
Though it's not the way it appears so far, we are told this one is a middle-class recession. That it will affect far more people. Really? Because the last one affected people from all classes, I seem to remember.
You left school or college in the mid-1980s and headed for the North Wall, Dún Laoghaire, or Knock or Shannon airport. It didn't make a whit of difference whether you had a degree under your arm or not. Most of us left and took any job we could get when we reached our destinations.
Obviously people weren't riverdancing for joy at their prospects, but likewise folks generally make the best of their situations, whether that be in boom times or bust.
In the good times, some parents were worried if they didn't have an apartment for each of their kids, something to give them a foothold in life. But what kind of a message is that to give our children? That they couldn't be trusted to gain their own foothold, that they wouldn't be capable of it?
A big concern for many families is that the offspring are once again being reared for export. There's no point having that apartment but no job. Even if they do have to emigrate we have to trust that we have given our kids the emotional tools to survive and thrive. We didn't do too badly in the end, even if we were brought up in an era when our "feelings" on everything were pretty much ignored, even if the precious boom passed many 30- and 40-somethings by, busy as they are bringing up their families.
As in the past, when times get hard, people become ingenious at making do. It will be wall-to-wall home brew and chateau northside, DIY and second-hand clothes and horrible old bathroom suites that were the in thing 30-odd years ago.
Could I suggest that the Government, while slashing and burning our services, starting from the top down, make do also? Why did the OPW spend over €200,000 on an ex-taoiseach's offices. What were they putting in there? Frescoed ceilings, Italian marble floors and furniture upholstered with the soft underbelly of rare animals? Perhaps a little zen garden where Bertie could contemplate his €100,000 after-dinner speeches? Maybe he can help me. Maybe he can ruminate on my five-year-old's conundrum: do spiders have snots?
• Fintan O'Toole is on leave