Kathy Sheridan: Is there a sea-change in Irish consumer attitudes? Maybe. Economists say that Irish households have substantially downgraded their expectations over the past year or so.
Recent research suggests that a new generation of hard-nosed, cost-conscious shoppers is born. "In short, we are feeling grumpy," says Des Byrne of Behaviour & Attitudes.
The "grumpy" part is unquestionable. Anti-bin charge campaigners, for example, admit that bin charges are only one aspect of their malaise.
But "cost conscious"?
The Central Bank has just revealed that credit card borrowing continues to soar, up from €1.25 billion to €1.5 billion in a year. Five years ago, it was well under half that.
Should we worry? Not unduly, say the experts. Yet the facts on credit cards are shocking. Take AIB's standard Mastercard or Visa. No better or worse than most, they come with a staggering APR of nearly 19 per cent.
Credit card interest rates in Ireland are at least five times the European Central Bank base rate.
A Consumer Choice survey in March came up with an average APR of 16.7 per cent, making our credit card APRs almost 40 per cent higher than those in other EU states. Even after the annual fee charged by most European providers, our EU neighbours are still quids in by comparison. In the UK, with no annual fee, APRs are no more than 14.9 per cent. Even at that, they were described recently as "usurious" by a House of Commons committee chairman.
Far from launching an inquiry into usurious banking policies here, the Government slapped 100 per cent on the credit card levy, diminishing any feeble chance of attracting competition to challenge the big boys.
To say that Irish providers are slow to pass on ECB rate cuts to cardholders is a screaming understatement. Despite a series of ECB cuts that brought the base rates all the way down from 4.25 per cent in August 2001 to 2.75 per cent in December 2002, American Express, MBNA, Tesco and Ulster failed to reduce rates in that time, according to Consumer Choice. And while AIB, Bank of Ireland and NIB had indeed reduced their rates over the previous 18 months, the reductions applied only to gold cards.
The stock answer of the Irish Bankers' Federation to all this is that 50 per cent of cardholders clear their bills on time, and therefore have all the benefits while clocking up no interest. But even that's not definitive. The Irish Credit Bureau put the figure at 30 per cent. In short, anyone who racks up credit card borrowings has to be mad, reckless or desperate. But there are a lot of us around.
Matthew Barrett, the dapper, Kerry-born chief executive of Barclays Bank, said as much when he appeared before the House of Commons committee a couple of weeks ago. Not only did he describe credit cards - including his own company's Barclaycard - as "an expensive way to do borrowing", he added that: "I would not recommend to anybody that they chronically borrow on a credit card". He had offered the same advice, he said, to his four grown-up children - not to "get too much debt on a credit card" - and they were taking it.
Now, the Joe Soaps among us might view this merely as sound, if not earth-shattering, advice from one in the know. But for Barrett, the press and City reaction could hardly have been more hysterical. Comparisons were made with Gerald Ratner, the jewellery tycoon who committed commercial suicide by describing his products as "total crap".
To the Daily Mirror and the Sun (both purportedly best mates of wage slaves everywhere, the kind most likely to rack up credit card borrowings) Barrett was, respectively, "Matt the Plank" and "Barclays Berk". To the politicians who questioned him (themselves past masters of the art of evasion), he was a prize catch, a "fat cat" who had yielded a career-threatening revelation.
Matthew Barrett (basic salary, £1.7 million a year), the quintessential insider, told the truth about a matter that routinely destroys lives. Days later, the chief executive of AIB, Michael Buckley, gave much the same answer when the Sunday Independent asked if he borrowed on his credit card, although it never strayed beyond the business pages. CEOs at Ireland's other banks declined to comment. Surprise, surprise.
Meanwhile, an acquaintance admits to sifting the post for all bank missives addressed to his student son and dumping them before the boy gets home. Distasteful it may be, but this man is all too familiar with those aggressively-promoted siren calls to first-years, which amount to an invitation to get into debt early and often.
He has already repaid several thousand euros of borrowings for an older offspring, an otherwise intelligent girl who swore she never knew "it could spiral like that".
So Matthew Barrett told the simple truth. What does it say about the banking world and its media cheerleaders that they find this so utterly unnerving?