We’re all in this together… some of us more than others

GAVAN REILLY

I HOPE you’ll indulge me if I do something more unusual here, and go off on one about my age.

Your humble columnist is 33 years old. I started college in 2004, when it seemed to be the case that you could study any degree you wanted and still walk into a job, in an entirely unrelated discipline, after graduation. I was due to graduate in 2008, but took a year out in the middle of my degree to work for the students’ union, during which time that employment vista changed fairly dramatically. Leaving UCD with a Commerce & German degree in 2008 might just about have got you a job, but was more likely instead to fast-track you into an expensive Masters degree if you had any ambition to work in the sector in Ireland. Even a year later, a fourth-level qualification wouldn’t guarantee you work. I was monumentally luck to get a job at one of UCD’s student newspapers and moved into a separate career from there.

Many of my 2008-2009 classmates emigrated and, when you’ve spent most of a decade in another country making a life and perhaps meeting a partner, it’s very hard to ever justify moving back. Those of us who stayed at home rarely begrudged our peers for doing what they needed to do; we licked our wounds and accepted that we’d never have big class reunions (or even a full rate of the Dole), but we accepted that financial disasters were rare and that we were the victims of terrible timing.

Now for the second time in our young lives we hear we will be living through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, a time so miserable that its best (?) legacy is the board game Monopoly. This, too, is unfortunate timing. A once-in-a-century pandemic can’t be predicted, even if the 2008 property-cum-financial crisis perhaps could have been.

Ireland’s millennials aren’t the only ones who are now unlucky enough to experience two financial crises in such a short time. Millennials weren’t the first generation to emigrate and they sadly won’t be the last.

But here’s the rub. The State is now going to run a deficit of €23 billion – billion! – this year. For every €3 the State takes in this year, it will spend €4. Next year that deficit will be close to €14bn. Another €37 billion added to the national debt, on which interest will be paid, albeit at unusually low interest rates.

Which generation will be the ones paying for that… and which generation will benefit from Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil throwing another €200m+ to postpone the pension age?