PENSIONS

– Managing Your Future

WORDS: Jill Kerby

People used to think I was exaggerating when I said that counting on someone else — an employer, the state, and especially a knight in shining armour to provide you with a comfortable retirement was asking to expect the wide eyed magic of a Santa
Claus Christmas to continue long past the age of 12..

The entire exercise feeds our endless interest in how the famous live, and also our unedifying desire for moments of schadenfreude: the taking of satisfaction at someone else’s misfortune.

The celebrity’s answer to ‘have you lost any money’ is usually answered with how much they
paid for an expensive car that ended up spending more time with a mechanic than with them, or the purchase of an overhyped share against their better instincts to leave their money in the post office.

Usually, they were only observers of other people’s wild extravagance: those €1,000 lunchtime jeroboams of vintage champagne; the shopping trip where 20 pairs of Louboutins were bought but never worn; the helicopter trip to retrieve the forgotten Chihuahua left behind in a portaloo at the Grand National.

Oh, how we laughed blithely at such excess. When the economy is doing well, and especially
when it’s in bubble mode, the world is everyone’s Galway oyster and there is little outright
condemnation of such conspicuous consumption.

Now, I’m afraid all it takes to bring out the mean-spirited flintiness and begrudgery in the Irish soul is an old-fashioned economic meltdown.

Since there are so few people in Ireland who can say, with hand-on-heart, they avoided all
superfluous, vacuous, devil-may-care borrowing and spending between 2001 and 2008, I think that 2012 should be declared the year that all hairshirt recriminations — public and private — about the collective fiscal stupidity of the Irish people should come to an end. What we have now — give or take a sovereign default — is the new normal.

That doesn’t mean that we let the government or banks off the hook; their corporate and personal excesses have never been properly purged and, truth be told, are on-going, both here and everywhere else. But they are a hopeless case and anyone with sufficient breath to fog a mirror knows now not to depend on either to reform the inherent corruption that governs their self-serving activities. That’s what revolutions are for, and there’s still plenty tax-blood left to squeeze out of Irish stones before anyone in the Dáil, or the Central Bank, ends up saying, without irony, that the people really ‘are revolting’.

Read more about Pensions – Managing Your Future in the Spring 2012 issue of WMB, on newsstands from March 1st!