Former Minister for Finance Charlie McCreevy conjured up his own epitaph when he uttered the now legendary description of his budgetary tactics that went something like “When I have it, I spend it and when I don’t, I don’t”. This phrase has become somewhat folkloric. Its attribution is cited as sometime in the mid 2000s and the exact wording changes depending on the telling. It is a tale of legendary negligence, a legitimation of the burn after earning that characterised the production of Celtic Tiger wealth. It was a warning sign of the inevitability of hard times to come that we mostly chose to ignore.
McCreevy’s comment is iconic of the era in which it was uttered. During the Celtic Tiger period a collective consciousness was arguably created in which most of us believed in the myth of eternal economic growth (or if we didn’t, we at least did not think about the consequences of collapse so often). In a way the Government had convinced people that they didn’t really need state support. On some level we all knew that the Government were squandering the tax intake but it didn’t somehow seem essential to (most of) our daily lives. We were producing our own wealth, creating our own opportunities. They had pulled off the neoliberal trick of convincing the country that it wanted less and not more state intervention. And this produced new types of citizens. In the space of a generation the Irish had gone from a people that saved before they bought, questioned any extravagance, and were wary of debt, to a nation only too happy to blow their paycheque on nights out, put the bills on the credit card, and become sodden in debt to buy their dream home and all the trimmings in one go. For a long time the Irish had been a people who simply didn’t have it to spend. Now that we had it, by god we were going to spend it.
This attitude was actively encouraged by the Government in almost everything they did. They transferred the tax burden to assets, property in particular, and talked up the property market at every turn, encouraging people to buy, buy, buy. They generated an economy based on consumption and called it growth, and they dealt in macro-economic statistics to obscure the uneven and precarious nature of this ‘expansion’. (more…)
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Ireland after NAMA 
November 3, 2010
“When I have it, I spend it and when I don’t, I don’t” and other tales of budgetary madness
Posted by irelandafternama under #Commentaries | Tags: Cian O'Callaghan, economy, financial crisis, public sector, Taxation |[4] Comments
Former Minister for Finance Charlie McCreevy conjured up his own epitaph when he uttered the now legendary description of his budgetary tactics that went something like “When I have it, I spend it and when I don’t, I don’t”. This phrase has become somewhat folkloric. Its attribution is cited as sometime in the mid 2000s and the exact wording changes depending on the telling. It is a tale of legendary negligence, a legitimation of the burn after earning that characterised the production of Celtic Tiger wealth. It was a warning sign of the inevitability of hard times to come that we mostly chose to ignore.
McCreevy’s comment is iconic of the era in which it was uttered. During the Celtic Tiger period a collective consciousness was arguably created in which most of us believed in the myth of eternal economic growth (or if we didn’t, we at least did not think about the consequences of collapse so often). In a way the Government had convinced people that they didn’t really need state support. On some level we all knew that the Government were squandering the tax intake but it didn’t somehow seem essential to (most of) our daily lives. We were producing our own wealth, creating our own opportunities. They had pulled off the neoliberal trick of convincing the country that it wanted less and not more state intervention. And this produced new types of citizens. In the space of a generation the Irish had gone from a people that saved before they bought, questioned any extravagance, and were wary of debt, to a nation only too happy to blow their paycheque on nights out, put the bills on the credit card, and become sodden in debt to buy their dream home and all the trimmings in one go. For a long time the Irish had been a people who simply didn’t have it to spend. Now that we had it, by god we were going to spend it.
This attitude was actively encouraged by the Government in almost everything they did. They transferred the tax burden to assets, property in particular, and talked up the property market at every turn, encouraging people to buy, buy, buy. They generated an economy based on consumption and called it growth, and they dealt in macro-economic statistics to obscure the uneven and precarious nature of this ‘expansion’. (more…)
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