Counting one’s blessings is not easy in the current context

GORDON Brown has one success under his belt. He set out to campaign, on Saturday, at the emergency meeting of leaders of the biggest EU economies, for a support plan to shove under small businesses like a sheepskin, so they wouldn’t get bedsores as a result of inactivity during the recession.

One would not have expected those leaders to pay that much attention to Gordon, in light of his limited popularity in his home country. In addition, the choosy way Britain commits itself to the European project might, perhaps, influence Europe’s eagerness to bail out Britain’s entrepreneurs. (If Brian Cowen were to have joined him, that would have completely put paid to Brown’s chances of success. Europe was just coming to terms with Ireland’s no vote when we went off and rescued our banks in a spectacularly insular way. Pan-European popularity, at the moment, we don’t have.)

However, the importance of small businesses right across the continent undoubtedly persuaded Silvio Berlusconi, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso and European Central Bank president Jean-Claude Trichet to pledge to help SMEs in dire need of credit, by speeding up the release of $41.5 billion in European Investment Bank loans.

Even though they failed to come up with a systematic solution to the banking crisis, this, at least, is some small consolation.

No doubt, as the radio ads say, “Terms and Conditions apply.” Those terms and conditions notwithstanding, this intervention will hopefully be useful to Irish businesses currently under crippling pressure.

I met the MD/owner of just one such business when I spoke at a conference on Friday. This individual owns a household brand whose products sell heavily in the US and Britain. They boast €15 million in annual turnover. And, in the past year, their profit margin has had a huge bite taken out of it by currency problems. The low level of the dollar, for example, has elevated the price of their offering beyond what any normal purchaser could or would pay.

This, in turn, led to their bank hauling them in and telling them that because their margin-erosion had knocked hell out of their arrangement with the bank, the bank was now increasing their interest rate.

Now, how’s that for bad business thinking? The bank knows the business’s track record and its people. It knows they have invested their lives in what they do. It knows the downturn is outside of their control. But it punishes them for it, nonetheless, in a way which will tighten the vicious circle they’re in.

It’s a bit like what one ruthless Native American Indian tribe used to do with captured enemies. They would wrap sodden strips of animal skin around their heads and leave them, tied, in the open air, knowing that the sun would dry and contract the leather, which would agonisingly crush their skulls. But at least this unconscionable cruelty was meted out to enemies. The bank, in the case I mention, was meting out the equivalent punishment to a good customer who has huge potential. I don’t know if the European Investment Bank loans can help in that situation, but I do know that banks which apply such pointlessly punitive and anti-business measures need a severe kick, and would hope the Government, now it’s rescued them, would deliver that kick.

I’d be more confident about the possibility if the budget was not being relentlessly sold as the toughest budget in history.

The danger of the self-righteous Puritanism currently framing the budget ignores the fact that economies do not recover from disaster only through saving money.

Cutbacks in public spending are a way of preventing a country going bankrupt, not a way of stimulating recovery.

Economies and nations recover through the creativity, innovation, energy and boundless irrational courage of business people, particularly entrepreneurs, who are prepared to work longer, harder and at lower salaries in order to keep their business — and the businesses and individuals who depend on it — afloat.

We have to hope that there’s someone around the Cabinet table who can divvy up the cuts required of their Department, but at the same time remind the rest of them that recovery requires help, judiciously applied, and I do not mean to the construction industry. (Incentives for insulation, as proposed by the Labour party, are grand, but injecting Styrofoam into walls, while it makes homeowners warmer, reduces energy demand/carbon footprint and keeps a few of the lads in work, will not significantly revive trade, confidence and cashflow.) It’s time Cabinet and commentators stopped seeing virtue in punishing people who did nothing to bring about the current crisis, but who hold the potential to drag us all out of it. The pleasurable masochism behind the grim unanimity is beginning to be tedious. We don’t need to be told any more loudly that the water’s going to be freezing, and that it’s going to stay freezing. We got that message some time back.

We also know that we face a decade wherein, the minute any of us complain about anything, the mantra’s going to be “Cutbacks.” That is the way it was, last time around. Any failure of professionalism, good business practice, delivery dates, basic standards or customer care was explained away by the C word. (I do wish the Cabinet would bite the bullet and use the real word. Talking with determined spin about “cost reductions on a departmental basis” won’t work and is insulting to the people who are going to be bitten in their vulnerabilities by those cutbacks.) In the current context, counting one’s blessings is not easy, although a series of documentaries running on TG4 might help viewers in that direction. The documentaries, made in the good old days before reality television polluted our appreciation of societal truth, are drawn from the Irish Film Archive and are — appropriately — running under the collective title of Seoda. They are gems. Newly restored gems of outstanding cultural, historical and entertainment value.

The 11 films in the series date from 1948 to 1970 and cover a broad range of topics including emigration; politics; personal saving; TB; diphtheria and architecture.

A new introduction to each film in the series has been written by documentary historian, Dr Harvey O’Brien, and the series is presented in Irish by the inestimable Niall Tóibín. Some of them are dramatised, with great actors like Joan O’Hara, Angela Newman, Marie Keane and a very young Joe Lynch.

They bring to life the bleak Ireland of the 1940s and 1950s, where over-use of antibiotics couldn’t happen because they hadn’t been invented, where diphtheria was an horrific threat to the life of children, where rickets left generations bow-legged, and where TB or “galloping consumption” was not just a killer disease, but one hedged around by secrecy and shame. While new treatments were coming onstream, public health education was hugely difficult, in an Ireland where the nearest equivalent to “mass media” was one radio station broadcasting at limited periods throughout the day. The Department of Health decided to use the cinema. The documentaries they made, currently running on TG4, provide a fascinating corrective to contemporary self-pity…