Shadow over Christmas - Perspective never more important

THERE has been a shadow hanging over this Christmas unlike any seen for many, many years.

There is an expectation that the new year will be very difficult and that there is little enough any of us can do about the approaching storm.

Despite all of our best efforts to enjoy the moment, the economic forecasts are such that they cannot be ignored. It is becoming difficult to sustain the kind of optimism and energy that helped us achieve so much over recent decades. People are worried about their jobs and their ability to meet their commitments.

These worries turn to anger when people contrast their own prospects with the situation where a bank chief can borrow €87m from the bank that employs him to look after its interests and hide the transaction, seemingly without any meaningful consequences, even when the bank goes belly up. One law for the rich and another for the rest of us indeed.

Thousands of families in the mid-west are on tenterhooks waiting for an announcement from Dell that anything up to 2,000 jobs, invaluable jobs that changed lives across the region, are going to Poland or Asia.

Like so many other Irish workers, it seems their brief flirtation with prosperity is over as manufacturers chase cheaper labour and energy costs across the globe.

Earlier this week Taoiseach Brian Cowen warned us that we will suffer a drop in living standards because “we’re spending more than we’re earning”. The 2008 Exchequer figures are due next month and are expected to show a gaping €8bn hole in the public finances.

Mr Cowen has warned: “We’re going to take some pretty tough decisions, in addition to the ones we have already embarked upon.”

Cheering, holiday-making, party-mood news indeed.

Mr Cowen has spoken of the broader picture, but the southern regional president of the St Vincent de Paul Society, Brendan Dempsey, paints a more intimate picture of the deteriorating situation.

He speaks of people in dire straits, and in once instance he said he found children “starving” — his words not ours — because their father had lost his job.

His colleague, Ellmarie Spillane-Dowd, president of the Cork city conference of the charity, said she is “flabbergasted” by how quickly people’s situations have changed.

“People are saying to me that this time last year they were donors, now they are looking for help.”

In the space of 12 months people have had a complete reversal of their fortunes.

We did, indeed, build our castles on sand.

These are the predictions and it is likely that some people will face circumstances they never anticipated, but all is not gloom. Even if the worst predictions on unemployment come true the vast majority of Irish people will still have jobs, even if they have to accept pay cuts to protect their jobs.

And, as the Taoiseach pointed out earlier this week, “after 10 or 12 good years... we face into a few years where the standard of living is going to drop. But it is going to drop back to a level which is still well ahead of where it was five, 10 or 15 years ago”.

Let’s hope he is right this time.

Some people will need help, and we must all do we can to make sure they get it, either through government or organisations like the St Vincent de Paul.

But there are other realities as well. Great songs and great books will still be written. There will still be great days at Thomond Park and in Croke Park. Our world may change but it will not end; a sense of perspective and history was never more important.

If you were lucky enough to have enjoyed one really good party over Christmas ask yourself a question — was it the people or the money that made it so?