Please switch off the lights ...

I READ with considerable interest Matt Cooper’s column (May 14) concerning the state we find ourselves in (pun intended) and how we may one day extricate ourselves from it.

My family and I are, or perhaps should be, poster figures for the boom era. My wife and I both are in our 30s and work in managerial roles for multinational North American companies. My wife is Turkish by birth and we have a one-year-old daughter. After this point our familial hand no longer fits the demographic glove so carefully woven for it by the men in the sharp suits over the past few years.

We do not live in a duplex in north Leitrim that cost us a third of a million euro but has no public lighting. Our (small) car is now in its eighth year and there are no plans to replace it. Our television, DVD player, (digital video camera and stroller were all bought second hand from any number of free websites over the years.

Throughout the halcyon days of the boom we were often pilloried by my parents, peers and colleagues about our “lifestyle”. Many people found our living in a rented one bedroomed flat in Donnybrook odd and spartan. And then there were the property experts, who would tell us why we would be “finished“, if we did not get on the booming and rock solid rent to buy market. It was these avaricious and tracker mortgage obsessed maniacs who laughed loudest and longest. No one is laughing now.

It is with some uneasiness then that I see a campaign afoot to extend the very generous NAMA arrangements to fellow citizens who have borrowed obscene sums of money to live in poorly-built housing estates in the twilight marches of Dublin’s outer commuter belt. I have listened carefully to the reason behind this arrangement. But I cannot accept that this is the only way forward.

I have no great economic training, but I do know that failure and error should not be rewarded. I cannot see any future for the country if we morally capitulate on this point only to indulge in some sort of blame free, consequence neutral national love-in. Everyone, including the very rich, can and should be expected to feel the consequences of their irrational enthusiasm. But as a consummate cynic who can no longer make any proper conceptual distinction between Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, IBEC, SIPTU, NAMA and the upper echelons of the banking and property industries, I expect nothing of the kind to occur.

My wife and I will continue to save our money for as long as our jobs last and then, sometime next spring, we will move to Turkey or perhaps Lebanon. Consider that for a moment. The economic “policies” of the permanent FF/SIPTU/IBEC/CIF partnership junta are forcing its citizens to live in states that a coupe of years ago had Irish soldiers deployed in them to preserve human life. Would the last one to leave the country please switch off the lights?

T Kelleher

St Brigid’s Grove

Artane

Dublin 5