Coping with the recession is hard enough without listening to it all day

The three-year old wasn’t so much draped over his mother’s shoulder as collapsed over it, head heavy against her neck, one arm caught in the hood of her anorak, the other hanging loosely.

Her husband met her in the hall and the toddler was gently transferred to him. He climbed the line staircase like a man under water. Slowly. Silently. If the little one stayed asleep for an hour or so, the two parents would be able to sit at the kitchen table and share their lives. It’s the only uninterrupted time they have together. No television. No radio. No texts or tweets or phone calls taken or returned. Just them, in the picture-perfect kitchen in their negative equity home.

Starting from that home, five days a week, she drives east and south, starting before dawn, dropping off their son at the crèche on her way to where she works, 63km away. He drives west to his job in Limerick. If you do the inhalation of breath indicating this must be tough, both automatically shake their heads.

“We’re lucky,” she says. “We have jobs.”

Not only do they have jobs, they have plans. A website that just might provide a living for one of them. Attending a class so they can do acceptable DIY on their new home. They shrug off the fact that theirs is the only occupied house in the newly-built cluster of homes. Sooner or later, the prices and the money potential buyers can raise will meet, and other couples will move in. If they’re lucky, at that point one of them might be working from home and might get to know their neighbours. Right now, that wouldn’t be possible anyway. Although, he says, they’ve saved shopping time at the weekend. Amused observers of their own patterns, they say that they used to spend Saturday going from Tesco to Lidl to Aldi, buying only the half-price special offers in each. At one of their kitchen table meetings, he was enthusing about the quality of Aldi’s meat when she raised the Lidl drill issue.

The Lidl drill issue? Oh, come on, you know yourself, that bit of equipment you never knew you needed, largely because you actually don’t need it, but which you now appreciate is an absolute necessity, and anyway, it’s dirt cheap. You’re sure. Not that you’ve done price comparison, but it stands to reason. Doesn’t it?

No, it doesn’t, this couple decided, after the third Lidl drill-type purchase. Impulse buying had to stop. They now always buy online from Tesco. The site reminds them of their regular purchases and allows them to compare what they spend this week to what they spent last week or six weeks ago. The method eliminates the possibility of impulse-buying, and they’ve found the level of control they’ve gained outweighs the transient pleasure once afforded by picking up a personal treat. In addition, a beneficial spin-off is that they’ve gained time to play with their son and robbed him of the chance to develop the “pester power” habit.

It’s a tough weekly grind, but they don’t see it like that. They’re grateful and optimistic and they do unfashionable things like remark on the days getting longer and the birds singing in the mornings. Meeting them is like stepping into a different country. They don’t get riled about public servants retiring early. In fact, they don’t get riled about much. Mainly, they say, because one of the things they gave up as part of their approach to surviving the recession was media. She started by abandoning blogs, even though she’s the electronic engineer who’s developing a business website. Too much negativity, venom and viciousness, she says. Then he quit listening to radio programmes, having discovered an app that allows him to listen, instead, on his IPhone, to lectures by Harvard professors. Every now and then, he tunes into radio again just to check that he’s not missing a major national event. So far, he says, it’s been Groundhog Day. He tuned in and finds himself listening to exactly the same stuff he heard last time. Interviewers attacking politicians about the state of the nation, giving out about bankers, quoting texts from people who seem chronically, permanently enraged. The kind of programming Alan Dukes may have had in mind when he said the kick of being a judge on a reality TV programme was the chance to “give out to people for not doing things I couldn’t do myself — like journalists do”.

Journalists have always given out, but in the past, they spent most of their time finding information for one specific outlet. Now, many of the best of them spend most of their time reacting to information in several outlets. Richard Bruton, in reference to the coverage of Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s remarks in Davos, talked about the growing trend for “pouncing on a phrase”. Applied to politicians of all parties, this phrase-pouncing facilitates analysis predicated on the notion that prepared communication is somehow less probative of the real views of a politician than is an infelicitous phrase. In this construct, a verbal gaffe is emblematic of the entire intellectual and moral makeup of the man or woman. News reporters immediately start working their phones to reach any vested interest who might be persuaded to criticise the comment quoted to them, while sub-editors come up with headlines filled with words like “condemn” and “attack”. Columnists do compare-and-contrast, knowing that the more impassioned their criticism, the more likely will be an invitation to repeat it on a TV or radio programme, which, in turn, will please their bosses because it counts as free marketing for their paper.

Sex always sells, but for the last three years, nothing has sold as well as fury. Rage and blame are top of the pops. And they feed into each other. Many radio current affairs presenters instinctively rate the success of an item based on the volume of texts it generates. That would be akin to a TD believing that the complaints turning up in their constituency clinic represent, in microcosm, the issues about which the nation is exercised, whereas any experienced politician knows that those who attend clinics are a self-selecting segment representative of nothing in particular, not even political affiliation or personal loyalty.

In addition, radio programmes train texters. They don’t set out to do it, but the way they use texts or tweets constitutes an on-going tutorial. Sean Moncrief now has an eager set of contributory listeners who deliver radio haikus to him; short, witty and laden with one-off nicknames for his guests. Other programmes propagate permanently-embittered responders who come alive at the whiff of hostility. They reinforce the programme by their reactions (“See, we have listeners and they’re mad enough to contact us”) and are reinforced by it. It is a vicious circle, and increasingly a turnoff for the coping classes.