Did we blow it, or did it exist at all?

One of my pet peeves is the phrase "blew the boom" which has permeated the media for a number of years now.

Having reflected on this recently I came to an interesting, if slightly odd hypothesis. Of course I have no proof, but neither does the BTB brigade.

So, here goes. Before Ireland ever had a boom, Dublin was very well serviced by fantastic infrastructure, Dublin is where the commentariat lives and Dublin got a lot of progress from 1995 onwards. The issue being that the rest of the country started to catch up, the focus switched from Dublin to the regions and hell did we get a lot of much needed infrastructure in the regions, albeit that some of it was part privately funded.

Stadia, motorways, we finally got motorways, schools, colleges, university capital projects, parks. But I do agree with the begrudgers in a way. We have unsustainable levels of public service salaries, welfare, current service expenditure.

People now believe they're being screwed because they're expected to pay European levels of tax on their bloated salaries. The people who have a right to feel shafted are the ones that never bought into the boom, well maybe they had an SSIA. Ah the SSIA, remember that, the scheme whereby they state gave people free money. Shafted we were, blown it was. Imagine a country that had so much spending going on and so much tax coming in that it had to screw the poor citizens by giving them free money.

It could never last, I remember saying it at 18 years of age on a cold October evening in 2006. Walking from Neptune's Hostel in Killarney to the Gleneagle Hotel with a fellow member of Fianna Fáil's Con Colbert Cumann I said something along the lines of "you know, the government is going to have to do something to control the price of houses, to bring the average price back to 3 times the average industrial wage." I had the theory of negative equity explained to me (by a developer's son...the irony) I may write another blog on that topic, and another one on my first Ard-Fheis that was on that cold October weekend.

Anyhow, I suppose this rambling is questioning whether there was actually a boom at all? Or was it all an illusion? Maybe the truth lies somewhere between, maybe it was an economic blip, and maybe, just maybe we got exactly what we deserved.