I thought BuMble point was correct and insightful.
I refuse to continue to accept the high prices for everything in the country. My rent is obscene. I’m putting off going to the dentist because it’s so expensive. Two stops on the Luas costs me €2.20 or something. I’m going for a few pints later on and I’m hoping to get away with a €50 spend. A friend and I drove around a Dublin suburb the other night and couldn’t find a non-charging parking space. I looked into buying a business as a going-concern last year. But after thinking for about 30 seconds about the cost of hiring the necessary 4 or 5 people to man the place, on top of rent, rates and insurance (and all that before I even turn on the lights), and the idea blew away in the wind. My dad recently had some medical treatment, thankfully on the VHI, and the bill came to €12,000 for a few nights in hospital, a few consultants buzzing around and a minor procedure. A friend of a friend teaches Maths grinds (extremely professional tuition in fairness) and she’s driving a very nice sports car. Another friend has just had a child and said she feels like she is withdrawing hundreds of euro every day from the bank machine.
Everywhere I turn there is a price gouge going on. Things that years ago simply attracted no charge - like parking in the fucking suburbs - suddenly do. There are certainly pockets of value on certain things, but the whole structure from the top down just feels ruinously bloated still.
So yeah, I hear the arguments about growth. Krugman and all those guys. Fine. But until someone can tell me why I’m going to spend €120 in the dentist’s next week for 15 minutes in the chair, and how my income is going to rise to justify that, I’m going to say deflation is not only desirable but necessary.
I hear you Larry, I’m just a few weeks back in the country (from Germany) and have managed to blow through 3K already, I feel sickened, the country looks like it is falling apart and Audi are launching a massive investment program - it is becoming so polarised here and any thoughts I had of trying to get something up and running here are out the window. No min wage and cheap rent make Germany a much better prospect for a small business. (I’m not against min wage and would like to operate a profit share system but need some slack to get something up and running).
With regard to your other points, I think you should compare costs in other countries before you jump to the conclusion that Ireland is overpriced.
How much would your dad’s operation cost in the US/London? (You can go private in the UK)
How much is a tube ticket in London?
How much is a pint in London or Hamburg?
How much is parking in a London? (I believe some boroughs have the time from the meter running out to your car being clamped down to 30 seconds on average)
Not at all. I may in fact be hopelessly optimistic in thinking that in future we will never see house prices increase at anything more than general inflation and those looking to invest putting their money to productive use rather than speculative.
As for the glass, it’s simply twice the size that was needed to hold its contents, leave the emotion out of it, stick to fact.
I’m 39. As far as I am concerned, things have not been normal in this country since about 1998.
I can remember a colleague - Irish - having a conversation with me at work in Brussels discussing how house prices had risen in the previous year. We were horrified and this was around late 1998 or early 1999.
Most people my age would have seen the property market as shocking at that time. I know a few people who gave up waiting for it to become more sane around 2002.
Some of us are still waiting. The simple fact is it went on so long, it was normal. We’re talking about 10 years which represents - just about - more than a quarter of my life.
I hated it - I could see it wasn’t sustainable but - arguably, it was normal, in the way that for me, inflation tracking prices were normal in Ireland, and renting was normal in Belgium and France.
I still don’t have a house - signed a new lease recently. I expect property will take decades to recover unless we have serious inflation. I suspect the credit laden countries - UK, USA and ourselves - might not necessarily object to that.
I don’t think it’s a viable solution to the problem because all it does is kicks it down the road for about 40 years.
Long enough for a bunch of cubs to forget what financial meltdown is like. Has happened several times in the last century, let’s face it.
"This comparison has some inconsistent or sparse data. It already provides a reliable comparison but it is not bullet-proof. It is based on 3,097 prices entered by 314 different people. "
However I would agree that both Manchester & Glasgow are cheaper.
In addition I would also include Belfast, Athens, Porto, etc.
However I believe the net average income in these cities is considerable below average take home income in Dublin.
If we are going to make comparsions surely local net incomes should be similar to Dublin.
It is astonishing that people keep on saying this as though there is no connection between prices and wages. And as though the latter are an immutable truth for the ages that must inevitably and for all time dictate correspondingly high prices.
This is especially true for mortgage payments. It is still considered ‘normal’ that your your monthly mortgage payment be on the very limit of what your net wage can afford.
Why should a peripheral non-industrialised country, like Ireland, have wages of a Nordic level when, surely, we should be on a par with Portugal, Greece or Spain? And how in God’s name should we be payed more than 1st tier economy workers? Mad, I tell yiz.
