Anne Enright · Sinking by Inches

"...One of the strangest feelings, living through a housing boom, is that you are rich or poor not because of the money you earn, but the year you started earning it. It is not a question of effort, but of luck. This was part of the impotence and panic that drove Irish people to buy overvalued houses towards the end of the boom; it was the feeling that we were running up a down escalator and had to grab hold of whatever we could, to stop being swept away. There is very little pleasure in buying a house. Perhaps this fact is not mentioned often enough. For a while, house auctions were a kind of blood sport in South Dublin. There were women who spent their lives going to them, to get high on the smell of money and other people’s pain. It was like living in a casino: the insanity of the sums involved; that blank, ecstatic misery on the faces of the people who won.

Telling the truth was, in the circumstances, not just boring, it was also unlucky, hexed, taboo. It might even be unclean. Careless talk costs jobs. If the bubble burst it would be your fault for calling it a bubble, because, at the end of the day, it’s not an economy, it’s a mood.

I am not a Freudian about this money shit, especially these days when it is so notional, so rarely handled or seen. I do think money is a magical substance, which makes the phrase ‘frozen desire’ a little too … frozen, for me. These days I play with the idea of money as mother’s love; her body, her attention, the blessing of her gaze. It is the thing you fight your siblings for, because to be poor is to be so unloved. But money changes when you multiply it by millions of families, and that is the shift that I can not understand.

Anyway. What does well in a downturn? Security systems, fast food, medical supplies. It has taken Ireland more than two years to get real. The private sector discovered it in 2008, but in 2009 the public sector really learned what a €3 billion, followed by a €3.5 billion readjustment in the national finances does to your pay cheque, your grant, your welfare slip. ‘And remember, kids,’ says the chat show host at the end of the annual Toy Show on television, ‘Manage Your Expectations.’

On 12 December, everyone in Smyths toyshop in Bray is on the phone, either to the internet or to a spouse. One person is talking in Polish, another couple in German. It looks the same as any other year – maybe a bit quieter – but if you bump into someone you know in the aisle you do not stay to see them weigh one piece of plastic tat against another, or how long it takes them to decide. The place is full of buggies. I love these children with their wise eyes: the ones who are allowed to see it all, because they are still too young for Santa Claus."

The entire article was published by the London Review of Books on 7 January 2010 and can be viewed here - LRB · Anne Enright · Sinking by Inches