I’m No George Lee But.....

We are in economically straitened times. I believe (and I have to stress this is a personal opinion) that we as a nation talked ourselves in to the recession and as a result it happened a lot sooner than in other countries. When I say ‘WE’ I mean everybody - politicians included.


If you look at the UK at the moment they are on the cusp of a recession and will announce that they are in one on Friday. Ireland on the other hand allowed a number of events to happen that brought the economy to a halt sooner than it should have. Firstly the speculation on stamp duty on property before the election in May 2007 meant that nobody bought a house on the off chance that they would make a saving after the election. Then the introduction of new VRT and car tax measures meant that the annual rush to register new cars became a crawl as people waited to buy in July. Then when July came around most people decided to hold off until January 2009.


That dithering caused a knock on effect for thousands of businesses and they had to rein in their spending. Those events coupled with consistent warnings that the recession was just around the corner meant that people began to err on the side of caution.


The net effect of all of this was that the economy screeched to a halt instead of the anticipated soft landing that we were promised.


Outside events played their part, but within the national context we have ourselves and the Irish media to blame for some of the fix we are in now.
The media seem to be taking great delight in the unfolding events – after all it is their bread and butter. What all that reportage is doing is creating a cloud that scares people and creates a culture of fear.


At the coalface of recruitment I can tell you that very little has changed since last year. The amount of roles that are being offered by clients hasn’t changed dramatically. Our company has a strong pharmaceutical and medical device base of clients and they are working away oblivious to the doom and gloom. What has changed is that candidates are being scared away from moving because like Chicken Licken’s friends they have been led to believe that the sky is falling down.


Sometimes I think that nobody thinks these things except me. This time I am glad to have been proven wrong. I spoke with a senior HR specialist at a large multinational earlier this week. As we were shooting the breeze she said pretty much what I was thinking that the media had walked us in to this far earlier than was necessary. She like me said that she wasn’t advocating burying our heads in the sand, but was advocating balanced reporting.