When leaving home is the only way out

EVERY culture has its own spectre of hardship, says economist Alan Barrett. For Germans, it is the hyper-inflation of the Weimar Republic and its destruction of families' hard-earned savings. For the English, it is the rationing during and after World War II, which left some in that generation still prone to hoarding every time headlines cause alarm. For the Irish, it is landlessness.

Their folk memory turns on the stories of the potato famine of the 1840s, when starving people were evicted from their homes by English landlords and died by the roadsides with grass stains around their mouths.

Even today, says Professor Barrett, of Trinity College, Dublin, "in the social collective consciousness, losing your property and eviction are the worst things that can possibly happen."

This has led to a national preoccupation with property ownership, agrees Professor Piaras Mac Einri of Cork University, "We have an obsession with land. Owning your own land is the biggest thing you can do.''

Which partly explains what has happened with traditionally frugal, hard-working Ireland. In the 15 years to 2008 the country boomed, proclaimed as "the Celtic Tiger". On a surge of prosperity and optimism, and turbo-charged by low interest rates, Ireland spent billions building roads, luxury hotels, golf courses, and a gleaming, futuristic, 600 million (A$783 million) international airport, T2. The Irish also borrowed heavily to buy into a feverish local property market.

Barrett, who is on secondment from Ireland's Economic and Social Research Institute, says: "If you asked anybody what was the big benefit of the Celtic Tiger, I think a lot of people would have answered that for the first time ever, if you were born in Ireland you could assume that you could live and work in Ireland for the rest of your life."

But the Celtic Tiger is now a mewing kitten. Last month marked the first anniversary of Ireland's humiliating bailout by the troika of the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund, without which it would be bankrupt. Ireland has also just suffered its fourth consecutive austerity budget, this time one that provides an "adjustment" of

3.8 billion through increased taxes and slashed spending. It follows cuts of 4 billion last year.

The Irish are talking about unemployment tripling to 14.5 per cent with 450,000 now jobless, about the way houses have lost half their value and about the big cuts to salaries and social services that make life harder. But there is another painful Irish spectre that is not getting as much airplay - forced emigration.

Emma and Eoin Monaghan are typical of those hardest hit by the crash. They have regretfully decided that they must leave the country if they and their children are to have a future. He is 35 and works as a thermal insulator; she is 29 and works part-time as a make-up artist. They have two children, five-year-old Jamie and baby Maleah, nine months, and live in a Celtic Tiger-era housing estate at Donabate, on the edge of Dublin.

They did what they thought was the responsible thing and bought a house before they had children, at a time when prices were rising fast, because they feared they might not get into the market at all if they dithered.

"The day we actually bought, there was a big queue," Emma says. "They said if you didn't bring your deposit within 24 hours you would lose your place. We were so frightened that we wouldn't even get on the property ladder."

They were conservative, for the time; they took a mortgage of 100 per cent, when all around them people were borrowing even more than that to add on a car, or a renovation. Between 1998 and 2008, Irish banks borrowed 300 billion to fund loans for property speculation, which amounted to 2 times the country's gross domestic product.