Peasant people can't accept the blame
I read the article by Maeve Dineen (Irish Independent, January 27) criticising Enda Kenny's comments. It was strong on opinions less so on facts.
As stated by Yeats, "We are a peasant people" who refuse to countenance blame for anything and take on the role of victimhood with alacrity.
The fact is that we did "go mad on borrowing".
Perhaps, in the ascendancy of blame, we could target the 300 or 400 developers, senior bankers, regulators and senior politicians, but the fact remains that hundreds of thousands of people borrowed unwisely.
Without the participation of these numbers, the overall mountain of debt could not have accumulated as it did.
We could also blame the artificially low interest rates in the eurozone caused by German reunification but should refrain from doing so as personal responsibility should always take precedence.
Since the inception of modern banking in Lombardy 900 years ago, guidelines have been painfully -- and repeatedly -- learnt as to what the upper limit for mortgages and loans should be. Generally these are in the range 2.5 to 3.5 times earnings.
How do you reconcile that with 100pc mortgages taken out by hundreds of thousands of people based on six to seven times their salary?
How about the 200,000 holiday homes bought overseas, mostly with borrowed money which the country can now kiss goodbye?
These were not bought by wealthy tax exiles but by teachers, taxi drivers, firemen and people of similar backgrounds.
They were bought in France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, the US, Turkey Bulgaria, Croatia and other eastern European countries barely out of internecine warfare and to which Ryanair no longer flies.
How do you explain why every small-town shopkeeper and businessman borrowed to buy up the field on the edge of town so as not to miss out on the property boom, the loans for which has now gone belly up?
It is a fact that not everybody got involved in unwise borrowing -- and this writer is among this lucky group -- but sufficiently large numbers did indulge to bring personal borrowing as a percentage of GDP from 55pc to 250pc when anything above 90pc is considered dangerous.
Tony O'Dowd
Rathfarnham, Dublin 14
Irish Independent
