Substitute teacher Economics editor Dan O’Brien heralds a new series on the “squeezed middle” starting in tomorrow’s paper.
Having urged you to purchase during the boom the paper of record now feels your pain.
“If you have purchased anything in the last 10 years you’re likely to be in negative equity.”
Cheers, Dan.
BONG!!!
I bought pints’n'kebabs, I’m grand…
I bought pints and cd’s.
Buy the Indo on Saturday – There’s a property boom happening there!!
Jaysus. Doesn’t anybody in the IT know how to record decent audio? Amateur hour.
As for Dan: Zzzzzz.
Saturday’s edition comes with a special Irish Times money box to be filled and collected after lent.
Squeezed Middle. Hmmmm
Suppose I’ll have’ta. Those Christmas lbs are a kúnt.
Tis like a mezzanine level.
Some amazing insights there.
The intermittent still images add a beautiful air of sensical (what’s the opposite of non-sensical) beauty to this wonderful video.
tangible?
Clearly Dan didn’t purchase a microphone.
That was really piss poor, like the print version.
Its titled “Irishtimes.com: Ireland’s Squeezed Middle ”
Irishtimes.com: Ireland’s Squeezed Intellectuals morelike
Intellectuals? I don’t think so.
Ireland’s Squeezed Middlebrows, maybe.
I’m always amused by the air of indifference about any general alarm raised about the middle classes, especially when you consider the vast majority of broadsheet readers are of that class. I’m sure they’d prefer to have the wealth of the upper classes and the down-to-earth charm of the working classes.
Nail. Head. On it.
The point being made in this post is this. No paper, with the possible exception of the Sunday Independent, did more to encourage people to buy recklessly during the boom on overpriced property than the Irish Times. Their insane cheerleading culminated in one of the most idiotic purchases of the tiger, namely the 40 million-plus spent on the website Myhome.ie even as the paper was making journalists redundant. In 2005 the paper’s then MD was paid 500,000 euros while the editor was being paid more than her counterpart on the Daily Telegraph, which has a circulation nine times that of the IT. The IT’s active and deliberate commercial decision to help overheat the property market is a stain on that paper that won’t go away (largely because they refuse to acknowledge their role in the hubris). To have them now decrying the ‘squeezed middle’ is as pathetic as this barely audible video.
So right. The Myhome purchase stopped the Irish Times property cheerleading from being a simple misjudgement and pushed it close to something more sinister.
Well said.
Dan O’Brien was always a huge bear on Ireland during the boom though. I don’t think you can blame him. He was working for the Economist at the time and getting lambasted by Irish politicians on Primetime etc., when he said it’d all come tumbling down.
It would be interesting to quantify how many people’s lives have been destroyed by Irish Times heating the market. An ENTIRE generation.
Criminal.
Criminal.
No other word for it.
Hello Geraldine Kennedy.
It is also a poor quality paper full stop these days. Read anything on science, technology, engineering, construction, the environment and compare it to the Guardian, the FT or the NYT and the IT is depressingly weak. Perhaps it is inevitable given its smaller base market but it is sad that there is no quality Irish newspaper…