John Dolan: Tariffs war means end of good times? Er, what good times?!

As Ireland careered into an existential economic crisis in 2010, after a decade of the roaring Celtic Tiger, then Finance Minister Brian Lenihan tried to bond with the bruised electorate by shrugging and apologetically declaring: “We all partied.” Big mistake.

Yes, a lot of people did indeed splurge their way through those glory years - we all those who bought second homes on soon-to-be ghost estates, borrowed vast sums for shopping trips to New York, and even put their spare cash into blatant pyramid schemes.

But many more of us resented the insinuation that we were all culprits for the crash - most of us were just about washing our faces in those years of alleged plenty, and for anyone to suggest otherwise was deeply hurtful and misplaced.

Along with the hapless and irritating ‘We are where we are’ mantra by then Taoiseach Brown Cowen, the throwaway partying remark was a costly error for Fianna Fáil.

Now, for 2010, read 2025.

We are told Ireland is back on the verge of another economic precipice, as a tense and hard-to-fathom tariff war breaks out, led by an angry, erratic, and woefully misguided President Trump.

The good times for our economy are about to come to an end, we are being warned. To which many of us can only respond: ‘Good times? What good times?’ Is this another party for which most of us failed to get an invite?

Now, Mr Cowen’s successor as Fianna Fáil leader, Micheál Martin, is a very different animal.

You don’t get to survive as leader of that party for 14 years, and to win over a large chunk of the the electorate again and again, without having an instinct for survival, and a nose for knowing what not to say.

The canny Cork Taoiseach would never accuse anyone of partying, like Mr Lenihan, and has thus far dealt with the unfolding tariffs crisis with a calm if necessarily pessimistic tone.

Nowhere will you see Mr Martin refer to the recent years as a ‘boom’, he is fully aware of the power of language to kill a career.

Nevertheless, it is hard to escape this sense of a boom era drawing to a close when politicians and the media discuss the fall-out of tariffs, giving the impression that Ireland has spent several years living it up, and we are about to pay the price.

There is a feeling abroad that the taxpayer has become a fattened calf, and that if the government hits choppy economic waters, sure, we can all take the resulting hits to our incomes and state payments when the budgets start to tighten our belts.

Reader, I cannot agree with that scenario at all. The belts feel tight already.

Out here in the real world, many people already feel like they are struggling to get by, The cost-of-living crisis is biting deep, rents and mortgages remain sky-high and rising, the cost of electricity, gas, and fuel at the petrol pump is as eye-watering as ever.

We are already seeing the way our tourism sector is suffering on the back of this. And it’s not just visitors to this country who are feeling the pinch.

Anecdotally, I am hearing that a lot of Irish people are scaling back or even abandoning plans to take a holiday abroad themselves. And it’s not as if the prospect of a staycation amongst our own expensive hotels and restaurants is enticing them to stay put.

It’s the plummeting value of the euro in our pocket that is causing this, and the rising costs of just about everything - just this week, I got a nasty shock when I saw our family’s health insurance had increased by almost €90 a month.

If the government think they can squeeze us even more, under some false assumption that we have been living high on the hog, they have another thing coming.

The over-riding sense among large cohorts of the population outside the Dublin bubble is that Ireland has already, so far as our pockets are concerned, been effectively in recession for a few years, whatever the public coffers say.

Now think what a tough ‘corrective’ budget or two could do to that mindset.

It’s true that record tax receipts have kept our finances buoyant - particularly from large corporations based here.

The €13 billion Apple windfall didn’t do us any harm on that front either.

But surely nobody would dare suggest that we have seen the full benefits of this via either tax cuts or better infrastructure and vastly improved public services.

So, if Ireland has indeed been metaphorically partying for years, what has happened to all that extra cash?

The answer is that Ireland Inc has gone on a recruitment drive - the number of people employed in the public service rose by 25% from 2013 to 2022.

Since 2022, that acceleration has grown apace. The amount employed soared from 368,000 to 405,000 last year, and is forecast to rise to 426,5000 this year. That’s a lot of extra salaries and a lot of extra pensions down the line.

The money given to the HSE alone has soared from €14.5 billion in 2018 to €26.9 billion in 2025. The HSE workforce is now its largest ever, having risen by more than a fifth since the end of 2019.

If there are fattened calves to tackle in the event of a downturn, these might be better places to start than by taking from the pockets of already beleaguered homeowners and families.

Yet many media pundits in recent weeks have given the impression that our public services are a red line and should not be impacted by an economic downturn.

Cork radio presenter Matt Cooper recently advocated in his newspaper column that the property tax could be increased to help out our public finances. This was introduced during the 2010 recession and Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe had already confirmed that most homeowners will see it rise by between €5 and €25 next year. The thought of increases multiple times that is unpalatable.

The theory goes that property owners are well able to pay more - but I don’t think that argument would go down well in my house, or in thousands of other hard-pressed households nationwide.

There have also been fresh calls in the media for a water tax to be brought in, given the current state of the public system. Although this issue has become a political minefield, I wouldn’t be averse to such a charge per se - but read the room, guys. People are hard-up enough as it is, without introducing a whole new charge out of thin air.

For some, the party may well be coming to an end. For most of us, the party never started.