28th February 2009, 01:40 PM
Credit is crucial and the previous building boom was fed by Chinese and Gulf cash surplus. It was a crisis that had to happen sooner or later. Gordon Brown also fuelled the housing boom by destroying confidence in pensions. My neighbours used to be teachers and lectures but are now students. They had their wallets burned and we are not going to see the credit based economy of the 1990s in our lifetimes. There is still a major structural problem in that house prices are still too high for average first time borrowers. The government is limited in what it can do in terms of infrastructure investment as it has lent so much money to the banks and we will see them crawing back money soon from the public sector. The Irish government has already put a massive pension levy on all public sector workers. If we go the IMF god help those employed in the public sector- look at Hungary. If we escape a deflationary economy we are going to see a very prolonged recovery. The building industry will recover but I doubt it will be anywhere near the 2005 level even in a decade. However, this is a good thing for the preservation of archaeology and heritage if not for individual archaeologists.