Brenda Power: A bargain you can’t afford isn’t being thrifty (2024)

When staff arrived to prepare the Next fashion store for its 6am opening on St Stephen’s Day, they met some irritation from the dozens of shoppers already gathered outside. The crowds had begun queuing at 3am and as the store assistants walked past them to open the shop, they “got a bit antsy”, according to one employee, “because they thought we were jumping the queue”.

And there you have a perfect vignette of the season of peace and goodwill to all in Ireland on the cusp of the third decade of the 21st century: we celebrate the birth of an impoverished infant in a cattle shed with an orgy of gratuitous acquisitiveness, and woe betide any fellow man who stands between us and a half-price chain-store sweater.

You can just about excuse the pre-Christmas spending spree, which this year returned to Celtic tiger levels, on the basis that most people are shopping for others. The sales, though, are pure me-me-me time; the spirit of the selfie made incarnate and unashamedly indulged. Be honest, how often do you hear of folk getting up at 2.30am after a serious session to queue to buy a gift for somebody else?

Nobody shops the sales for goods they actually need. You may have convinced yourself you need a new cooker or television, but you are almost certainly upgrading to a fancier, shinier version while the old one heads to the electrical recycling graveyard in adequate working order. I doubt any of those Next shoppers truly needed the coats or sweaters for which they were prepared to do furious battle with the unfortunate store assistants.

And since the whole point of owning a €1,000 Balenciaga garment is to impress your friends with your affluence and taste, why would you boast to the newspapers that you’d just bought it for a knockdown price after spending most of Christmas night queuing in the freezing cold? And let’s not even get into the irony of sale shoppers jostling for pavement space alongside the usual complement of rough sleepers.

When thousands are prepared to get out of bed, in the depths of a midwinter holiday, clamouring to buy more stuff just because it’s there, we are the snake-oil salespeople’s dream market. In the face of all this mindless profligacy, then, our politicians’ cavalier attitude to taxpayers’ money is a great deal easier to understand.

Back in 2002, just as the boom was getting boomier, Bertie Ahern told us we were the “laughing stock” of Europe with our “stupid auld pencils” and paper ballots at election time. And in a way, that attitude — that we would show them what sophisticated consumers we could be — informed our runaway spending in those prosperous years.

I reckon we have a deep-seated dread of being perceived as poor, possibly dating back to Famine times. My late granny, whose parents lived through the Great Hunger, considered it a compliment to be told you looked fat, since it implied you had enough to eat. So what our more confident continental neighbours count as prudence — such as not buying drinks for everyone in a round system — we fear may be construed as evidence of want.

However, careless waste and pointless expenditure — whether on e-voting machines, useless politicians or cheap designer clobber — is not proof of financial confidence; it’s the opposite.

Why don’t we insist that our politicians vouch for every cent in expenses they claim? Why was Dara Murphy able to have two jobs, and seemingly do a minimum of work for the TD’s salary and expenses we were paying him? Why was almost €2m of our money blown on a printer that nobody bothered to measure first? Why did politicians including Simon Coveney, Regina Doherty, Barry Cowen and Mary Lou McDonald order thousands of euros’ worth of print jobs, at our expense, some of which they never even bothered to collect? Why have our public representatives turned a blind eye while insurers fleeced us for years?

Alas, since we’ve such contempt for our own hard-earned cash that we’ll get out of bed to throw it around on St Stephen’s morning, and pick fights with anyone who stands in our way, we can hardly expect our public representatives to treat it with any more respect.

Don’t centre the city around addicts
On Christmas Eve, a good day to bury bad news, An Bord Pleanala issued a ruling granting planning permission for a drugs injecting centre in the heart of Dublin city. Medical supervision of addicts in a safe space is an admirable idea, but locating it in the middle of the city’s tourist district — which is full of pubs, hotels and historic sites — is unwise. There was much aggressive begging, and worse, in Dublin’s shopping areas around Christmas time. I saw one old lady, dazed and bloodied, being helped up off the pavement after her bag was snatched in broad daylight. People should be free to move around Dublin without fear of being attacked or harangued. Addiction is a scourge, for sure, but not just for the addicts. Those people who want to go peaceably and legally about their business ought to have rights too.

A film to remember when Fifty Shades has gone grey
Instead of racing around the sales on St Stephen’s Day, I stayed at home with the turkey sandwiches and watched An Affair to Remember on TG4. It has aged well, unlike its star Cary Grant. Though looking much older, he was just 53 when the film was made in 1957. It’s an age at which modern stars, such as Tom Cruise, are portraying boyish action heroes and not middle-aged playboys. Still it proved the perfect Christmas fare: a movie you watched as a child that you can now enjoy with your own children. Somehow, I doubt today’s youngsters will have quite the same nostalgic glow about one of RTE’s prime-time festive offerings: Fifty Shades of Grey.

brenda.power@sunday-times.ie