Architecture employment in 2011

@Paul Clerkin wrote:

Are you optimistic for your job prospects in 2011? Do you think that your employer / business will survive the year?
If you’re unemployed, do you think you’ll be re-employed this year?

Vast amounts of people rushing to respond to this one I see Paul.

For myself I have no clue. I am neutral on hope this year.

All my hopes listening to that unmitigated fool and foul misrepresenter Lenihan last year were dashed.

“A recovery in Q3” we were told – a paper recovery for exporters, a jobless recovery for the rest of us, people expecting planning applications to be designed and lodged for €500 – that’s all we got.

With the banks we now allegedly control and for which we paid so much for not even lending a tenth of what is being applied for, how could a society and economy that for the past fifteen years has run on credit have staged any meaningful recovery?

Hordes of professionals in the building and legal professions are now on the dole and the rest have moved back with their parents, or are borrowing money from their presumably retired relatives to pay their inflated outrageous mortgages.

Meanwhile the government seems engaged on a path of economic treason, putting up to 20% of the workforce out of work in order to deflate our economy.

But what of the great and the good – are the multiples massively lowering their prices – Dunnes are to some degree, while a major retailer is to close in Naas, losing 100 jobs – a spat over a lease, while the store was still trading profitably.

Those of us who still have jobs are having our substance wasted by tyre-kickers and time-wasters who think they are all charity cases we should be doing work for at a loss.

SO in summary I may be doing some profitable work at some point in 2011, I’m just not sure it’ll be as an architect.

You know, I lived here through the 1980’s, struggling through my college course which, for me at least, was no picnic.

The Tiger years were a massive affirmation of how good Ireland could be.
Then the outrageous money chased by some people seemed to sour it all.
Stupid tax incentives, unwise lending, no regulation – ruined the aisling geal.

I never thought I’d see times of 60,000 a year unemployment coming back again.
No wonder we still have a really low population level of under 5 million in this country.
I’m back reading the imperialist apologist Kipling again for some character-building sustenance.

http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_if.htm

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

I suspect all this is engineered, just as the credit crashes of 1907 and 1929 were engineered and with the same pretext – preparation for war on a grand scale.

Past time we took a long hard look at the bankers, international financiers and investors and those who pull their strings to manipulate world events, but who will conduct this investigation?
Our media, including our own glorious state ORGAN, RTE, is neutered, and runs coke head front men who do what they’re told, not what they should.
Or press asks questions of everything but what it should and fails to present the public with any decent level of analysis any more.
I stopped buying papers except for planning adverts over five years ago now – waste of good trees.
If its going to be done it’ll be done on bulletin boards like this one and in private e-mail.

Apologies for the rant, but you did ask the question 🙂

ONQ.

Having gotten all of that off my chest, I’d like to point out that an engineering colleague of mine told me over Christmas that he felt that after the last budget had been absorbed, there were some signs of life returning to his end of things, which in the main reflected manufacturing and civil engineering works, so there may be some hope for the construction industry in 2011 that we just don’t know about yet.

ONQ.