REPORTER: David Brill
This is Irish Grand National day. It's one of the highlights of the racing calendar but this year the mood at the track is far from festive.
MAN: Live in hope and die in despair.
MAN 2: I’ve got enough for today but I don’t know how tomorrow will work out.
While money is still changing hands, there are signs everywhere that the economic crisis is biting.
WOMAN: It's quiet, everything is quiet.
REPORTER: Very quiet? How much has it dropped do you think?
WOMAN: I suppose its down 40% compared to last year.
It seems it's not the odds on punters minds, but another set of figures - property prices.
TIM CROWE, DAIRY FARMER: Homes have gone down an awful lot in prices.
REPORTER: Do you know what percentage they have gone down?
TIM CROWE: Well you're talking about £250,000... a £400,000 house you buy for £250,000 at least.
Tim Crowe is a dairy farmer from Tipperary. He's worried about how long he and his countrymen will be in work.
REPORTER: Is unemployment very high?
TIM CROWE: I'd say it's going to rise a lot more. It's raising every week, every week.
REPORTER: Do you know what it is?
TIM CROWE: They're talking about 400,000 people shortly.
REPORTER: 400,000 people, out of what, 5 million?
TIM CROWE: Out of 4.5 million. That's a lot of people and its rising.
Neil O'Hearcain is one of those newly unemployed.
NEIL O’HEARCAIN, ELECTRONICS ENGINEER: These are our resident computer experts.
REPORTER: Are they trained by Father, are they?
NEIL O’HEARCAIN: No, no these are self-trained. Absolutely.
REPORTER: You haven't designed any chips for them?
NEIL O’HEARCAIN: No, they'll be teaching Daddy how to design chips in a couple of years.
As an electronics engineer, he was at the forefront of Ireland's changing face, during the Celtic Tiger's boom years. In fact, things were going so well he started his own firm. He had 10 employees designing computer chips for foreign companies.
NEIL O’HEARCAIN: Things looked very good. We had quite a good amount of business. We had some quite good contracts, we had good visibility.
But back in August last year, when the crisis began, his clients suddenly started cancelling meetings and business trips.
NEIL O’HEARCAIN: And that was a terrible feeling. and then when you have an unexpectedly scheduled call with the management of the company, then you say "Oh, my goodness, what is this?" And unfortunately our worst fears came true, and that was a terrible, terrible time. So to be letting people go, and in particular people who were friends, was very, very difficult.
REPORTER: What's happened to those people now?
NEIL O’HEARCAIN: So, those people have on the whole, over the last six months, people have had very little work.
CARMEL O’HEARCAIN: That was very, very tough. He found it very, very hard to let people go.
REPORTER: How did you cope with that?
CARMEL O’HEARCAIN: To be honest, at the end it was me who was nearly pushing him to say "Well, you have to let them go" because he hadn't paid himself for over a year, and I was only working part-time, with four kids. So in the end, we didn't really have a choice.
The O Hearcain's are now struggling to make ends meet. Having bought a house near the top of the property boom, they have a large mortgage. They even considered migrating, before Carmel managed to find more work in marketing
CARMEL O’HEARCAIN: I'm working full time at the moment but if anything ever happens to my job I've already a plan of doing after-school care for children and camps during the summer or cookery courses or something with kids. People always need somebody good to mind their kids so I'd be happy to do that.
REPORTER: Did you see this coming?
NEIL O’HEARCAIN: No, you know, I don't think anybody really saw it coming.
PAT MCARDLE, ULSTER BANK CHIEF ECONOMIST: This is a new situation for Irish people. We have had a couple of generations who've only experienced good times. Going through a recession and an economic cycle is not something they've been exposed to before, so they're having to get used to that.
Pat McArdle is chief economist for one of Ireland's big-four banks. He believes many more people will soon be unemployed.
PAT MCARDLE: Indeed we forecast that it will continue growing up to at least 15%.
REPORTER: Of unemployment?
PAT MCARDLE: Yes.
Job losses are happening all over the country. In January, the city of Limerick was shocked to hear that its largest business was sacking nearly 2,000 workers.
MAN: There are an awful lot of families inside that are going to be devastated for the next 12 months - devastated.
REPORTER: How bad is this for Limerick City then?
MAN: It's unreal, it's just unreal.
As Ireland boomed, its workers had become too expensive and Dell was moving its operations to Poland.
JOHN GILLIGAN, MAYOR OF LIMERICK: I feel very, very bitter about the way that Dell has treated the people in this region.
From his office, the mayor of Limerick, John Gilligan, has watched the knock-on effects of Dell's decision unfold. He estimates up to 10,000 jobs will ultimately be lost - in a city of just 100,000.
JOHN GILLIGAN: In my own family, I have one daughter who was redundant about three months ago, maybe a little bit longer. I have another daughter who went redundant last month and her husband who worked in Dell also was made redundant - all within a month. This is the biggest thing that ever happened to us. This is a catastrophe on the scale not seen before. This is equivalent to a nuclear attack on the Midwest region.
Among the employees getting the bad news in January was Eamon Ryan.
EAMON RYAN, DELL EMPLOYEE: This is a very, very poor severance settlement offer.
I caught up with Eamon, in his local pub, to see how he was coping three months on. He's still working for Dell but his days are numbered.
EAMON RYAN: Maybe at current rates of progress I might end up working in my 80s pushing trolleys around the supermarket car park. It's happening in other parts of the world and I can't see why it's not going to happen in Ireland.
Like many people in Ireland, Eamon is angry with the government for allowing the economic bubble to grow so large.
EAMON RYAN: The gross mismanagement of our economy by a totally incompetent government added to the global downturn which is making us, having us ending in a much worse position than a lot of other countries. And now we're going to be unemployed on top of that.
BRIAN LUCEY, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF FINANCE: There's a widespread perception that the government don't want to go hard on the banks because the banks were heavily indebted to the property developers. Property developers were the major supporters of the major party of government. So, there's a perception of a cosy cartel of crony capitalism.
Brian Lucey teaches finance at Dublin's Trinity College. He believes there's plenty of blame to go around.
BRIAN LUCEY: So for the last five years, up until last year, we borrowed lots of money from international markets and we thought we could get rich by basically selling houses to ourselves. That stopped once the international credit crunch happened and once the property boom here, the property bubble in fact burst. So who's to blame? We're all to blame.
The construction industry has now come to a standstill. Credit is scarce and Ireland's trading partners are in recession.
PAT MCARDLE: It's that triple whammy that has led the Irish economy to experience a contraction in growth this year which will probably be the highest in the developed world, of the order of 8% - possibly even slightly higher.
Compounding Ireland's woes are the government's own budget problems. Unlike in Australia, there are no stimulus packages on offer.
PAT MCARDLE: Even the government of Ireland, instead of stoking the economy, as it's doing in the United Kingdom and the United States, because we have a rather large deficit they've had to introduce emergency measures to cut back and to raise taxes.
As a result, dole queues are now lengthening all over Ireland. And as the crisis deepens, charities are hearing from more and more desperate people.
PAUL KELLY, CONSOLE HELPLINE: We have people phoning up who are on the brink of ending their lives because they see no hope because their house is going to be repossessed, their car has been repossessed, they're losing their jobs, they've got serious financial worries and there is tremendous marital strain and a great sense of failure. We've had some very prominent businessmen here in Ireland have died in recent months...
REPORTER: What, to suicide?
PAUL KELLY: Yes, through suicide.
REPORTER: Because of the recession?
PAUL KELLY: Because of the economic climate and especially those in the construction industry and where their businesses have collapsed.
REPORTER: I suppose at the end of the day that's what it's about?
NEIL O’HEARCAIN: That's what it's all about, absolutely. Four healthy kids growing, changing almost by the day.
Despite the hardships, Neil O'Hearcain is trying his best to be positive. All the forecasts are for a few grim years ahead. But he's holding onto the hope that one day soon, the good times will be back.
NEIL O’HEARCAIN: I'm confident that, you know, as the world begins to recover that businesses here will also play a role in that and from a personal perspective, I'd be able to get back doing what I do best.
Reporter/Camera
DAVID BRILL
Researcher
VICTORIA STROBL
Fixers
FIONA MACARTHY
EMMA McNAMARA
Editor
DAVID POTTS
Producer
AARON THOMAS
Translations / Subtitling
OLGA VAN BAREN
Original Music composed by
VICKI HANSEN