8th December 2010, 01:06 PM
(This post was last modified: 8th December 2010, 01:13 PM by Stuart Rathbone.)
I haven't heard that the conditions in Ireland have changed much because of the recent budget and the EU bailout. Things have been dire here for 3 years now, so they still are. State sector employees are quite rare in Ireland, and are generally in well paid and long term stable positions. They will have been hit previously by additional 'taxes' to cover their pensions and so on, but generally they are in the best positions. There were some cuts to newly appointed staff a few years back and there has been effectively a complete block on hiring new staff for state jobs in all sectors for some time now.
The contract sector is effectively dead. There are a few excavations going on and some people working on post ex, preparing publications and so on, but the majority of contract staff have been out of work for ages and are mostly it seems back at college doing courses in other things (strangely the state will not pay for post grad courses, so they are doing second, and even third bachelors degrees, or lower level courses). With construction effectively halting between 2008 and 2009 this sector just ended and it doesn't look like it will come back any time soon, and even if it does the skills base, which was huge over here, will have moved on and quite likely won't come back.
Finally the University sector is probably going to be hit quite badly. Established people should be fine, but post grads and post docs are going to find it very tough. Additionally the big funding source at present is the Heritage councils INSTAR fund. This is a really wonderful program but as it is now effectively the main source of funding it is massively oversubscribed and getting incredibly competitive.
In terms of monuments falling to pieces that shouldn't be any more of an issue than it was prior to the meltdown. Sites fall into two categories here, those in state care which are conserved and those not. The former are all well consolidated and in no danger and the rest are slowly falling apart as they always have been, principal threats being the slow destructive ingress of vegetation into stone ruins. That threat has it seems long been accepted as just what's going to happen to a lot of sites.
The state of Irish Archaeology was well summed up by the recent Irish Archaeological Institutes conference in Belfast. It only had approximately 40 attendees and the big question on everyone's lips was "what are you doing now?" The answer sadly, and even for some very well known and experienced people was, "a little bit here, a little bit there, but not much of anything really". Didn't stop us getting pleasantly plastered on the Saturday night though!
The contract sector is effectively dead. There are a few excavations going on and some people working on post ex, preparing publications and so on, but the majority of contract staff have been out of work for ages and are mostly it seems back at college doing courses in other things (strangely the state will not pay for post grad courses, so they are doing second, and even third bachelors degrees, or lower level courses). With construction effectively halting between 2008 and 2009 this sector just ended and it doesn't look like it will come back any time soon, and even if it does the skills base, which was huge over here, will have moved on and quite likely won't come back.
Finally the University sector is probably going to be hit quite badly. Established people should be fine, but post grads and post docs are going to find it very tough. Additionally the big funding source at present is the Heritage councils INSTAR fund. This is a really wonderful program but as it is now effectively the main source of funding it is massively oversubscribed and getting incredibly competitive.
In terms of monuments falling to pieces that shouldn't be any more of an issue than it was prior to the meltdown. Sites fall into two categories here, those in state care which are conserved and those not. The former are all well consolidated and in no danger and the rest are slowly falling apart as they always have been, principal threats being the slow destructive ingress of vegetation into stone ruins. That threat has it seems long been accepted as just what's going to happen to a lot of sites.
The state of Irish Archaeology was well summed up by the recent Irish Archaeological Institutes conference in Belfast. It only had approximately 40 attendees and the big question on everyone's lips was "what are you doing now?" The answer sadly, and even for some very well known and experienced people was, "a little bit here, a little bit there, but not much of anything really". Didn't stop us getting pleasantly plastered on the Saturday night though!