A man contacted Newstalk's Breakfast programme on Friday to protest at suggestions that he was to blame for the recession. He wasn't one of the people we feature on pages 11, 12 and 13 today. A PAYE worker on less than €50,000 a year, he wanted people to know that he had not overextended himself on credit and champagne during the good times. When he bought cars and holidays, he paid for them there and then. He saved what he could. Not for him the kind of credit-card bill that would make your toes curl. He was sensible and careful, he said, and was getting very tired at suggestions that he and others like him had some responsibility for the post-Celtic Tiger hangover.

I sympathise with him because the recession doesn't have anything to do with me, either. I too am getting fed up with the idea that I share in the collective responsibility for the downturn because I occasionally like to eat out, or have a CD habit that sometimes crosses over into addiction, or like to go on holidays once a year. Neither do I know anybody who behaved irresponsibly during the boom times. And neither, I'll wager, do you. For the most part, people worked hard for whatever rewards they got; they were entitled to spend those rewards whatever way they saw fit.

There were exceptions, and we've heard all about them. There were the property developers who borrowed hugely with no real intention, it seems to me, of ever paying back what they owed. And there were the bank executives who let them. Rogue solicitors like Michael Lynn and Thomas Byrne, who personified whatever greed was out there, have become household names. Newspapers have feasted on stories of ordinary folk gone mad, like the soldier, with no assets other than his soldier's salary, who managed to acquire eight houses and an unmanageable debt. Such individuals have come to personify a version of Ireland, which I don't recognise, in which people reacted to sudden riches irresponsibly, indiscriminately, and with no thought of tomorrow.

The majority of us did not behave in such a way, and we should resist all attempts to make us guilty for taking pleasure in what our extra euros brought us, for being able to do the things that our parents, in a different Ireland, at a different time, could not afford to do. We mostly deserved what we got, and we often sacrificed to get it. (As our parents did, without the rewards.)

We moved miles away from our jobs because we could not afford to live near them, and suffered the consequent four-hour commute; we incurred impossible childcare costs; we were crippled by mortgages we could only barely pay back. (We couldn't afford them, not because we were living in palaces, but because the prices of ordinary houses were pushed ever upwards by the rogue alliance of banks, developers and blind-eye politicians.)

Church leaders say they've detected a crisis of spirituality, a collapse in faith, a decline in community spirit, since the boom began, but that's less to do with having our heads turned by money than with an ill-thought-out housing policy which decimated rural Ireland and sent many of us off to live in faceless, facility-free urban and suburban jungles.

If we do have a responsibility for the current troubles, it is because we continued to vote for governments which so lightly regulated the building and banking sectors, and which operated for so long with no expectation of, or plan for, the downturn. But most of us didn't vote to place such a rabble in power. We have no responsibility for the decisions that followed. This attempt to make us feel guilty for having the temerity to enjoy ourselves (vulgar peasants that we are) is part of a wider attempt to force wages downwards in both the public and private sectors. This is a great pity because what the country needs now more than ever is a spending splurge from those who can afford to splash out.

Government policy thus far in the recession, in so far as any policy can be detected, has served to depress the economy by taking money out of the system rather than finding some way to allow it to flow around and give struggling businesses and their employees some hope to cling on to.

Those of us with jobs could carry out that function now by overcoming the fear which is stopping so many of us spending and make some purchases again. We don't have to party like it's 1999, but every little helps.