I has a question to pose to yous

cloud493

Hello, I have a question I'd like to ask you all, bit broad but, what was it like here(in Ireland) during this 'celtic tiger' thing everyone keeps banging on about? I only came here at the end of 2010, September from Liverpool, so I obviously wouldn't have seen, but every man and his(or her) dog never stops telling me how good it was during that time, and I have to ask, was it that good like?

im invisible

Ah, it was grand, shure

Vicxas

There was gold in the water and we walked around on shoes imported from the orient....





But in all fairness, if you were in the building trade you were actually richer then kings. The rest of us still pottered along.

danniemcq

Living in Donegal we never really seen the tiger, we get the resession though.

Shiner11

cloud493 wrote: »

Hello, I have a question I'd like to ask you all, bit broad but, what was it like here(in Ireland) during this 'celtic tiger' thing everyone keeps banging on about? I only came here at the end of 2010, September from Liverpool, so I obviously wouldn't have seen, but every man and his(or her) dog never stops telling me how good it was during that time, and I have to ask, was it that good like?

You just missed out. Some say it peaked on the 21st. They even wrote a song about it. "Do you remember, the 21st night of September....."

Abi

Vicxas wrote: »

But in all fairness, if you were in the building trade you were actually richer then kings. The rest of us still pottered along.

This really ^




Are you from Liverpool, or Irish returning from Liverpool? Do people from Liverpool normally say 'yous' for plural? I thought it was a mistake some Irish make.

abouttobebanned

As mentioned...people in the building trade walked around in their cement and mud covered clothes and boots and when they were paying for their breakfast rolls they took out wads of 50s. They had so much money and they loved tellin everyone about it.

It wasn't only the builders though. Nightclubs, believe it or not, we're taking up to 15k tax free on the door before customers even got to the bar. I worked for one of these companies (had nightclubs, restaurants and bars) and I can remember seeing an invoice one day...this is the absolute truth....they paid €195 for...wait for it...defragmenting a computer.

Loads an loads of money was paid to local businesses that the owner knew...not because the service was good or affordable, just because he was friends with them. They were of course ripping him off but he had too much money to notice. It was only when the night life industry dwindled that he was forced to look more closely at his outgoings. It was too late though...people were laid off...and he went into administration.

The knock on effect was that the businesses he was dealIng with, his cronies, suddenly lost all their big clients. The spiral had begun.

foxyboxer

The celtic tiger was actually in the early 90's during which the economy experienced decade of genuine growth.

From 2002 and the circulation of the euro, borrowing costs were historically low. A lot of Irish people borrowed like it was going out of fashion. For the decade of the 00's we experienced a credit fuelled 'boom'.

With wages increasing and house prices rising, this contributed to the feel good factor of being 'wealthy', when in fact it was a case of being in debt, the old chestnut of keeping up with the jonses is unique to the irish psychology.
i.e. that fecker down the road is buying an apartment in bulgaria off the plans! I should get one in Estonia!

The idea that house prices and wages would increase forever whilst crazy in hindsight almost became a mantra for both the public and the government who encouraged the feel good factor with the necessary policies.

The whole house of cards came down in 2007 when inter-bank lending became tight to almost non-existant and the crazy policies came to bear with the culmination being a humiliating IMF ECB bailout 12 months ago.

Vicxas

abouttobebanned wrote: »

It wasn't only the builders though. Nightclubs, believe it or not, we're taking up to 15k tax free on the door before customers even got to the bar. .

^^

True, a well known nightclub in co. Meath could make up to 60 - 100k on a saturday night during the boom

danniemcq

abouttobebanned wrote: »

As mentioned...people in the building trade walked around in their cement and mud covered clothes and boots and when they were paying for their breakfast rolls they took out wads of 50s. They had so much money and they loved tellin everyone about it.

It wasn't only the builders though. Nightclubs, believe it or not, we're taking up to 15k tax free on the door before customers even got to the bar. I worked for one of these companies (had nightclubs, restaurants and bars) and I can remember seeing an invoice one day...this is the absolute truth....they paid €195 for...wait for it...defragmenting a computer.

Loads an loads of money was paid to local businesses that the owner knew...not because the service was good or affordable, just because he was friends with them. They were of course ripping him off but he had too much money to notice. It was only when the night life industry dwindled that he was forced to look more closely at his outgoings. It was too late though...people were laid off...and he went into administration.

The knock on effect was that the businesses he was dealIng with, his cronies, suddenly lost all their big clients. The spiral had begun.

Thats one of the best example of how screwed our country had gotten.

The really depressing thing is if you watch reeling in the noughties on RTE you can see the boom and all the warning signs that were there and how those that warned of it were ridiculed by (mainly) the FF government. And then you see all the big lads and lasses retiring and stepping down as its the right time etc. 6 months to a year later it was all tits up.

Posy

I never got any of the benefits of the Celtic Tiger at all. I was actually struggling more during it than now, when at least some rents and products etc cost less.
I must have been in the bathroom when they tried to deliver my merc and foreign holidays, damn.

Minstrel27

cloud493 wrote: »

but every man and his(or her) dog never stops telling me how good it was during that time, and I have to ask, was it that good like?

Not for everyone. Some people went mental and they are paying for it now.

mojesius

Posy wrote: »

I never got any of the benefits of the Celtic Tiger at all. I was actually struggling more during it than now, when at least some rents and products etc cost less.
I must have been in the bathroom when they tried to deliver my merc and foreign holidays, damn.

'Celtic Tiger, strange kind of cat
Why I am skinny? and everybody's fat'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtWmMwATEGA

Doc Ruby

foxyboxer wrote: »

the old chestnut of keeping up with the jonses is unique to the irish psychology.

Its really not.

Well it pretty much went like this.

If you had money, you spent it on a flatscreen TV, a car, but certainly NOT on doing up your house or third level education.

If you had no money, you were given some money, then you spent it on a flatscreen TV, a car, but certainly NOT on doing up your house or on third level education.

OldGoat

Minstrel27 wrote: »

Not for everyone. Some people went mental and they We are paying for it now.

FYP

strobe

foxyboxer wrote: »

the old chestnut of keeping up with the jonses is unique to the irish psychology.

Strange comment to make about a saying that originated in the USA and is much more commonly in use in the US and UK than in Ireland, no?

foxyboxer

strobe wrote: »

Strange comment to make about a saying that originated in the USA and is much more commonly in use in the US and UK than in Ireland, no?

Keeping up with the O'Reillys then? It's just an idiom like :-(

starbelgrade

During the boom, I built a house made entirely from cocaine & had massive parties all week long with friends & hookers.

It wasn't until the recession hit, and most of the house had been snorted, that I learned the true value of money..... I woke up one day & found myself sitting on the base of one of the foundation walls... I looked around me to see some of my friends asleep on the ground, covered in white powder & everyone looking like death.

As I took a drag from the first Havana cigar of the day, I realised that I'd blown all my money & wasted several years of my life in a pointless hedonistic pursuit.

The hooker beside me asked me what was wrong... "I'm broke, I said. All my money is gone."

"That's really tough" she said, "but what do you expect - you spent all your money on consumables and unlike me, you can't just wash your crack & sell it again".

cloud493

I'm from Liverpool for the person who asked, this is my first time in Ireland.
So there was no visible effect of the Celtic tiger?
Cos in Liverpool there was like, a effect. I mean there were a fair few jobs around, I got my first job in 2008 at tesco.

strobe

foxyboxer wrote: »

Keeping up with the O'Reillys then? It's just an idiom like :-(

Well of course it's just an idiom but my point was that the fact the idiom with it's meaning didn't even originate in Ireland kind of puts a bullet in the whole 'it's a uniquely Irish thing' thing. It's a human thing, not an Irish thing... Hell, it's not even a uniquely human thing, come to think of it.

Kasabian

cloud493 wrote: »

I'm from Liverpool for the person who asked, this is my first time in Ireland.
So there was no visible effect of the Celtic tiger?
Cos in Liverpool there was like, a effect. I mean there were a fair few jobs around, I got my first job in 2008 at tesco.

More importantly do you support Everton, Tranmere or Liverpool?

bnt

Well, I was here, and I worked ... that was it. Saved a bit of money, but never enough to consider entering the property market, even had I wanted to, which I didn't. All I knew about the property market was the basic mortgage/salary ratio I'd read years before: a mortgage should be no more than 3-4x your salary. It was already at 6-7x by the early 2000s, and got worse, and I remember wondering just who was mad: me, or all those people spending far too much for a bit of property?

Now we know, don't we? By 2007 I could afford to stop work and start university, since I never went straight from school. I thought some financial sanity would be restored to Ireland by 2012 ... oops, eh?

cloud493

Tranmere Rovers FC

MissMoppet

Everyman was drinking smoothies...Never see anyone drinking them now.. :rolleyes:

Witchie

I have never experienced the Celtic Tiger. I never could afford the expensive car, holidays, flat screen tvs etc.

The only slight nod to this was the move up the property ladder from a 3 bed semi to a 5 bed detached that I now regret coz cant pay for it!

GingerFire

Ah we were all insane...
I had a business and ladies were throwing their money at me.. of course i didn't care and took it gladly (hair and beauty) (oh and have nothing to show for it mind)

now though its a different story the "essentials" that the ladies used to have done are now luxuries again...

all we can do is hold on.. like a roller coaster and grit our teeth...

pajunior

MissMoppet wrote: »

Everyman was drinking smoothies...Never see anyone drinking them now.. :rolleyes:

Twas a golden age alright.

im invisible

starbelgrade wrote: »

During the boom, I built a house made entirely from cocaine & had massive parties all week long...

yeah man, im so broke now, i've had to resort to using rolled up fivers to snort my coke through, its just not the same...

Sky King

what was it like here(in Ireland) during this 'celtic tiger' thing everyone keeps banging on about?

There was just a different buzz about the place. I wouldn't say people were happy, but they certainly didn;t moan about money. No one seemed to care. You wouldn't think twice about paying a fiver for a piece of rubbery shit cheese sandwich from O'Brien's Irish Sandwich Bar..... Almost every waiter, deli attendant and shop assistant was foreign and lots of them had just arrived so their english was ****e.

Guys would head out thursday, friday, saturday, sunday nights and wax 150 / 200 bucks on a night out no problem. Coke was all over the place. People drank Vodka Red Bull by the bucketload paying 8/9 quid for a glass of it.

You could never get a taxi afterwards either - had to wait hours for them.

Deli counters sprung up out of nowhere (there were very few shops doing freshly made sandwiches before 1995ish - every shop has them now) and every shop had a deli with a row of guys in hi viz vests standing at the food counter. The 'breakfast roll' became a staple foodstuff.

Before the mid 90's most shops (esp. down the country) closed on Sundays and bank holidays and at lunchtime and 6 in the evening. During the tiger they couldn't take our money fast enough during normal business hours though, and they started opening every day, every evening, and in some cases 24 hours. This is a legacy which remains today, to a certain point.

Every cityscape was dotted with cranes and it was normal to have mates in the building industry that were far FAR better off than you were. Mine were quite smug about it too - sneering me for povving my way through college while my carpender buddy was getting 1500 a week and my blocky buddy a punt per block laid.

Lots of semi-D middle class people started driving 3 series beemers and c class mercs, and building decks in their tiny back gardens and barbequing on them. A daily commute from Portlaoise or Carlow to Dublin became a normal thing whereas previously it would have been unheard of. Traffic was chaotic, particularly around dublin, where the crappy infrastructrue groaned to keep up with the huge deluge of extra traffic. They re-did the m50 to cope and as soon as they were finished, they went back to the start and re-did it again. People went on foreign holidays a couple of times a year and regular workaday folk starting drinking wine and eating stuff like hummus, pesto and pasta dishes as opposed to the cabbage bacon milk and spuds they were reared on.

Politicians and high flying gangsters still ripped us all off but back then nobody seemed to care. Tribunals cost the state hundreds of millions and we all shrugged our shoulders and went back to watching Who wants to be a Millionaire and Big Brother.

Middle class people and those lucky enough to have bought land and property on the cheap became de facto millionaires. Idiots with no qualifications became 'property developers' peddling land, building and property back and forth and making astronomical profits becuase prices were increasing so fast. They bough race horses and helicopters and mansions. They invested poorly.

Banks were eager to cash in on this but they had no capital on deposit to outlay so they borrowed heavily to fund it.

This is the money you and me are now paying back.

People in hospitals still lay wasting away on trolleys in hospital corridors throughout the whole celtic tiger thing, mind you.

I guess some things never change.

psychward

Vicxas wrote: »

There was gold in the water and we walked around on shoes imported from the orient....

ah you were one of the commoners who had to walk...


My favorite mode of transport during the boom below :

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cb/Sedan-chair.jpg/250px-Sedan-chair.jpg

Latchy

Abi wrote: »

Are you from Liverpool, or Irish returning from Liverpool? Do people from Liverpool normally say 'yous' for plural? I thought it was a mistake some Irish make.

This give some explanation on the use of the word Abi .

foxyboxer

Sky King wrote: »

There was just a different buzz about the place. I wouldn't say people were happy, but they certainly didn;t moan about money. No one seemed to care. You wouldn't think twice about paying a fiver for a piece of rubbery shit cheese sandwich from O'Brien's Irish Sandwich Bar..... Almost every waiter, deli attendant and shop assistant was foreign and lots of them had just arrived so their english was ****e.

Guys would head out thursday, friday, saturday, sunday nights and wax 150 / 200 bucks on a night out no problem. Coke was all over the place. People drank Vodka Red Bull by the bucketload paying 8/9 quid for a glass of it.

You could never get a taxi afterwards either - had to wait hours for them.

Deli counters sprung up out of nowhere (there were very few shops doing freshly made sandwiches before 1995ish - every shop has them now) and every shop had a deli with a row of guys in hi viz vests standing at the food counter. The 'breakfast roll' became a staple foodstuff.

Before the mid 90's most shops (esp. down the country) closed on Sundays and bank holidays and at lunchtime and 6 in the evening. During the tiger they couldn't take our money fast enough during normal business hours though, and they started opening every day, every evening, and in some cases 24 hours. This is a legacy which remains today, to a certain point.

Every cityscape was dotted with cranes and it was normal to have mates in the building industry that were far FAR better off than you were. Mine were quite smug about it too - sneering me for povving my way through college while my carpender buddy was getting 1500 a week and my blocky buddy a punt per block laid.

Lots of semi-D middle class people started driving 3 series beemers and c class mercs, and building decks in their tiny back gardens and barbequing on them. A daily commute from Portlaoise or Carlow to Dublin became a normal thing whereas previously it would have been unheard of. Traffic was chaotic, particularly around dublin, where the crappy infrastructrue groaned to keep up with the huge deluge of extra traffic. They re-did the m50 to cope and as soon as they were finished, they went back to the start and re-did it again. People went on foreign holidays a couple of times a year and regular workaday folk starting drinking wine and eating stuff like hummus, pesto and pasta dishes as opposed to the cabbage bacon milk and spuds they were reared on.

Politicians and high flying gangsters still ripped us all off but back then nobody seemed to care. Tribunals cost the state hundreds of millions and we all shrugged our shoulders and went back to watching Who wants to be a Millionaire and Big Brother.

Middle class people and those lucky enough to have bought land and property on the cheap became de facto millionaires. Idiots with no qualifications became 'property developers' peddling land, building and property back and forth and making astronomical profits becuase prices were increasing so fast. They bough race horses and helicopters and mansions. They invested poorly.

Banks were eager to cash in on this but they had no capital on deposit to outlay so they borrowed heavily to fund it.

This is the money you and me are now paying back.

People in hospitals still lay wasting away on trolleys in hospital corridors throughout the whole celtic tiger thing, mind you.

I guess some things never change.

Nail on the head. Excellent post.

Wattle

The main gripe of the day was traffic due to the roads being clogged with massive SUV's. People not on the happy wagon were advised by our Taoiseach to 'commit suicide'. Everybody became an estate agent. At one stage my house was worth three quarters of a million. It's a three bed semi. And there was lots of Foccacia bread. Crazy times indeed.

Chuck Stone

People were ostracized by their peers for bringing sandwiches to work.

You had to buy a sandwich for about €13 which was 'hand cut' (that was the boast on the radio ad - no robots doing it like, real hands of African children).

The beggars would only take notes too or a credit card as they carried those little machines around with them.

Snakeblood

im invisible wrote: »

yeah man, im so broke now, i've had to resort to using rolled up fivers to snort my coke through, its just not the same...

It's harder if you're stuck with the 2 euro coins.

I went into a bank and asked for a student loan of 8K and the loan person said and I quote:

"Ah sure do you want to make it 12 and have a good time?"

Delighted I just took the 8 as I was working.


A few years later and I looked for an overdraft of 400 euro and they basically told me to feck off for myself.

Vicxas

Edz87 wrote: »

I went into a bank and asked for a student loan of 8K and the loan person said and I quote:

"Ah sure do you want to make it 12 and have a good time?"

Delighted I just took the 8 as I was working.


A few years later and I looked for an overdraft of 400 euro and they basically told me to feck off for myself.

This sums up our banking situation.

I asked for a 12k loan for a car and insurance when i was 19. They turned around and asked if i wanted to round it up to 15.

Nowadays i want to change my repayements dates and they nearly shout me out of the building

Latchy

I had only moved over to England two years before the celtic tiger thing exploded and I remained there all throughout it .I gained nothing from it during... or after it's fallout so it's had no direct affect on my life but like most Irish people , I have seen how it has affected some family and friends .

castletownman

It was a time when we had money and it was grrrrr-eat

bnt

With banks, it's very simple when you boil it down to the essential fact: they lend money to make money. They are not a charity, and have no social obligation to lend. If they're not going to make money doing it, they don't do it.

(The higher the apparent risk you won't pay back, the higher the interest rate. I say apparent because the risk was there during the boom, but they couldn't see it clearly, could they?)

daveyboy_1ie

Vicxas wrote: »

^^

True, a well known nightclub in co. Meath could make up to 60 - 100k on a saturday night during the boom

That can't be right, at least not EVERY Saturday night?

cloud493

So you could tell the difference, thats interesting. Thanks guys

saywhatyousee

cloud493 wrote: »

So you could tell the difference, thats interesting. Thanks guys

Not really things are much the same today as they were during the celtic tiger i notice no difference at all.

wonderfulname

daveyboy_1ie wrote: »

That can't be right, at least not EVERY Saturday night?

Think about what twats used to spend on drink, that could be covered by a few hundred punters.

WoollyRedHat

We drank champagne for breakfast and dined on our fine yachts on the weekend and the craic was mighty.

maxfresh

Banks and credit card companies threw money at people , all people where talking about was shopping trips to new york and investment property's.

Personally i din't gain much from the boom times, had a good job (electrician) but didnt earn massive money, now its a different story :mad:

cloneslad

maxfresh wrote: »

Personally i din't gain much from the boom times, had a good job (electrician) but didnt earn massive money, now its a different story :mad:

Now you have a shít job and earn massive money?

maxfresh

cloneslad wrote: »

Now you have a shít job and earn massive money?

NO no job and no money

filthymcnasty

There was a shortage of geese after foie gras for breakfast became the norm.

saa

You could walk out of one job and into another. Low wage but at least the work was there.
If that didn't suit you, you could stroll into an almost empty social welfare office and claim with a christmas benefit.