The 70's and 80's in Ireland

Ipso

Yester wrote: »

Black shoes. White socks. Oh yeah!

With a track suit!

BBFAN

Yester wrote: »

Black shoes. White socks. Oh yeah!

And the socks had to be sparkling white!!!

hot buttered scones

We had toilets. No wheelie bins - no bin charges either. No internets - we played games. Ball games, board games, running and chasing games, card games. We communicated by talking to each other and calling into each others houses. You could make plans to meet someone a week or two before and they would more than likely turn up. Music was great and so were the clothes. Then again, I was a kid. I'd say it was fairly sh1t for me mam and dad. Mortgage interest rates were ridiculous and income tax was through the roof. We were luckier than a lot though - had a house, dad had a stable job (although he had to work loads of overtime). We still didn't have much though. There was a strong focus on education in our house, which I'm very grateful for. You could have a night out on a tenner, which was good.

Mongfinder General

The pubs were always full. Massive unemployment but also a massive black economy like today. There was huge tax evasion and the average worker was taking a massive paye hit. Gaelic football was great. Kerry, Offaly and a Dublin team that came out of nowhere in the mid 80’s.
Clueless gombeen politicians. Hunger Strikers. The Maze escape. Inflation. Rte 1 and Rte 2. Martin Cahill. Bohs v Rangers 1984. The Stardust Fire. Charlie Haughey telling us to tighten our belts. Knock Airport. Joyriders. The Tallaght Two. Heroin. The DART. Blue leathered seating on buses. Bosco. Large bottles of Guinness. Stonewashed jeans. Doc martens

Yester

Mongfinder General wrote: »

Clueless gombeen politicians. Hunger Strikers. The Maze escape. Inflation. Rte 1 and Rte 2. Martin Cahill. Bohs v Rangers 1984. The Stardust Fire. Charlie Haughey telling us to tighten our belts. Knock Airport. Joyriders. The Tallaght Two. Heroin. The DART. Blue leathered seating on buses. Bosco. Large bottles of Guinness. Stonewashed jeans. Doc martens

We didn't start the fire....

BrianD3

I was thinking about some 70s/80s things recently and was browsing some teletext pages extracted from old VHS recordings. If you lived in an area with "piped" TV or you had a huge aerial on your roof AND you had a TV with a teletext decoder (my family only got one in 1991), this was your "internet" in 1989.

http://www.uniquecodeanddata.co.uk/teletext76/bbc1-19881029/

If this was around today I'd still use it

hot buttered scones

Ipso wrote:

And walking or cycling to school (granted there are more cars on the roads these days).

But we had f3ck all in our school bags. I was walking to and from school over a mile away or getting the bus from the age of 8

dxhound2005

It was hardly any surprise that there was a shortfall in taxes versus spending. When FF had got the biggest majority ever by abolishing property tax, a couple of years earlier.

hot buttered scones

nullzero wrote:

It wasn't all doom and gloom but I definitely remember feeling like we had progressed an awful lot as a country by the mid 90's.

I miss the mid 90s. I was in my late teens/ early 20s and in college. Fun times. I could rent a flat in Dublin for £50 a week, and I was out 2 or 3 nights a week. The world just seemed so exciting and full of oppurtunity. There seemed to be a very positive vibe around the place. And I could skull a rake of pints and still get up early in the morning. Good times

hot buttered scones

hot buttered scones wrote: »

I miss the mid 90s. I was in my late teens/ early 20s and in college. Fun times. I could rent a flat in Dublin for £50 a week, and I was out 2 or 3 nights a week. The world just seemed so exciting and full of oppurtunity. There seemed to be a very positive vibe around the place. And I could skull a rake of pints and still get up early in the morning. Good times

I think when most people look back, their late teens/college years are the happiest. It’s a time of blossoming, learning, experimenting, become a person in their own right.

Gyalist

Yester wrote: »

Black shoes. White socks. Oh yeah!

LOL. Not just black shoes and white socks, they were black slip-on shoes and white sports socks! I clearly remember many of the young fellas dressing like they had just stepped off the set of Miami Vice - pastel coloured suits with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows and those awful slip-on shoes and white socks.

FatherTed

I was a teenager in the early 80's, I remember the world was a bit edgy with the Troubles and Cold War always in the news. When The Day After film came out it frightened the bejayzes out of everybody and we talked about it for weeks. Thanks god for Gorby, he quickly sorted things out.

Everybody I knew didn't have much money so there was never any splashing on fancy clothes or going out of the country on holidays. My holidays consisted of going to my uncles farm for a week. Even the one time we went to London in 1983 we stayed at one of my uncles. Thankfully my dad(a carpenter) didn't have the misfortune of being laid off unlike a lot of other people's fathers I knew. A lot of young people emigrated not because it was a "fun experience" or had a J1, they had no job and no prospect of a job.

Things started to get about 1988/89.

adgib

Being able to smoke on the upper deck of a bus, on the way to work, you could hardly see through the smoke

Try_harder

The 70s was a mini boom wasnt it?

adgib

And also the bus conductor on the fiddle

Try_harder

Im glad I wasnt a 20something in the 70s 80s. As a gay man I was shunned by society, at a high risk of aids and if was killed by local youths queer bashing, sure didnt I deserve it

Billy86

Kermit.de.frog wrote: »

What was it like in the 1980's in Ireland?

I have seen pictures, video and my god it looked like a depressing place. :eek:

And yet according to some on AH, it is a time we need to go back to. A happier time, a simpler time without such things as money or prospects or hope there to worry us.

JupiterKid

I was born halfway through the 70s so except for 1978/79 I have no memories of the decade.

I was a kid in the 80s and it was a sh*tty decade - I and my sisters were very lucky to be fairly well to do but I was aware of how fortunate I was as poverty, deprivation and misery was everywhere.

Every evening on the news another factory closing down, sky high unemoloyment - both my older sisters ended up emigrating. It was bleak. The Troubles tearing the North asunder. The cold war still on and that fear in the back of my childhood mind of nuclear war. Dublin city centre was half-derelict, rampant corruption, 3rd world infrastructure. Half of the cars on the road were complete bangers. A still very powerful church. The music was good though.

The 90s saw amazing changes happen and it was a great decade of come of age in.

Ireland was not in a good place back then.

PowerToWait

ChippingSodbury wrote: »

at a time when average industrial wage was about £500 per week before tax.

Was it fūck.

Wibbs

I grew up in the 70s/80's but was very lucky in many ways. Middle class, suburbia type background. At least enough that my folks could save(The Ma™ was very good with money) to have yearly holidays abroad, Spain, France, England, Germany, Italy, with two goes to the US, with sometimes a second week in the West of Ireland. So I didn't really have much of a sense of a lack of anything TBH. I had a very happy childhood. The sense of things being pretty crap came when I left school in the mid 80's and a large percentage of my peers had to leave. And they were also suburban lads. What folks I knew who were less well off, they suffered much more. I do remember my folks being worried at times, but as I say I was lucky. I do clearly remember how quickly prices rose. Where things like kids comics near tripled in price and a can of coke went from around 5p to near 50p between my junior school and the leaving cert.

Beyond the nostalgia which inevitably creeps into these things(which I dislike) and the fact that childhood is more often than not insulated from the fears around, I would say that social stresses were lesser for my generation than those today. There was more freedom to roam. Most of us walked or cycled to school(I only remember one lad in my year who regularly got driven) and we weren't attached to our parents hips by phones and the like. We were more outside kids). The teenage years were lived in smaller terms in smaller groups and were more "innocent". Not always for good of course. Though looking back it's crazy how daftly ignorant/innocent of things like sex we were. The vast majority of my peers at 18 men and women would have been virgins.

However you were free to be a complete gobshite learning how to grow up without any notion of it being made a wider public thing on the interwebs. Memories were shorter. There were fewer isolated kids too. Fewer opportunities to hide away, though fewer avenues for help too I suppose. There were social pressures alright, but again they seemed much smaller than kids today often face. Consumerism was present of course, but not to the degree or rapid turnover of today. Even with well off kids pocket money was feck all, so the fashion/stuff arms race was smaller. That stuff came at you much more slowly. As did life and growing up in general.

Like I said though, I lived in leafy suburban Dublin with "piped TV" and access to stuff that kids my age in say the countryside didn't. I did notice that on holidays to the Wesht and the like. There was a delay of sorts in music and films and TV, if they had it) was RTE. In essence I was pretty protected looking back. Which I remain grateful for.

FatherTed wrote: »

I was a teenager in the early 80's, I remember the world was a bit edgy with the Troubles and Cold War always in the news. When The Day After film came out it frightened the bejayzes out of everybody and we talked about it for weeks.

I remember that. A few years back I got a poster for the German release of the flic for a song on ebay. A tenner. Had to have it. The Cold War TV stuff freaked me out, especially the British ones Threads and When the Wind Blows. They looked more like "here".

Threads.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrHoMSRZOS4

The first bombs land...

I do remember being really freaked out when the Soviets shot down the civilian Jumbo 007. I was on holidays with my folks in Spain at the time and the vibe was a bit subdued among the adults in the hotel we were staying in. Being Irish there was an element of "ah sure feck all would land on us", which made us less fearful I suppose.

JupiterKid

Try_harder wrote: »

The 70s was a mini boom wasnt it?

Up until the oil crisis of 1973/74 things were going well but the second half of the decade was not so good - high inflation, interest rates, disastrous economic policies that set us up for the sh*tty 80s . It was a decade of 2 halves I believe.

squawker

Hector Bellend wrote: »

I was too busy trying to get a feel of Debbie Whelans arse.

well did you manage it or not?

For Forks Sake

squawker wrote: »

well did you manage it or not?

I don't think he can admit to that or Debbie will be starting a #metoo thread

The Crowman

Toddlers and grandad's were always drowning in barrels and rivers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjWHrjCG1LQ

PowerToWait

JupiterKid wrote: »

I was born halfway through the 70s so except for 1978/79 I have no memories of the decade.

I was a kid in the 80s and it was a sh*tty decade - I and my sisters were very lucky to be fairly well to do but I was aware of how fortunate I was as poverty, deprivation and misery was everywhere.

Every evening on the news another factory closing down, sky high unemoloyment - both my older sisters ended up emigrating. It was bleak. The Troubles tearing the North asunder. The cold war still on and that fear in the back of my childhood mind of nuclear war. Dublin city centre was half-derelict, rampant corruption, 3rd world infrastructure. Half of the cars on the road were complete bangers. A still very powerful church. The music was good though.

The 90s saw amazing changes happen and it was a great decade of come of age in.

Ireland was not in a good place back then.

You're about my age. I remember it very differently. I had an absolute blast. Health and safety hadn't been invented, rebelling against all the institutions and conservatism with like-minded friends was a great way to grow up, challenging the status quo.

I loved it.

ceadaoin.

BrianD3 wrote: »

I was thinking about some 70s/80s things recently and was browsing some teletext pages extracted from old VHS recordings. If you lived in an area with "piped" TV or you had a huge aerial on your roof AND you had a TV with a teletext decoder (my family only got one in 1991), this was your "internet" in 1989.

http://www.uniquecodeanddata.co.uk/teletext76/bbc1-19881029/

If this was around today I'd still use it

Good old teletext. I used to love playing bamboozle, think it was on the utv one. It was easy to cheat though because it took a few seconds to load you could press each colour quickly and see what the page number was, the odd one out was the right answer. Simpler times

Big Nasty

The Crowman wrote: »

Toddlers and grandad's were always drowning in barrels and rivers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjWHrjCG1LQ

John, did you put the cat out?

angel eyes 2012

ceadaoin. wrote: »

Good old teletext. I used to love playing bamboozle, think it was on the utv one. It was easy to cheat though because it took a few seconds to load you could press each colour quickly and see what the page number was, the odd one out was the right answer. Simpler times

I think it was channel 4 teletext that bamboozle was on and it was during the 90s. I used to cheat too!

Crea

I was born in 1970 so experienced these decades as a child/teen. Most cities were run down, alot of old buildings about to fall down. Very few people had any money. 3 meals a day - if you got hungry between meals it was bread and jam or sugar sandwiches. No sweets unless Granny gave you money after mass on Sunday. No one went on foreign holidays but lots of families would spend the day at the local river. Hundreds and hundreds of people would show up for family fun days and community events - this was in the suburbs.
Most of the mothers were at home full time and most houses didn't have a car in the 70's but did in the 80's.
As kids we were outside most of the time cycling around, playing tag and making forts to hang out in. At home we watched tv in 2 channel land or played hide and seek, pillow fights in the dark or blind man's bluff in the dark.
There were alot of strikes and power cuts were regular enough.
I remember being cold cause we wouldn't have enough money for oil.
Travellers would call to the door for old clothes or a "sup of milk for the child.
We'd get clothes parcels from the relatives in the US.

Gyalist

ChippingSodbury wrote: »

Well they did ask us in the referendums. But running your own currency isn't all sweetness and light either: don't you remember the currency crisis in 1992/1993?


At that time a £75,000 mortgage over 20 years would have cost you almost £900 a month at a time when average industrial wage was about £500 per week before tax. I was a bit young but I think interest rate went as high as 25% for deposits around that time.

I started a retail business in 1987 and a pair of Levi's 501s was about £60 - £65. For most young people that would have been almost as much as their weekly take-home pay.

JupiterKid

PowerToWait wrote: »

You're about my age. I remember it very differently. I had an absolute blast. Health and safety hadn't been invented, rebelling against all the institutions and conservatism with like-minded friends was a great way to grow up, challenging the status quo.

I loved it.

Don't get me wrong. I had a largely happy childhood myself but so many others didn't. I was also aware that the 80s were not really a great time to be an adult in Ireland - real money worries for nearly everyone except the kleptocratacy, and pretty bad - especially if you were a woman or gay or in any way "different."

Unemployment, economic insecurity, rampant alcoholism, sexual frustration, rampant clerical child abuse etc made for many many unhappy childhoods.

As recently as 1988 the ESRI and OECD estimated that about 45% of Irish children lived in consistent poverty. Take a moment to think about that...

The Crowman

Big Nasty wrote: »

John, did you put the cat out?

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

Hotblack Desiato

nullzero wrote: »

Pretty drab and depressing, not like the world we saw in American movies of the time where everything seemed an awful lot better, probably why people still clung to anything American back then.

Something people often don't realise, and I didn't realise it at the time, is that movies aren't just escapism for us, they're escapism for Americans too. I mean Ferris Bueller's Day Off with a synthesizer to play a coughing sound and his friend's da owning a Ferrari, fantasy land stuff in the 80s for 99% of Americans.

Oh and smog from the coal fires in the winter, hard to believe how smokey the air was in a relatively modern era, all changed in the early 90's with smokeless coal and people relying more on their central heating.

It was horrific in the late 80s, I have asthma and I used to be gasping on the onset of every winter because I lived in a suburb where most people were relatively poor and burned coal in open fires. Then I left school and went to college in Kevin St which was slap bang in the only part of Dublin which was polluted even worse. The first year 88/89 wasn't so bad but in the winter 89/90 it was colder and there was a thermal inversion trapping the smog, you literally couldn't see from one end of a corridor to the other due to the smog. Indoors. The ban cleared the air overnight, FF had resisted doing it for years because of their usual pandering to vested interests. It meant I could play sports for the first time without gasping :mad:

Does anyone remember the TV ads in the 80s telling us how great coal was? And it used to be all over the Dublin buses in the 70s and 80s, "Coal Cat", "Coal is cheapest". While this product was strangling the inhabitants of our city, making life a misery for tens of thousands, and killing off thousands of pensioners each year before their time.

The Crowman

Bonzo wants to go out Dear.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIh0kMPdlUc

BBFAN

Hotblack Desiato wrote: »

Something people often don't realise, and I didn't realise it at the time, is that movies aren't just escapism for us, they're escapism for Americans too. I mean Ferris Bueller's Day Off with a synthesizer to play a coughing sound and his friend's da owning a Ferrari, fantasy land stuff in the 80s for 99% of Americans.



It was horrific in the late 80s, I have asthma and I used to be gasping on the onset of every winter because I lived in a suburb where most people were relatively poor and burned coal in open fires. Then I left school and went to college in Kevin St which was slap bang in the only part of Dublin which was polluted even worse. The first year 88/89 wasn't so bad but in the winter 89/90 it was colder and there was a thermal inversion trapping the smog, you literally couldn't see from one end of a corridor to the other due to the smog. Indoors. The ban cleared the air overnight, FF had resisted doing it for years because of their usual pandering to vested interests. It meant I could play sports for the first time without gasping :mad:

Does anyone remember the TV ads in the 80s telling us how great coal was? And it used to be all over the Dublin buses in the 70s and 80s, "Coal Cat", "Coal is cheapest". While this product was strangling the inhabitants of our city, making life a misery for tens of thousands, and killing off thousands of pensioners each year before their time.

Don't think people realise that coal is only banned in Dublin so far. Still burning it like mad down the country.

Wibbs

Being of "Piped TVLand" the one I remember as a kid that gave me the chills was this one from UKLand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZWD2sDRESk

Donald Pleasance does the voiceover. Donald effin Pleasance. As a creepy monk of the waters. Jaysus. :eek::D Even today if I'm climbing a tree or using a branch for support(don't ask...), in my head I still hear "this branch won't hold his weight". Musta worked then.

Wishbone Ash

Gyalist wrote: »

I started a retail business in 1987 and a pair of Levi's 501s was about £60 - £65. For most young people that would have been almost as much as their weekly take-home pay.

Levis 501's were about €40 in 1986. I earned €50 per week then and remember buying a pair in Talbot Street and being delighted with myself!

1970's - every woman over the age of 30 didn't leave the house without a headscarf.

indioblack

Kermit.de.frog wrote: »

What was it like in the 1980's in Ireland?

I have seen pictures, video and my god it looked like a depressing place. :eek:

Grey, delapidated, hopeless.

What was it like? How did you get by without internets, wheelie bins, toilets...?

Would you go back if you could??

*Might as well throw in the 70's too for people of that vintage.

I'd go back. Had some great times there. But then, I was a visitor - on holiday. I didn't have to make a living there.

JupiterKid

Loves_lorries wrote: »

Lower expectations, holidays abroad were unheard of etc

Yes lower expectations, but for the well to do upper middle class holidays abroad became commonplace in the early 1970s. So no, not unheard of.

Hand me down clothes in the 1980s were very much the norm back then. I grew up in a comfortable middle class suburban household and hand me downs were part of my clothing wardrobe.

My parents were worried about money matters a lot in the 80s. My late mam would always fret over the shopping bill at Quinnsworths (now Tesco) and how the price of everything was going up. Utility and phone bills were another worry.

You see, in real terms goods and most services were much more expensive in relation to incomes which were much much lower than today. Credit was hard to come by so for holidays and luxuries now taken for granted, you had to save. A dishwasher or video recorder or even a microwave was a luxury item. A cooker or fridge would often cost several months' salary of a middle class 1980s Irish household - a middle class that was much smaller than now.

branie2

Video cassettes

Just two channels on tv (unless you had multichannel, or satellite TV)

no Kindle, just regular books

Gimme A Pound

Most of my childhood was in the 80s (ending in the 90s) - I thought it was the biz. Such great TV, chart music and toys! Yeah it looks desperately bleak on footage now, but shur as a kid you wouldn't be noticing stuff like that. That said, I grew up in a middle-class household, my dad had a not hugely well paying job but it was permanent and secure. Lots of households didn't have a phone or a car (and they weren't necessarily poor households either) - we had two of each. Not great cars or anything, but still... two cars. We went to England every year too - so many families didn't leave the country. If you went to France or Spain you were considered extremely well heeled all together! :pac:

So just because life was peachy for me, doesn't mean other kids didn't struggle. But I'm glad I was just a kid because no matter what background you were from, it was a tough time for young adults.

Wibbs

Gyalist wrote: »

I started a retail business in 1987 and a pair of Levi's 501s was about £60 - £65. For most young people that would have been almost as much as their weekly take-home pay.

That was my earliest inklings into the power of advertising. Before 501's became a "thing" a relative of mine was high enough up in Levi's Ireland, or the distributor, can't remember which. Anyhoo, I liked jeans, but I was and remain a gangly bastid, narrow of hip, long of leg, and found it hard to find jeans in my size(28/35 at the time, 29/35 now. I've let meself go..). So The Da™ put the talk on said rellie and got me these "American" jeans in my size. Made us pay retail too. Cheap fu..

I didn't know 501's from Adam and got slagged because they had buttons rather than zips. "Grandad" was one. Shrunk like fook in the wash and only came in blue, which also turned everything else in the same wash blue(The Ma™ was not best pleased). This would have been around 81/2. Then the advert comes out with Nick Kamen stripping down to his kacks in a laundrette while listening to the grapevine. The retail price went nuts overnight, and I was suddenly, and most out of character, "cool".

I was buying them, or my folks were TBH at 12 pounds retail, when the ad campaign came out they were 29 to 35 pounds retail. That was around 85? TBH G I don't remember them hitting the over 50 quid mark until the 90's? Though you'd know the reality of the time. A mate of mine, an aficionado of the denim, who knows his selvedge from his thread count told me the other day that 501's are now over a hundred quid. Jaysus... Then again these days they're mostly bought and worn by old farts like me and they have the spare cash.

Wishbone Ash

branie2 wrote: »

....no Kindle, just regular books

Ah here, 95% of us still use 'regular' books. It's not as if they are like Green Shield Stamps.

Fourier

Wibbs wrote: »

Threads.

I'd forgotten that film. Very bleak at the end, with people speaking in pidgin and the new generation with mutations.

branie2

I was born in the tail end of the 1970s, 1979 to be exact.

For Forks Sake

The Crowman wrote: »

Bonzo wants to go out Dear.

Now, there's a flashback.

Gimme A Pound

Fourier wrote: »

I'd forgotten that film. Very bleak at the end, with people speaking in pidgin and the new generation with mutations.

Oh Jesus Threads is terrifying! :eek:

So well put together though. I was too young to be aware of it but older kids must have been traumatised. I became aware of the nuclear fear from about Chernobyl onwards and it was always lurking there, putting the absolute terrors through you.

branie2

For Forks Sake wrote: »

Now, there's a flashback.

And a scary one at that.

bennyineire

Born in '77 in Dublin to a couple of "country" kids from Offaly aged 18 and 19 respectably. My "Irish twin" was born 11 months later.

2 years after that my Mam left my bus conductor Dad (womeniser) and we moved back to the county town of Offaly.

I don't excuse my Dad for his actions but my parents were far too young to be married/move to Dublin and have 2 kids all before 20 but this was certainly not unusual at the time

So I grew up in my early years in 1980's Tullamore, all I remember from that time was been surrounded by loads of family (my mothers side) who loved me and I loved them. Yes I was dirt poor and from a single parent home but I was happy and loved. I love been from Tullamore for that reason I guess.

I've come a long way from the 80's to where I'm at now (Masters degree, work on I.T. and comfortable), I don't regret my childhood but at the same time I've made damn sure my kids never came close to anything close to the abject poverty and an absent father.

The 80's were a world away from Ireland today make no mistake, even with the problems today with homeless families are having. At least they are been put in temporary accommodation and have money for clothes.

My Mam, me and my sister would have been classed as homeless in the 80's for a few years by today's standards, we lived in a mobile home for a few years and I wore the same clothes to school everyday (no school uniform in the 80's) and had holes in my shoes.

Having said I have great pride in my country, that fact that I can come from that poverty and avail of free education right up the college education is a testament to Ireland, if I was born in the U.S. with the same set of circumstances where or what I be doing now ?

Gimme A Pound

Those 501s ads increased Levis sales by 800% or something insane like that.

There was What A Wonderful World (the Sam Cook one not the Louis Armstrong one) with the guy in the bath... then the launderette/Heard It Through The Grapevine one which went stratospheric. Then Be My Baby, The Joker ("Some people call me the space cowboy..."). That was another thing about the 80s - there was a lot of nostalgia for the 60s!