The 1990s is a long time ago

miamee

This ^, Constance Carroll foundation, Exclamation perfume and Dewberry perfume from The Body Shop were staples for every teenager in the early-mid 90s😄

silverharp

If Back to the Future was remade today it would be set in 1992 . Presumably alot of internet and mobille phone references.

Ash.J.Williams

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0E0ynyIUsg

tune

jj880

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118767324#Comment_118767324

Here no need for this!

Now I really feel old as f*ck! 😆

silverharp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118768265#Comment_118768265

all those laughing at my mother's farm stories about getting the cows in before walking to school for 2 miles barefoot are haunting me now, I probably sound the same regailing the kids with my 80's stories.

Ash.J.Williams

Pam and Tommy on Disney has some great 90's references, dial up modems etc!

jj880

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118768635#Comment_118768635

Yeah its good. Instantly remembered the taste of goldschlager shots watching the night club scene.

jj880

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118768611#Comment_118768611

Yip my aul fella reckons he walked in the snow barefoot to school and if he didn't have 2 pieces of turf for the school fire he got a clip round the ear so would always break his 1 piece of turf in half 😆. Still not sure if I believe that.

I remember the 5p cartons of milk from school in the 90s. 1 of the teachers used to fill a trailer with the spare cartons and take them home.

BrianD3

The Back to the Future/1992 comparison is a good one, then again the film came out in 1985 which really seems like ancient history. That was the year of the moving statues in Ballinspittle.

Back to the 1990s, I think I have identified the exact moment that pop music peaked - 3 minutes 11 seconds in the below performance.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3oLn3tyqo4E

Sunny Disposition

Looking back on it, the late 90s were a great time. The late 80s and early 90s were grim in Ireland, there was very high emigration, near civil war in the north and a terrible economy. But the second half of the decade was so different, we had a new level of prosperity, but didn't have some of the problems that we got later with housing. We also got peace in the north for the first time in 30 years.

silverharp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118769138#Comment_118769138

While I think overall the 90's was the best decade in general, I'd have to say music probably peaked in the 70's or early 80's

ceadaoin.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118769138#Comment_118769138

I would love it if they got back together for one more tour. Nows the time lads when 90s nostalgia is at its peak!

If you think about it, the Derry Girls is set a full decade further back in time than Happy Days was when it was made in the 1970s looking back into the 50s and even back further in time than That 70’s Show travelled.

A hell of a lot changed in the mid century - fashion, music, social attitudes, technology etc and did so very quickly. The cultural revolution of the 60s and 70s was extremely dramatic.

The other issue is current generations in our 20s - 40s had parents who didn’t have attitudes that were all that different to ours. If you’d parents born anytime after 1950s that generation gap wasn’t there. If your parents were born before the 50s, it’s stark and that’s something 70s / 80s and even 90s teens would have experienced in a way maybe most of us never had to rebel against. They were starkly different to their parents’ generation in so many ways.

We really had more of an evolution of their cultural revolution. I think the thing the 90s and 00s generation probably did have a huge impact on though has been LGBTQ rights - that built over a long time but the real speed of change was felt relatively recently.

1990s to 2020s has been relatively stable for many of those things and is more of a continuum than some of the decades that went before. I mean, yea you can identify 90s fashion, but not in the way you could contrast 1960s / 70s fashion with the 50s or 40s.

In terms of fashion and music the 1980s actually stands out much more - fashion was weirder & music went very electronic due to the dawn of usable practical synths, samplers etc and computer technologies. All that stuff got rather more organically integrated into music in the 90s and into modern times. Always makes the 80s very much stand out. There’s a continuum of electronica that runs from the late 70s, more so the 80s and right through the 90s to modern times. It really was a genre that barely existed before then as the tech didn’t really exist outside obscure labs and sound art type contexts.

bassy

Schilachi.

Timofte against Bonner the nation holds there breath

spookwoman

1993 was the year Annie Murphy appeared on the Late Late show to talk about her affair with Bishop Casey. Saw the true nasty side of Gay Byrne in the way he treated her.

arthursway

Yo Yo's tamagotchis and Adidas popper tracksuit bottoms 😀

cj maxx

The 90's will always be the best decade for me. And I think will go down in history as the most pivotal decade in recent history.

on top of the fall of Apartheid and communism ,I moved to Lancashire and discovered sex, drugs and true friendship.

It was such a relief to be out of the 80's, the height of decadence and being up your own hole..

Tony EH

If this thread has reminded me of anything at all, it's how much I fucking hate(d) Oasis. 😆

riclad

90s or 2000,s was the best time to be a teen in Ireland , great sense of optimism, no one worried about global warming, extreme weather events, rent was low compared with now, no housing crisis. Cost of living much higher now , gen z is facing a tough future and rising inflation rising energy cost.we have maybe 5 years left to tackle climate change. Some parts of the USA have droughts mega forest fires it's getting hard to live in some states or rural areas. Yes we had a crash in 2007 but it was still better than now as regards standard of life for young people

dmn22

A lot of rose-tinted glasses posts in this thread.

I feel this song is very appropriate here (came out in 1999!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTJ7AzBIJoI&ab_channel=steffyweffy777

Mad_maxx

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118777336#Comment_118777336

Hated that song

Girly Gal

I think the 90's were definitely the best decade in Ireland, the change in Ireland from 1990 to 2000 was massive, we went from a very conservative society and economic depression to a much more liberal society and a booming economy. While the early nineties weren't much different to the late eighties, a few things happened that really changed things; Italia 90 and the general success of the Jack Charlton era gave people something to cheer about, the peace process in the North put Ireland in the spotlight, the Eamonn Casey baby controversy was the beginning of the end of the stranglehold the church had over the state which lead to a more liberal society. Also there was huge inward investment from the EU (EEC as it was then) along with the IDA attracting multinationals to Ireland, all this created the basis for the boom in the second half of the nineties and into the noughties. People's standard of living increased significantly from 1990 to 2000, overseas holidays and travel became a thing, third level education became accessible to ordinary people for the first time.

The music was great; the Oasis v Blur Britpop battle, pop music in general was better with more variety. Films were better and more interesting than now, you had the big blockbusters like Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, Armageddon, Independence Day and also the likes of the Shawshank Redemption.

There was a great sense of freedom growing up in the nineties, the nanny state we live in wasn't a thing, kids could disappear for the day to explore and do their own thing without parents worrying about them. No real worries about climate change, no constant warnings before and after tv programmes "If you are affected by......", no social media.

I think the big change has been mobile phones. They’ve have been both amazing and a complete curse. We don’t just go places and not continuously keep in touch and feel we need to be continuously alerting ppl to our every move.

We also don’t call in unannounced or make arrangements ahead of time and stick to them like we used to.

I also think we overrate risks nowadays and blow them out of all proportion. The US was already doing that by the 1990s. It spread here eventually and we seem to have become much more frightened of our own shadow than we were. We don’t trust other people like we did and I think it’s both toxic and isn’t very reasonable either. There are bad people out there, but very very few of them. It’s not like some CSI episode.

I remember as a teen being packed off to France and Germany without any notion that anything bad could possibly happen, and it didn’t. I has an amazing time, found my way back and had not much more than travellers cheques and a callcard. I didn’t even have bank cards that worked abroad! Checked in at most every few days. Brilliant experience. If you suggested that now everyone would think you were insane, but the risks are the same or possibly even lower, yet we are all terrified.

We seem a lot more wrapped in cotton wool and less robust. I don’t think it’s “nanny state.” If anything that’s also “nanny state”. We’re the fecking nanny! It’s us!

The 90s were a bit more carefree because we hadn’t convinced ourselves that the world is a scary place. We need to relax a bit and find that sense of community again before it evaporates.

DublinWriter

I'm 52 now. I generally love what Ireland has become, especially in terms of inclusivity and acceptance of our LGBT community.

However, we're great ones for patting ourselves on the back.

My parents were able to buy their own house in the early seventies. My father worked in a blue-collar job. Single income. Try that now.

Only recently I spent 15 hours in A&E in a hospital in the North East of the country and left without seeing a doctor.

We're taxed not too far off the same amount as Belgium and the Scandinavian countries, but we have far less healthcare, education and pension.

It really puzzles me when I see younger people pine for the 80's. I lived through them. They sucked.

bejeezus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118771789#Comment_118771789

Absolutely. And I still like Gay. All blame on the woman. Toxic interview.

bejeezus

The BBC had a programme on 1991 Friday night and a piece on Nirvana too. Was too young to ‘get’ them at that stage but definitely remember the grunge look the first time round. Would recommend a look at 1991!

JupiterKid

The 1990s was a pivotal and unique decade of tremendous social and later on, economic change for the better in Ireland. I turned 15 in 1990 and 24 in 1999 so it was also my coming of age decade, like others here mentioned before.

I know that people tend to look back at the era of their youth with rose-tinted specs and tend to forget the bad stuff - but the 90s were truly a special decade for Ireland and to be young in 1990s Ireland was a true joy. There was a real mood of optimism generally which increased as the decade progressed. I finished school in 1993 and was in my undergrad in uni between 1993 and 1997 - and I had a complete ball of a time! I also came out as gay in my third year of college after breaking it off with an Erasmus student that I was in love with (a lovely young woman) but for the wrong reasons. We are still good friends to this day.

I think the 1990s was a decade of two halves in Ireland. Firstly of a growing momentum of social change followed by an economic boom. The combination of these two factors led to a near revolution in Irish society. It really started with Mary Robinson’s surprise election in 1990 as our first woman President, which was a harbinger of things to come. The economy was still very weak in the early 90s and in a slow recovery from the complete disaster of the 1980s, but a lot of hard work was being done behind the scenes to lay the groundwork for the Celtic Tiger that emerged around 1994/95. MTV still played music - and much of it was simply great.

The Catholic Church, seemingly still all-powerful in the grim 80s, began to collapse after the 1992 Bishop Eamonn Casey “scandal” that, in hindsight, was nothing in comparison to what was to come - the seemingly endless revelations of widespread child sexual abuse by clergy that was covered up by the hierarchy, followed by the revelations of institutional abuse of women and children in TV documentaries such as Dear Daughter. People were shocked but were also very angry at the way they had been duped by the Church for so long. Mass attendance began to plummet after 1994/5. The revolution in education that began in the 1960s bore full fruit in the 90s, not just in terms of hugely increased access to third level but a generation of Irish adults who were no longer willing to kowtow to the Church and started to ask hard questions on the former sacred cows of Irish society.

Then there was the Northern Ireland peace process which really took off after the IRA ceasefire of 1994 and culminated in the 1998 Good Friday agreement. Homosexuality was finally decriminalised in 1993, after two decades of a legal fight against the establishment by David Norris, Mary Robinson and others that went all the way to the European Court of Human Rights. Dublin’s gay scene finally went overground. There was also an urban renewal tax incentive construction boom that changed the face of the formerly run down and decrepit inner city in Dublin and elsewhere - our towns and cities started to look a lot more colourful, much less drab. Census 1996 showed a population increase within the Dublin canal ring for the first time in 80 years.

The road network also improved hugely - the M50 Phase 1 & 2 opened in 1990 and 1995, many bottleneck towns were bypassed, the first proper stretches of bypass motorways opened and the Jack Lynch tunnel in Cork opened in 1999.

Technology was rushing ahead, many people became computer literate in the 90s, email emerged (I had my first email account in my second year of college, 1994/95 and thought it was amazing at the time lol 😁), the Internet proper started to come into play around 1996/97 but speeds were painfully slow. But it unleashed an information and communications revolution. I got my first mobile phone - a Nokia 3210 - in 1999 around the time I started working as a researcher and doing my postgrad part-time. There was also the very narrow passing of the Divorce Referendum in late 1995 (my late father - 55 at the time - voted yes as did I and my older sister - it was my first referendum). In fact, many people, of my dad’s generation started to change their formerly very conservative attitudes - my dad fully accepted me when I plucked up the courage to come out to him in 1997.

The economy was really taking off by 1997/98 and there was a real dynamism to Dublin nightlife with new bars and clubs opening every month. The music was great also - IMO the 90s was the last decade of really great music with great diversity of styles and genres. Most pop music at the time was rubbish of course - but there was grunge, alternative, post-grunge, trip-hop etc. and many new artists that were utterly original and defied categorisation such as Bjork, Portishead, Jamiroquai and Massive Attack - 90s dance music too was cracking as was the nascent clubbing scene and my generation enjoyed every minute of it. 😎🎶 Foreign travel became much more affordable and commonplace, expanding people’s horizons.

It truly was a great decade to be young - to live through Ireland’s belated 1960s when we finally grew up as a society and caught up with the rest of the Western World. There was a great sense of freedom and of possibilities and social media was (thankfully in hindsight) still years away. There is unlikely to be another decade like it for a long time, if ever. I agree with the others who opined that it seems that fashion changes since 2000 seem much more slow and gradual in comparison to the dramatic changes during the 1965-90 period.

To sum it up - the 90s were bloody great.

riclad

i think the pace of change now is faster, a 100 euro smartphone is more powerful than a laptop from the 90s.We are a much more diverse country now, the catholic church has almost no power apart from controlling many local schools. i think young people pine for the 80s, it seems a simpler time, no one was cyber bullied or trolled online.there was great music and movies.But there was discrimination against minority groups, single mothers, there was no such thing as lgbt rights or gay marriage .Even married people had trouble getting contraception.i think young people think there was more freedom, rents were cheap, no housing crisis .They dont think about the negative aspects of life in the 80s.

Strumms

What I disliked about the ‘90’s..

public transport… bus off peak was about a 30 minute wait if you just missed one. Living in a reasonably high density population area too. Fûckin thing would be packed…

thing like nice clothes, car insurance, house insurance, were extortionate.

feck all good bands played here…Vicar st and others only opened the tail end of the decade… it was either the Point or Whelans with nothing of note in between..so for a music lover, feck all gigs.

flying was still expensive, I paid £247 return to Paris, ticket purchased in December, flew in April.

what I liked…

the whole pace of life was a bit easier, less cut throat and there just seemed more nice people about. I think now it’s the opposite.. now life is ultra competitive, more people striving for less resources or opportunities like jobs etc therefore there seems to be more cutthroat people around that would hang you just to get their next foot on the step you are standing on… wasn't like that then, more people were happy for the success of others. Focused on enabling their own wellbeing through hard work, ingenuity, intelligence and so on as opposed to trying to bring other people down to their level like now.

Our population was 3.75 million, today it’s 5,01 million…in 22 years our population has grown a 33.6% increase. no housing crises or population crises then so not every scrap of farmland, or any land was having houses built on it…unlike eyesore city now. There were also planning standards…

Government like them or otherwise had the interests of Irish taxpayers and citizens at the forefront of their thinking and responsibly…turn on the news and it’s how we can better our lot…or…” for Irish people we are doing”… that would be borderline racist now… now we are expected to work hard to better and enable everyone else’s wellbeing and lot, the system is skewed to work against us and our wellbeing. .. while we sacrifice our happiness and wellbeing to enable that of others…

’90s we’re ok, life was fairer… easier.

Jim2007

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118768758#Comment_118768758

I recall hearing the story about having to bring turf from several people. They would have been in school 1935 - 45 or so. Also heard them talking about bringing a baked potato from the hearth to keep their hands warm in the morning and eat for lunch.

We were not that poor in the ‘80, but most of us did not realize we were even poor, our mams and dads did a good job of shielding it from us.