What generation of Irish people have had it the toughest?

Deleted User wrote: »

It's interesting to consider how much the jump in living standards even between about 1993 and 2003 was like night and day in this country. I remember being in my early teens when things started getting rich during the boom and it felt like something changed in around 2003 going into 2004 - like the older idea I had in my head of Ireland being somewhat poor was completely redundant and that peoples lives had become decadently easy. I felt kind of disturbed by it at the time, like there was something evil about kids my age growing up in such luxurious conditions - probably a remnant of catholic guilt and guilt about how hard people who lived throughout Ireland in the past had it. Not even thinking of access to cash (we weren't rich ourselves), moreso the availability to others of all the entertainment and comfortable beds, big houses with wooden floors, comfortable chairs, kids having phones etc. - just seemed like everyone was spoiled and being spoiled was bad or something. I used to feel that our teachers probably saw us as weak for not having to grow up in the crap times they did! that said I can remember when I was fairly young things were very tight, not so tight we suffered dreadfully but by the standards of today definitely a lot tighter with money/resources (eg. 10 p chomp bar once in a while being only treat, no chance of a toy during the year apart from at christmas, not even at birthday, no kids up for birthday parties because stuff would cost money etc.)

I have to be honest, I think very few people born after 1982 had any type of experience of Celtic Tiger excess. I'd one pal whose dad had a haulage and courier firm and they became very rich overnight (new car every year type standard), apart from that I never knew of anyone working class who became (or pretended to be) ridiculously well off. Most people in their early 20's I knew still lived with their parents. Anyone I knew earning a decent coin in construction blew most of it on coke every weekend (I always found it strange how cocaine was portrayed as an upper class drug. Most college educated people I knew would have barely known what it looked like let alone used it), and everyone else was either a student or an apprentice scraping by on 250 odd a week. Most people I knew in their late 20's were strangled with a mortgage unless they'd managed to get on the affordable housing scheme. I left school in 2003, which IMO was before people started getting limos to the debs, before the leaving cert holiday became a thing, and so on.

Rose tinted specs and all of that if you ask me. People constantly complained that their wages were not high enough to justify 6 euro for a pint and 350k for an ex corpo house in Finglas. I remember how striking it was when you would go up the North and see every young lad and young one driving around- in the South the insurance costs made this out of reach for the vast majority of people under 22 or so.