Ireland the 1980s

Deleted User wrote: »

But...there was massive unemployment. And emigration. The stats are all there. I don't think anecdotal evidence about estates being built changes that, and I don't remember too much going up in Cork at all.

We held a concert to address the unemployment crisis. Cactus World News played. It don't get much worse than that.

I'm fairly sure there was a large number of council houses built in the 80s.

nullzero wrote: »

We had a much less sophisticated pallet back then. Food was functional and for the most part bland, far from the fiesta of world cuisines you can choose from in today's supermarkets.

There was a lot of smoggy days in winter too, smokeless coal was introduced in the early nineties and that became a thing of the past reasonably quickly.

I was a small kid then, I do remember some class mates at school having "trendy" hair do's (think spikes on top and long at the back type mullets and the dreaded rats tail).

Mass was really busy as well, the church was so busy round our way there were overflow masses on Sunday mornings in the school hall, almost alien in today's essentially secular Ireland.

Me and most of my friends had second hand clothes, seemed the norm, cars were bangers and ancient

Low quality goods were common - nothing near the variety, choice and quality today

No cheap flights, holidays in Ire, the UK or maybe France in a tent if lucky

It was great fun, but economically it was **** compared to today

mariaalice wrote: »

Well maybe not exactly the same subset but in general two working adults.

Families with two employed adults were extremely unusual in the 80s (unless the second person was an adult child still living at home). And therein lies part of the reason for house-price rises. Try reading Elizabeth Warren's Two Income Trap. Families on average are a lot less well off in terms of housing and ability to save than they were in the 80s. Obviously most of her work is based on American families where the economy was in much better shape in the 80s than ours, but it was definitely possible for a family on one low wage to buy a good home in a nice, central area, while continuing to save a little. Something that is close to impossible now.

My dad always complains that when he bought our house, he could have got one on the coast in Malahide for £500 more, but decided to spend the money on furniture in the front room instead.

Fast forward 30 years and there was a €400,000 price difference between the two houses

Dohnjoe wrote: »

Me and most of my friends had second hand clothes, seemed the norm, cars were bangers and ancient

Low quality goods were common - nothing near the variety, choice and quality today

No cheap flights, holidays in Ire, the UK or maybe France in a tent if lucky

It was great fun, but economically it was **** compared to today

You could go out with £20 in your pocket get drunk and do the same the next night with the change of the twenty pounds. Pubs were packed every weekend, going by this thread you'd think the 80's were a time of poverty and destitution in Ireland.

5rtytry56 wrote: »

Brush was Gay Burns's omnipresent "special guest" on the Late Late Show in the 1980s.

...and Lenny Henry, Billy Connolly, Spike Milligan, and Peter Ustinov would pass by like bi-annual comets. Gauran-****ing-teed like.

Housing situation comparisons are futile. So apples and oranges.

Yes the interest would be brutal, but the low price and low deposit percentages meant that young first timers could at least hope to get started if they had any kind of steady work.

80's were great for me. Went through Secondary school, got to collage and actually got a Job.........in Ireland !

I also learned that blond highlights and a mustache wasn't a look for me to carry into the 90's.

50p for a bag of chips and £1:45 for a pint of Smithwicks too.....

ohnonotgmail wrote: »

because they have to pay the market value of the land.

Market value at agriculture price or developer price?

mariaalice wrote: »

Ireland in the 1980s has the reputation of being a basket case unemployment 20% etc, however if you looked from one side of Dublin to the other including all the suburbs, a huge amount of housing was built in the 1980s massive housing estates in all the suburbs, its the same in Limerick not sure about Cork or Galway but probably the same so who was buying all the housing if there was such massive unemployment.

In an era of massive unemployment people were able to buy houses and now in an era of lowering unemployment the same subset of people can not afford a house.

House prices relative to income (single income at that) had not skyrocketed back then.
A hosue was not 10 times annual salary and single salaries could afford to buy property.
Granted mortgage interest rates were crazy, but people had many less monthly bills.
Oh and they made do with old stuff, second hand stuff, etc until they could actually afford it.

As for claiming the eighties were not that bad.
Yes they were and they weren't.

Growing up in rural West of Ireland most people in your class ended up emigrating to UK and some off to the states.
There was no one off to Australia.
Hell even if you did go to college, which really only took off in the 80s, meant you probably emigrated at the end.

The only one I knew with a BMW was a local solicitor and the Mercs were owned by business men or bank manager.
Everyone else made do with Toyotas because they were ultra reliable, even if they rusted to shyte or Fords, Opels, VWs, Nissans.
There were shag all new cars, bar the cra*heaps from mother Russia.

Another example was in the farming community.
The only new tractors bought were either cheaper Eastern European Zetors / Ursus or old common make stuff.
Only contractors bought new "proper" tractors.
Even then they weren't hundred horsepower plus expensive machines.
Farmers didn't have jeeps, but VW jettas to pull the car trailers.

There was one TV, often rented, and even then it might have been Black and white.
There were no satellite services, no cable, no broadband, no mobiles and very few landline phones which meant people had less monthly bills.

Shag all people went on foreign holidays and even flying off the bloody island to UK was astronomically expensive thanks to the state owned union riddled employee centred Aer Lingus.
We owe Ryan Air a lot really, yes I know deregulation was part of it.

There was continous trouble in the north and always undercurrent that something bad might happen down here.
I remember those kidnappings and special branch staking out the homes of republicans.

Saying all that we had crack because we probably didn't know any better.
We had MTV USA on Sunday afternoons where we all became fans of Bryan Adams, Bruce, etc.
We wore kangaroo boots and stone washed jeans because they were cool, we had German army parkas to keep out the cold and the rain, some had PLO scarfs, some wore docs, some people had mullets, some wore white socks, black slip on shoes and black speckled pants.
Some of us used to roll our jacket sleeves up and pretend that the old Opel Kadett was indeed a Ferrari.
We didn't worry about overcrowding cars going to discos, hell even having the driver three sheets to the wind on the way home.

Maybe we were innocent, but feck it we did have some fun.