Rose-tinted views of the past in Ireland

Kilometres na gcopaleen wrote: »

It's a weird one and a phenomenon I've noticed too on online groups. FWIW, in my experience, Dublin is safer, cheerier than it was in the 1990s when I first started wandering about it regularly. I still hear of break ins and muggings but especially the latter seem far less common than back then. It is strange seeing people saying how much better things were back in the day when my abiding impression of Dublin in the late '70s and the '80s was a poor city being destroyed by heroin addiction. Of course addiction and all concommitant problems still exist but they don't seem to define the city the way they used to so it seems strange that people are like "ah back in the day things were great." The amount of people who think that cops should be battering people is frightening too, everyone invokes Lugs Brannigan like he put the whole place to rights.

Completely agree. Feels far safer in Dublin City Centre now than I ever remember it being.
I think people confuse the actual past with films and Maeve Binchy books. They talk about halcyon days that never actually existed. I wouldn't want to go back to any previous iteration of Ireland, for all the problems we may have now we had far worse ones in any previous time.

And the photo's all appear to show the street's during good weather, during the summer etc. You'd think it was the Med!

I am sure, say, Cook Street in Cork City was just as ****ing miserable on a drizzly, December afternoon in 1948 as it is in 2018.

valoren wrote: »

And the photo's all appear to show the street's during good weather, during the summer etc. You'd think it was the Med!

I am sure, say, Cook Street in Cork City was just as ****ing miserable on a drizzly, December afternoon in 1948 as it is in 2018.

In the old days people knew not to spell plurals with apostrophes that everybody seems to do now!:D

JupiterKid wrote: »

I’m member of a couple of FB groups that put up old photos of Dublin and other places in Ireland and they are interesting to see.

One thing I note from many of the comments from some of the members posting up is stuff like “how times were so much better back then”, “no crime”, “respect for authority” and how Dublin and Ireland have gone “to hell” in the past 20 years.

Why the selective nostalgia of a much poorer country where there was real hardship, the religious reigned supreme and abused countless vulnerable women and children?

Some posters on these sites even come out with casual racism and homophobia. Would these posters (mostly older people I note) prefer a return to those times?

Thoughts?

Ah jesus give it a rest. With your Liberal whining. People are entitled to recollect the past even through Rose tinted glasses. One thing we didn't have is nanny state liberalism and bloody face book
Don't kid yourself that your age group aren't racist too that's when your heads are out of yer arses
As for the poverty stuff Ireland was even in the 80s a lot richer than most of the World

Bobtheman wrote: »

Ah jesus give it a rest. With your Liberal whining. People are entitled to recollect the past even through Rose tinted glasses. One thing we didn't have is nanny state liberalism and bloody face book
Don't kid yourself that your age group aren't racist too that's when your heads are out of yer arses
As for the poverty stuff Ireland was even in the 80s a lot richer than most of the World

What the hell is that?

I would like to see what Ireland was back like then to be honest.
I'd be from outside Dublin so they'd be different issues/etc.
I'd mainly like to see were people happy/etc.

FFS I remember growing up in the 70's and 80's and it was a depressing hole. Things are much better now. Ireland is a much better country especially as we have finally got the jackboot of the church off our throats. It's not perfect but it is a far more tolerant country than it was.

I have some very conservative close family members who would be firmly in the "the country was better in the past" brigade but its purely because of the liberalisation of marriage, women getting control over their bodies and the decline of their beloved church in modern Ireland.

EdgeCase wrote: »

There are people who reminisce about the great old days of Telecom Éireann when everything was all high tech and wonderful.

I read the history of it and they were diabolically bad in the 1970s and early 80s to the point that the telephone service in a lot of parts of the country was like something that belonged in a museum of 1920s technology.

It then installed a bunch of digital exchanges in the 80s and briefly was cutting edge until it didn't invest and got passed out by the world again and was a relatively laggard by the mid 90s.

If you wanted to make a call from Cork to Dublin, you'd nearly need to consider taking out a mortgage and there was basically no internet.

It was bog standard and grossly overpriced.

Likewise people going on about the old Irish Rail being nice. It was rough, really inconsistent, the trains were often clapped out bone shakers and it usually smelled like an old pub.

yup

remember taking a train back from Dublin after an AI final sometime mid nineties... not a single bit of unoccupied space

It just parked itself on the line somewhere in the midlands for about 2 hours

Think the engine gave in

Irish Guitarist wrote: »

I often see people younger than me reminiscing about things that are completely false. For instance lads in their twenties or thirties harking back to the good old days when they played outside instead of playing video games. If you're under the age of forty home computers and video game consoles have existed all your life.

And before them were the snooker & pool halls and video game arcades, where you could shelter from the suns rays all day. "outside" meant cider crazed youth time, down a lane or in a park.

Kilometres na gcopaleen wrote: »

It's a weird one and a phenomenon I've noticed too on online groups. FWIW, in my experience, Dublin is safer, cheerier than it was in the 1990s when I first started wandering about it regularly. I still hear of break ins and muggings but especially the latter seem far less common than back then. It is strange seeing people saying how much better things were back in the day when my abiding impression of Dublin in the late '70s and the '80s was a poor city being destroyed by heroin addiction. Of course addiction and all concommitant problems still exist but they don't seem to define the city the way they used to so it seems strange that people are like "ah back in the day things were great." The amount of people who think that cops should be battering people is frightening too, everyone invokes Lugs Brannigan like he put the whole place to rights.

the 80s/90's was also the golden age of joyriding and bank robberies

Yeah. Nostalgia can be a dangerous thing. I mean, I hear people lamenting the 70's Ireland for God's sake. They forget the crippling poverty and unemployment. Unemployment rates that would be FAR higher if it were not for the staggering amounts of emigration.

People would emigrate to the UK and the US and basically would never be seen again because transport costs were SO high and, in many cases, they were there illegally.

Standard of living in general was very poor: Food was basic and hadn't changed much since the 40s. The economic climate showed no signs of improving and the whole world was deep in the middle of a cold war.

And as for the vaunted "respect for authority". There is a difference between respecting authority and kowtowing to the church and an overtly corrupt and self-serving government. People say "Oh, look at all the perverts and sex-crimes you have today. Didn't have that in my day". You did. But it wasn't reported because, however bad women have it today, it was so so SO much worse back then. But they had no voice because of said "authorities".

Perverts back then were the gay community: THEY were the ones who were assaulting young boys everywhere. Not the "authorities"

I'm sure, 40 years from now people will look upon the utopia that was 201X. Forgetting the rapid rise in racist, isolationist nationalism especially in the US and eastern Europe. The rampant homophobia in eastern Europe. The constant fear of terrorism and the hate-mongering that is both a symptom and cause of it. They will forget the boom and bust of the world economy. Will forget the people who bought houses only for them to be worthless a year later. They will forget that right now our economy is in the same place as it was at the height of the Celtic Tiger yet we have housing shortages and homelessness and always will have them.

They will point out the further merging of peoples and cultures but will forget people drownling in their thousands as they flee war-torn countries to countries that don't want them or can't handle them. They will forget the photo of a drowned baby laying face down on a popular pleasure beach.

They will laugh at the quaintness of emerging Social Media platforms but will ignore how they became a cesspool of hate and profiteering and agenda-driven misinformation.

They will point out how we were never so well off but will forget that we had to work harder and longer than ever before and use transport infrastructure that was not up to the task. Will forget people's 4 hour daily commute.

But, nostalgia is not new and will be here forever. Each generation looks back at the past with rose-tinted glasses and at the next generation as a bunch of lazy, entitled snowflakes (God I hate that term). It's just that now we are in an age where the average persons reminiscing can reach an extremely wide audience instantly and easily.