Stories from the Celtic Tiger Years *Mod Warning in OP PLEASE READ*

I remember when a co worker went to shop in lidl for the first time ever 12 months into the recession. He came back to work the day after and was amazed at the prices and said to me "and people have been shopping there for years"

the_syco wrote: »

We had two options;

Bail out the banks, and we'd still have banks in Ireland.

Not bail out the banks, and use the banks not in Ireland.

The problem with the latter is that we'd be asking for a bank not in Ireland to lend to a country that has no banks, and no way of enforcing debt. Unlike the UK where they can take your stuff and sell it, apart from the Monk coming over to you, there's not much reason for you to pay up if you don't want to. So if the bank was going to lend to anyone in Ireland, the risk would be high, so thus would the interest.

Iceland didn't bail out the banks. They did the right thing and let them go balls to the wall. They also jailed the bankers and gave the middle finger to the Brits, Dutch and Germans who were demanding their ill-gotten gains.


Ireland actually had a workable solution but it was torpedoed by Timothy Geithner, another Goldman Sachs alumnus scumbag.



Saying there was no other way is bullsh1t.

The problem was not bailing out the banks as such but rather bailing out ALL the banks with a blanket guarantee.

Some institutions should have been left to implode.

duffysfarm wrote: »

I remember when a co worker went to shop in lidl for the first time ever 12 months into the recession. He came back to work the day after and was amazed at the prices and said to me "and people have been shopping there for years"

most Irish people didnt shop in Lidl during the boom. People looked down on anyone who shopped there, its only poor people who shop there I remember someone telling me.

salonfire wrote: »

Just because you don't have any savings doesn't mean everyone is the same.

People had their whole life savings in the bank. These are the people who were rightly bailed out.

Deposits are guaranteed. What are you talking about?

I blew €2000 on Blackjack online
I had the Celtic Tiger BMW
I flew Cork to Dublin a few times for the feck of it
Ordering 3 bottles of Champagne in the Palace bar
Several skiing trips
Weekend breaks away to European cities
In the position I could buy pretty much anything I wanted without being too bothered about the price.

By the end of 2008 I had €54k of unsecured debt. I was 30 yrs old and on €70k pa with no kids or mortgage. It all got a bit real then with wage freezes and cuts. Went on massive drive to pay back everything and cleared it all by the end of 2010

partyguinness wrote: »

I nearly bought a house in April 2007 (top of the cliff time) for €290k and I was going to rent out to Poles- it was the thing at the time. Even put my deposit down and 100% mortgage offer to hand. Had no intention of living there.

For some unknown reason I just changed my mind and I honestly to this day cannnot understand why I just pulled out. Must have been some sort of guardian angel.

But anyway, all hell broke loose and the same houses were selling the following 1-2 years for €40k and the estate is still only half built to this day and looks pretty miserable.

Lucky escape.

You seriously dodged a bullet there.

partyguinness wrote: »

I blew €2000 on Blackjack online
I had the Celtic Tiger BMW
I flew Cork to Dublin a few times for the feck of it
Ordering 3 bottles of Champagne in the Palace bar
Several skiing trips
Weekend breaks away to European cities
In the position I could buy pretty much anything I wanted without being too bothered about the price.

By the end of 2008 I had €54k of unsecured debt. I was 30 yrs old and on €70k pa with no kids or mortgage. It all got a bit real then with wage freezes and cuts. Went on massive drive to pay back everything and cleared it all by the end of 2010

What is the Celtic Tiger BMW? base spec 05/06 316/18 with cloth seats? Seem to be a lot of them around

My biggest and most ridiculous Celtic Tiger splurge...wait for it..

A €250.00 mechanical penis extender...lovely walnut effect presentation box and bag.

Ended up in a skip within two weeks.

I actually worked in a professional services industry between 2002 and 2010 that was heavily linked to the overall property market. Saw some mad crazy spending.

But the one stand out moment from circa 2006 as when my barber was telling me about the holiday villa she bought in Romania.

That's right fcuking Romania. She couldnt even get a direct flight from Ireland.

My haircut went from €7.00 to €12.00 pretty quickly and this was a spit and sawdust type of place not Peter Marks.

Wonder how she is getting on.

I got a full time job in 1999. Think it paid a shade above minimum wage.
I thought I was loaded - I'd never really had a full time job before - I was a late starter.

So, while half the country was raking it in, I was earning feck-all and I was thrilled with myself!! Only credit I was offered was that my credit card limit kept increasing without me asking. Never went into debt.

Boom passed me by in a sense as the crash happened just as I got close to the age at which you'd be getting a summer job on the sites.

It was even more pronounced in small rural towns in the northwest imo especially when viewed through the knowledge of how bad the crash was here.

In my locality which is now home to some of the cheapest houses in Ireland 3 houses with helipads were built in about a 10 mile radius. One is still lived in, nama took one and the other was never finished and I think it ended up in nama too but still hasn't been sold. Another one of the big builds had/has a moat but it's dry now as the pump to keep it filled with water was turned off not long after the crash.

A local fella owned a helicopter that he only bought after getting put off the road while driving his Ferrari and the same buck employed a young fella cash in hand as his driver for when travel by car was more suited. Cab seized everything and sold it all for a fraction of what it cost shortly into the recession.

Friday from about 3 o'clock on, Saturday, Sunday and Monday were for drinking and other leisure activities such as jet skiing or boating on local lakes or stock car rallying at a relatively local disused quarry, loads of bucks got stock cars when they turned 15 or 16.

Very few really bothered moving away when they finished secondary school too much money to be made locally tbh. During a first year cspe class I remember our teacher asking us what we wanted to do when we finished school about three quarters of us said block layers. We did the leaving in 2011 safe to say none of us became block layers.

The crash was brutal. I'd say roughly 2 thirds of the local big big spenders lost their bollox.

The father and myself were going to borrow over 1.5m to buy 22 sites of a second phase of an estate in a small Cavan town about a year before the bubble burst, they were working out at 65K a site and the first phase of houses were selling for 185k at the time.

We would have got the money and all but we decided that it was a bit big for first time developers.

Fast forward 2 years and those houses were worth about 45k and the sites were worth nothing. I'm not sure if the second phase of that development ever got done or someone lost their b****x.

When the pub times changed and pub were allowed to open until 12.30 am, wasn't it the same for Thursday nights and then there was some outcry about people not turning up for work on a Friday morning so they had to set it back an hour on Thursdays? I vaguely remember that happening but those years were pretty blurry.

I got married at the end of the tiger time and the prices for bands and photographers were astronomical. Looking back now on my leather bound €3k photo book as a lasting memory