The 70's and 80's in Ireland

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There was no housing crisis rents were cheap gen z has it tough now you can work hard and have no chance of buying a house while be stuck paying rent for mediocre accomodation if you went to a cafe or a pub people talked instead of looking at phones now people spend hours on social media or uploading pictures to Instagram now at any public event people are taking photos or selfies

yup, and we still managed to resolve it, even when we were pretty much broke as a country, compared to our modern more wealthy nation!

There was a time when there were only two dual carriageways in the country.

One was the Stillorgan bypass which took TD's to Leopardstown and the other was the Naas dual carriageway that took TD's to The Curragh (or maybe Punchestown).

Yes my mistake very few people used satellite TV in the 80s you had to buy expensive satellite recievers and get the dish installed to recieve European TV channels

I think sky TV started sometime in the 90s

MTV USA was the first time people had a chance to see the latest music videos apart from the few videos that were shown on itv or top of the pops

Most TV stations would shut down around midnight .pirate radio stations like radio Dublin were popular before 2fm was launched.

Irish cable networks got satellite tv pretty much as soon as it was available. At that time very few people had satellite TV, the systems were outrageously expensive and most UK households didn’t have cable. It was a very accessible window on the world for cities like Dublin, Cork etc .. there was big cable uptake to get access to uk terrestrial tv, so Ireland got satellite tv channels very early and they were widely available, in Stark contrast, at the same time rural Ireland (and even in many large towns) it was very much 2 channel land if you weren’t in reach of UK overspill. So many areas in the southwest and west had no access to anything except RTE.

I often wonder if that had a big cultural impact?

This is from the very end of the 80s and turn of the 90s - local Cork cable tv coverage of Prince in 1990 with footage of ticket sales from Xmas 89. It’s the end of that era, but it gives you a sense of the place: https://youtu.be/IzqNZX7b0Zg - it wasn’t all grim.

Just an interesting clip as it’s big names, stadium production, yet quite unpolished but energetic local tv cable production, rather than Ireland viewed thoughRTE’s sometimes (certainly in that era) very starchy lens, and kinda gives some sense of how things were on the cusp of big changes around the corner in the couple of decades that followed.

I'm too young to remember but a work friend of mine from the Midlands went to college in Dublin in the early 90s. He commented that the gap between Dublin and the Midlands was a lot bigger then in terms of product availability, fashion and even cultural attitudes. You could get condoms in a vending machine in ucd and couldn't get them at all in his home town. The chain supermarkets like dunnes actually didn't have the same products that were available in Dublin, trends in fashion were noticeably 2 or more years lagging. Even the local cinema didn't have the same selection of films. Basic Instinct wasn't on show, he had to go see it in Dublin. I found that fascinating because his home place is just about 100km from the M50 but I suppose a lot of the trends and product availability are down to the invention of the Internet.

Great thread this. One thing about the rent being cheaper in the 80's, well some of the places people rented, they'd be raised at the UN today if they were let now. Talk about cold and dingy flats.

Hobbies were also a big thing. A lot of boys had one or two specialist hobbies of various types, like model making, music, CB's electronics, early computer games, fishing etc. The things the guys owned and saved up for were very precious indeed and often the talk of the area. I remember racing handle bars on some early "racers" were the thing. Great respect for anyone who had a hobby.

I think there was some progress in the 80's in consumer choice, for instance in terms nearly everyone had an automatic front loader washing machine, believe it or not that was not the case in the 70's. Microwaves came in the 80's, frozen food options, I know not a great advance, but for the suffering women of Ireland there was some choice. Some got large fridge freezers. Cars got better, in the late 70's I can recall countless pushing of FIAT's and the likes for neighbours, still happened in the 80's, but less so.

TV was better in the 80's for certain, people have already mentioned Dallas and the like. C4 came along for instance, although not very good at the start. Radio Cassette Stereos and the cassettes themselves, wow, you could copy albums, huge progress that.

I loved the 70's and 80's and really appreciate having grown up in them, I learned a lot of skills that in many ways couldn't be learned today, given the life lessons in the neighbourhood and the freedom we were allowed. It was mad really, large family, no updates to the house since the 60's, make do and all the rest. Very funny characters around.

My dad has passed away a few years back, but my god looking at what I have to worry about compared to him with so many more children in the house, no idea how the hell he did it.

I find this point really interesting and I see it on realing in the years and still can't get my head around it.... there was a large number of people looking to ban things (or more often keep things banned) that were none of their concern. Was there some sort of epidemic which prevented people minding their own business or what was the craic? These people are also for the most part still alive today. Have they been cured?

For me certain things stand out from the late 70s and 80s.

Entertainment.

MT USA with Vincent Hanley where we could watch vidoes of US based artists like The Cars, Styx, Bryan Adams, Bruce Springsteen.

Not relying on RTE to show maybe a couple of videos or relying on TOTP which RTE only started showing at some stage in 80s.

Huge concerts and massive artists playing likes of Slane.

Other thing that stands out is coming to Dublin and spending hours in Virgin Megastore (weren't they one of first places to sell condoms openly).

U2 suddenly making it huge in US with Joshua Tree was massive proof that we Irish could actually do it.

Live Aid - all down to a belligerent lad from Dublin who rightly called the place a banana republic.

Sport.

Appearance of and then winning in All Irelands by weaker counties e.g Galway, Offaly

Meath and Dublin at each others throats.

Euros 1988 where we looked like we belonged and beating the English.

Barry McGuigan.

Sean Kelly and Stephen Roche dominating in cycling and Nisaan tour of Ireland where you saw the big guys in an international sport.

Dennis Talyor and his mammoth win over the great Steve Davis.

Mayo getting to first All Ireland in 38 years and then of course losing

Live English League matches on RTE Sport Stadium on saturdays

Johnny Giles, Eamon Dunphy and Bill O'Herlihy making even boring matches entertaining in a weird way

Politics - Current affairs

Mountbatten attack and paras killed in Warrenpoint same day (lots of people celebrated that especially)

pope's visit - half the country seemed to have gone

Hunger strikes

Falklands war

Brighton bombing nearly wiping out old thatcher

Enniskillen bombing and Gordon Wilson on Late Late Show

Gibraltar killing 3 PIRA, Stone attack at their funeral and two British soldiers killed at further funeral

Yeah lots of bad news involving Northern Ireland.

haughey telling us to tighten our belts (fooking lying theiving scumbag)

Knock Airport opening - had a 747 before Cork 🤣

I’m not sure people were happier tbh. It’s easy to look back though a haze of nostalgia. We all do it. Times were tough. I remember the time we got the oil after years of having no central heating switched on…

I also remember basically never going on holidays. Except this one big mad trip to France by ferry which seemed like an epic journey to an exotic land, far far way…

The only very big negative I found was I was given soooo much hassle in school over my non religious upbringing. I genuinely hated school and only think I began to feel properly at home in Ireland when I got to university. It wasn’t minor bullying either - I was dragged out of class, brought to offices and had various priests and lay teachers trying to “intervene” by attempting get my parents to baptise me. I was even told by a priest that if I wouldn’t be able to go to secondary school and my “career” would be over..

I used to just avoid school a lot and ended up changing school multiple times and eventually doing my leaving Cert in a totally private “grind” place, which was fine actually and suited me well - got to hang out in the city centre. But I think for me a lot of media, tv and even early internet (my late teens hit that era) definitely was my “escape” from a certain aspect of 80s / 90s Ireland.

It wasn’t all bad by any means. I’d a great upbringing in what were fun - almost idyllic suburbs, with loads of freedom, friends and it was very enjoyable. I just didn’t quite fit old official Ireland at all.

And they had their own home grown version called "Aimen High", pop acts from home and abroad broadcast in 1975. I doubt anyone remembers though.

I was there too. Great concert. Stockton's Wing supporting was a bit incongruous though.

Re: MT USA - ran from 1984 to 1987. Sunday afternoons. The repeat was Thursday or Friday night I think.

I grew up in a small town in the south east. There was a high number of punks in the town (way outside the norm for the population size) which meant getting exposed to bands like The Fall, Wire, Buzzcocks, UK Subs, The Exploited, Pere Ubu, The Ruts etc from early teenage years. I can still see the graffiti down the alleyways and outside the cinema. In the 1990s, one pub started putting on gigs every weekend.

There were over 60 pubs in the town at one point, all open every day. Socialising was serious business then. One of the hotels ran a nightclub, another had one occasionally. There was the odd indie disco in one of the more sympathetic pubs or in the youth clubs.

In terms of television, if you lived in the town you had piped TV - BBC1, BBC2, HTV and S4C. We lived a mile outside so reception was intermittent / poor but I saw a lot of UK programmes in friend's houses after school and at weekends. I had one very good friend who would tape me stuff every week. The widespread cablelink service came at the end of the 1980s.

There were half a dozen video libraries in the town at one stage. One of them was still renting out films from the three UK DPP lists (prosecuted / non-prosecuted / section 3 video nasties) until the early 1990s. I remember when Goodfellas came out on VHS rental in 1991, there was a massive waiting list for it.

Our cinema had one screen. It opened seven days a week until 1976; closed for 10 months and after re-opening in 1977 was weekends only until its eventual closure in March 1990. The last films shown were Casualties Of War and Child's Play (11pm Late Show). When it was open every day it showed a wide variety of films, many controversial like Straw Dogs and later on, Death Weekend and The Brute.

There's a perception that outside the main urban areas was completely backward and a culture void. Definitely not my experience.

It was endemic then. Was still very much around in the 90s when Playboy and lads mags became a (legal) thing here, too.

Partly the rosary-swinging oul wans who missed their vocation to become a nun, partly the sex-negative feminists, and we still have that unholy alliance to this day with demonising sex work, TotRL etc

We used to give out about Ian Paisley etc but basically we (well, ~40+yo then) were in our own way a nation of Ian Paisleys. Religious zealotry and intolerance everywhere coupled with absolute terror of the notion that someone, somewhere might actually be enjoying themselves.

Easy to say when you were just a kid then, not the parent worrying about losing their job, mortgage rates at 15 or 20% and a stack of bills (and more kids than you really wanted because no contraception)