Do you remember when every house had to have decking out the back

I'm all for it to be honest. Considering the amount of rain we get its nice having an area outside that doesn't turn into a swamp 5 months of the year.

I don't know how much it cost but I am sure the cost of it is miniscule compared to many other boomtime essentials. Like 4 euro coffees and croatian holiday homes.

Went into B&Q the other day, and some c**t in an orange vest asked me if I wanted decking, luckily I got in the first punch.

Gophur wrote: »

Couldn't the OP come up with something other than a re-cycled Ross O'Carroll Kelly joke?

Apparently not.

We once made decking out of pallets to piss our neighbours off.

Thats actually a really good idea.

Deckland Declan?

The McWilliams stereotype?

I don't live south of Dublin in a new-money area so no, I don't remember every house having to have decking.

Aside from the fact that decking seems to have been the reserve of a minority, and not the majority, of Irish homeowners, there is some implicit suggestion in the OP's post that there's something wrong with decking -- or what it stands for.

Decking stands for narcissistic consumerism, it seems. It stands for people wanting things they have never been able to afford. It's not so much that laying these planks of wood in your back garden is particularly grand or opulent by European standards, it's that these sorts of forays into consumerism are something that is largely a new frontier for the Irish consumer group.

People like to look back on the celtic tiger period and recollect expensive household furniture and expensive holidays as though it was some sort of mad folly. Not necessarily. In many cases, it was just Irish people catching up with the rest of the world, just as our economy 'caught up' with the rest of the world from about 1986 onwards. (The entire Celtic Tiger period was a long episode in playing catch-up).

Regardless of whether you think such items, or leisure expenses, were necessary (and I would say they often are, for leisure is an important feature of human development and a requirement for a happy, productive society) the point is that this sort of behaviour was not the reserve of the Irish.

If you want to roll your eyes at something, roll them at consumerism in general.

But as far as I can see, the Irish were merely catching up with what is common practice elsewhere in many parts of Europe (and I include Northern Europe) and in the rest of the developed world. And such was, and is, their right.