Am I the only one ?

I was living in the UK during the tiger years. I came back for a holiday to see the folks and couldn't believe the crazy sh*te that was going on. Massively over priced everything. Women working on checkouts discussing that coming weekends latest shopping trip to New York. Most of the green spaces in the town had flats and McMansions of varying degrees of tackiness.

Most of the retail jobs seemed to be filled by eastern europeans. Bord failte ads had gone multi-cultural as opposed to the white and Irish ones of my day,not a bad thing and not criticising eastern europeans. People that I'd gone to school with where driving ridiculously expensive cars, had kids with pretentiously Irish and I think, self-invented Irish names. Everywhere I looked I saw god-awful fake tan and insanely white teeth.

I didn't have a piece of it and as it transpired many ordinary Irish people who'd been here while I was away didn't either. What shocked me was that it was obvious that everyone was living on huge amounts of credit. It was an enormous house of cards that was inevitably going to collapse and yet people genuinely didn't seem to realise the party was going to end.

It seems to me, having been an outsider looking in, that a lot of people went mad with greed and stupidity.