Living through the Celtic Tiger years in Dublin

The phrase still comes up in Dublin pubs, usually delivered with a half-smile and a slow shake of the head. The Celtic Tiger. It rolls off the tongue in a way that sounds almost mythical, as though Ireland spent a decade in a fever dream between 1995 and 2008 and woke up to find the streets paved with debt instead of gold. For anyone who lived in the capital during those years, the phrase carries weight. It is not a statistic. It is a memory of cranes on the skyline, queues outside estate agents, and a country that suddenly believed it could outpace the rest of Europe.

For an Australian reader, the closest parallel is the mining boom that reshaped Perth, drove rents through the roof in Karratha, and filled fly-in fly-out workers with cash. The Irish boom was different in texture but followed a similar shape: cheap credit, a global appetite for a particular product, and a political class that convinced itself the good times were normal. Both booms ended in tears. Both left ghost towns of a kind.

Dublin in those years was a city being remade while you queued for a flat white. Apartment blocks rose in the docklands where warehouses used to sit. The Luas tram lines were ripped open and stitched back together, and the entire time you could feel the ground shifting, not metaphorically but actually. Every pavement seemed to be coming up.

I remember walking along the canal near Portobello and counting nine cranes against the sky. None of us had ever seen anything like it, and yet we behaved as if it would simply go on forever.

Cranes over the Liffey

Dublin's skyline changed more between 1998 and 2006 than it had in the previous century. The Liberty Hall development, the cluster of office blocks around Spencer Dock, the new O'Connell Street bridge with its harp-shaped pylon — these were not just buildings, they were announcements. They told the world, and the world in 2005 was paying attention, that Ireland was open for serious business.

The work was everywhere, and so was the money. Electricians who had been earning modest wages in the early nineties were suddenly driving German saloons. Plumbers booked out six months ahead. My uncle, a carpenter on and off for years, was being flown west to build holiday homes for German buyers. He did not understand why the money was there. We just took it.

Compare that to Western Australia in the same period, when iron ore prices sent thousands of workers to Kalgoorlie and the Pilbara. The same pattern: tradespeople who had been doing it tough for a decade found themselves suddenly in the money. The booms spoke different languages but had the same accent.

A million conversations about property

There was a particular dinner-party question that came up in Dublin between roughly 2002 and 2007. Not how are you, not what's the news, but are you buying. Property was the national sport. Estate agents had the cultural status that auction houses have in Sydney today. People who could barely read a balance sheet were trading in developer's sites with three-bed semis in Kildare as the prize.

A friend of mine, fresh out of college, took out a one-hundred-percent mortgage on a one-bed apartment in Ranelagh and felt he had made it. He was twenty-three. In Sydney today, the same story plays out in Surry Hills or Newtown, where a first-home buyer in their twenties talks about getting in before they are priced out forever. The mechanics are identical, only the agents wear different suits.

When I asked a friend what would happen if prices stopped going up, he looked at me as though I had insulted his mother. Prices would not stop going up. Anyone who has watched a Brisbane couple stretch for a fourth investment unit in the last five years will recognise the look.

The new faces on the corner

Walk down Parnell Street in 2006 and you could hear Polish, Lithuanian, Romanian, Mandarin, and Brazilian, with a smattering of Dublinese between the shops. By 2008, roughly ten percent of the population had been born abroad. Polish delis, Brazilian bakeries, and Chinese buffets appeared in places that had known nothing but the same two pubs and a chipper.

The integration was not always smooth, and there are still scars, but for someone in their twenties it was exhilarating. The corner shop near me in Stoneybatter became a Polish grocery, then a Somali café, then a betting shop. The city felt like it was being rewritten. In Carlton, Melbourne, the same thing happened a generation earlier with Greek and Italian arrivals. Dublin got the same gift, in its own way.

When the music cut out

There is no single moment when a boom ends. It bleeds. The first real warning in Dublin was February 2007, when Anglo Irish Bank reported a thirty-percent drop in profits and its shares were hammered. Most of us did not know what Anglo Irish Bank was, which was, in itself, a kind of warning. The bank was a creature of the boom, grown in five years from a small Dublin lender to a property-fuelled giant. When it began to fall, the whole edifice came with it.

By September 2008, AIB, Bank of Ireland, and the rest were effectively insolvent. The government guarantee came on a Tuesday night: bondholders made whole, the rest of us left to figure it out. The IMF arrived in November 2010, the first time in Irish history. In Kalgoorlie, the hangover took the form of empty mining camps. In Dublin, it was ghost estates in Longford, unfinished blocks in Lucan, and a generation of young graduates who emigrated in their tens of thousands. Most of them ended up in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne and the inner west of Sydney.

The night Dublin stayed up

A less-noted feature of the Celtic Tiger was the night-time economy. Dublin in the late nineties had rolled up the pavements at half ten, except for a few stubborn late bars in Temple Bar. By 2005, the clubs in Harcourt Street and the new places around Cope Street stayed open until three, four, five in the morning. The Button Factory, the Village, the Pod — names that meant nothing in 1998 were currency by 2006.

The cultural change was sharp. Irish drinking culture has always been heavy, but the boom added a layer of self-conscious glamour that had not been there before. Bottle service appeared. VIP rooms appeared. In Sydney, the same shift had happened in Kings Cross a decade earlier, and in Melbourne the inner-city strip along Brunswick Street was going through its own version.

When the crash came, the late bars went first. The Village closed. The Pod closed. The city went back to its older rhythm of closing at a reasonable hour and going home. The Tiger had been, among other things, a four-year party that nobody wanted to acknowledge was ending.

What the comparisons miss

It is tempting, looking back, to treat the Celtic Tiger as a moral fable. We were greedy, we were foolish, we believed in property, and we were punished. There is truth in that, but it is not the whole truth. The boom also paid for the modernisation of a country stuck in the mud for decades. Roads were built. Broadband arrived. A generation got the chance to travel and to believe that a life in Dublin could be as good as a life in London or Sydney.

It also created, for a brief window, a kind of confidence Ireland had not had in living memory. You could see it in the way people walked through the city, faster, taller, with a look that said, we are not a small country anymore. Compare that to the way Perth swaggered in 2012, when the cranes on St Georges Terrace were saying what Dublin's cranes had said a decade before.

The other thing the simple moral tales miss is that the boom was genuinely enjoyable while it lasted. A life in Dublin in 2006 was, by any honest measure, a more pleasant life than a life in Dublin in 1996. The fact that it ended badly does not erase the fact that it happened, and the people who lived through it were not fools for enjoying it.

The long echo in the city today

Dublin now is a city shaped by the Celtic Tiger and its aftermath. The skyline still carries the marks of the boom. The Convention Centre Dublin, the Aviva Stadium, the docklands apartments, the IFSC — all built or begun in those years, all still in use. So are the scars. The ghost estate on the edge of Longford town, the empty shopping centre in Kildare, the unfinished motorway interchange outside Gorey. Drive out the M50 northbound and you can see them from the road.

There is also, quietly, a generation that came of age during the boom and has decided it will not be caught twice. They talk about rent the way their parents talked about mortgages. They move cities every few years. They treat job security as a rumour. That is the inheritance of the Celtic Tiger, more than any building or balance sheet: a national attitude towards money that is warier, and a national sense of what a boom actually costs when the music stops.

The same warier generation exists in Australia, particularly in Perth and Brisbane, where the post-mining-boom correction left a mark still being absorbed. The conversations in a share house in Fremantle are not, in the end, all that different from those in Phibsboro. Both are working out what to do with the long shadow of a decade that promised everything and delivered most of it as a lesson.

Other pieces on the slow changes Dublin has been through sit in the archive at derekpowens.com/blog, and the next piece in this series will look at the Dublin coffee scene of the late 2000s, and the small cafés on Georges Street where the boom and the new Ireland first tasted itself.