FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL (1989)

The ‘Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart’ – more commonly known as the Berlin Wall – was a heavily guarded concrete barrier that physically and ideologically divided Berlin from 1961 to 1989. The Eastern Bloc claimed that the wall was erected to protect its population from fascist elements conspiring to prevent the “will of the people” in building a socialist state in East Berlin. In practice, however, the Wall served to prevent the massive emigration and defection that had marked East Germany and the communist Eastern Bloc during the post-World War II period. U2 were actually hanging around Berlin around the time the Wall finally came down, but it was American singer and actor David Hasselhoff – whose single ‘Looking for Freedom’ was number one in the German charts in the eight weeks preceding the fall of the Wall – who remains almost inexplicably linked in the public mind with this seismic historic moment that reunified Germany. Footage of ‘The Hoff’ playing a free concert on the demolished Wall to tens of thousands of delighted Berliners will undoubtedly be played for centuries to come. The mind boggles!

ITALIA 90

The Ireland of the 1980s was a very divided, repressed and depressed place, but things began to look brighter as the new decade began. There are those who argue that the seeds of the Celtic Tiger were planted during the flag-waving joyousness of the Italia ’90 tournament. It all came down to one single heart-stopping moment on a balmy June night in the Stadio Luigi Ferraris in Genoa when Packie Bonner saved that Romanian penalty and a deafening chorus of “Olé, Olé, Olé, Olé” erupted, echoing through every private home and public house across Ireland. Seconds later, David O’Leary’s winning penalty sealed the deal: manager Jackie Charlton’s Irish squad had somehow made it through to the quarter-finals of the World Cup. The entire country partied as though we’d won the entire tournament. Needless to say, we ultimately didn’t, but it was definitely a psychological turning point for the nation. Suddenly, the Irish could actually see themselves as potential winners, up there with the very best of them, a notion that would quite literally have been laughed at in the preceding decade.

THE GULF WAR (1990-91)

The seven-month Gulf War was the first properly televised armed conflict. When Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army invaded Kuwait in August 1990, there was immediate international condemnation… and a very quick military response. President George HW Bush deployed US forces into Saudi Arabia and urged other nations to follow suit. Pretty soon, the largest military alliance since WWII was formed (35 nations in all). As the troops moved in, so did the CNN crews. With rolling 24/7 news reports from the frontlines, the war became a form of macabre entertainment. It quickly earned the nickname ‘Video Game War’ after the daily broadcast of images from cameras aboard US bombers during Operation Desert Storm (which followed the preparatory Operation Desert Shield). It all kicked off on August 2nd, 1990 and lasted until February 28th of the following year when the Iraqis fled Kuwait. Usually wars are big business for arms manufacturers and for those who rebuild what has been destroyed. But now TV news corporations were in on the action (quite literally). Needless to say, the 2003 invasion of Iraq by George W. Bush was even more ghoulishly voyeuristic. Even the eventual hanging of Saddam Hussein in 2006 was on the news.

Collapse of the USSR (1991)

The USSR was fashioned in the heat of revolution and war. Russia was its heart but Russia also needed satellites and buffer zones, a socialist empire, and that was the USSR. It withstood civil war and sucked Hitler’s armies into a winter war they could never win. From 1945 it defined itself in opposition to the US and matched it step for step, nuclear power, global intrigue, space. This was a world power. But it was undermined by an ill-conceived invasion of Afghanistan, which drained and demoralised its armed forces, an anti-alcohol campaign that greatly reduced the state’s income and a process of economic reform and administrative restructuring initiated under Mikael Gorbachev from 1985 onwards. The Baltics began pressing for independence from 1986. Then Kazakhstan. The skittles tumbled. The Berlin wall fell.

Gorbachev handed over to the Russian president Boris Yeltsin and the USSR finally broke up in September 1991. The impact was colossal. Political Krakatoa. For a while it seemed that a tide of freedom was washing around the world. But when an empire implodes what follows is rarely pretty. The vacuum in Afghanistan was filled by mujahedeen and the Taliban.

Yugoslavia collapsed into chaos. The Soviet Stan states like Kazakhstan were largely commandeered by despots. In Russia there was a decade of humiliation, social and economic despondency and Islamic terrorism. The insurgency in Chechnya was beaten down (for now) with enormous brutality and destruction.

Out of the ashes came oil and gas and Vladimir Putin. The power returned and the swagger followed. And they’ve developed a very sophisticated capacity for cyber warfare, one that has seen them disrupting politics in many countries, frequently in support of far right movements, something that would make Lenin and Stalin, for all their own oligarchic tendencies, turn in their graves. But this isn’t the USSR any more. It’s Russia and the big wheel has turned.

The break-up of Yugoslavia (1991/2)

To most Irish people Yugoslavia meant cheap holidays and wine and fierce football. You could get there for a pittance if you hitched a ride on a Medugorje pilgrim plane. It was socialist, but local worker councils had real heft. It was multi-ethnic and comprised six separate republics in a federal arrangement agreed after World War II to reorganise, rebalance and defuse the Balkan tinderbox.

There was a lot to defuse. Different waves of history had left tidemarks in language and religion and ethnic strife. The Socialist Federal Republic managed it all and generated economic progress under the leadership of the wily Josip Broz Tito but after his death in 1980 it began to unravel with increased foreign debt, economic stagnation and nationalist movements stoking ethnic tensions. Plus, the Reagan administration engaged in general subversion of Yugoslavia.

The rise to power in 1987 of Slobodan Milosevic loosed the demon of expansionist Serbian uber-nationalism. Hell followed. From 1991 the republics started seceding and Yugoslavia fell apart. Incident triggered incident and one atrocity was met by another. It was hugely destructive and savage, characterised by war crimes including massacre, rape and ethnic cleansing. We grew familiar with names like Dubrovnik, Vukovar, Sarajevo and, perhaps most haunting of all, Srebrenica, where 8,000 Bosnians were murdered in cold blood by the Bosnian Serb Army of Republika Srpska under the command of General Ratko Mladi.

It finally ground to a halt through NATO intervention. Many years passed before Mladic and his equally loathsome boss Radovan Karadic were rounded up. Plenty of war criminals escaped sanction.

All that said, the break-up eventually led to peace and gathering prosperity. The already westward-leaning Slovenia and Croatia joined the EU and the others are in the waiting room. Nobody would go back to the old days.

Can the same be said of other places scarred by similar atrocities, like Rwanda? And if not, why not?

CATHOLIC CHURCH SCANDALS (Early '90s onwards)

There was uproar when Sinead O’Connor ripped up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live and declared, “Fight the real enemy!” The controversial singer stated that she was referring to the cover-up of child sex abuse within the Catholic Church, and she was roundly pilloried for it at the time. However, Sinead turned out to be right. That same year, an American woman named Annie Murphy shocked the Irish nation when she revealed to Gay Byrne on The Late Late Show that she had had an affair – and subsequently a son – with Bishop Eamonn Casey. In light of the darkness to come, however, this was relatively tame stuff. Shocking revelations emerged about the likes of Fr. Michael Ledwith, Fr. Brendan Smith and Fr. Sean Fortune – all three had been abusing young children for decades and had their crimes covered up by the Church – and suddenly the floodgates were open. More and more victims of clerical abuse started to come forward, and pretty soon the horrific scale of the scandal became apparent. Drawing on the testimonies of nearly 2,000 witnesses, the Irish Child Abuse Commission published a lengthy report in 2009, detailing cases of emotional, physical and sexual abuse of children over 70 years. And that was just one of numerous inquiries.

DECRIMINALISATION OF HOMOSEXUALITY (1993)

Homosexuality – or at least homosexual activity – was still considered a crime in Catholic Ireland when Hot Press was launched in 1977. That same year, Senator David Norris began a case against the draconian laws, but it took many years to achieve victory. Norris’s case came before the High Court in 1980, where it was rejected, and before the Supreme Court in 1983, where it was also rejected by five judges who found that the laws did not contravene the Constitution. The determined Norris then took the case to the European Court of Human Rights, with the aid of future president Mary Robinson, where judges finally ruled that Irish laws contravened the Convention on Human Rights. Five years after that, in 1993, the laws were finally changed. It proved a watershed moment for gay Irish people, allowing them to live their lives more openly, but it then took more than another two decades for same-sex marriage to be legalised. Most Irish citizens were very proud when the referendum passed, but it’s actually quite shameful stuff when you think about it.

THE LEGALISATION OF CONTRACEPTION IN IRELAND (1993)

The Irish have endured a long and, in retrospect, deeply mortifying history of sexual repression. Younger generations will find this hard to believe, but there wasn’t even any basic family planning in the Republic until the late 1970s, and up until 1993 it was actually illegal – or at least extremely difficult – to buy condoms. While it wasn’t against the law to own or use contraception, laws restricting their sale meant that the vast majority of the heterosexual population had to rely on the rhythm method to avoid unwanted pregnancy. That or travel to the UK (the women could bring them back after they’d had their abortions).

When Richard Branson allowed condoms to be sold in his Dublin Virgin Megastore in 1990, there was uproar. “When we were asked by the Irish Family Planning Association (IFPA) if we would let them sell condoms in our Dublin Virgin, we were happy to oblige,” the entrepreneur recalled in a 2015 blogpost. “In May 1990 the IFPA were convicted for selling condoms in the Megastore and fined £400. The IFPA appealed the conviction on Valentine’s Day 1991 and I testified on their behalf. The judge increased the fine to £500 and warned future infringement could result in imprisonment.”

It wasn’t until a couple of years later that the laws were properly relaxed. Today there are condom vending machines in most pubs and nightclubs. Proper order.