THE CELTIC TIGER YEARS

(Mid ‘90s-2007)

With its cripplingly high levels of poverty, unemployment and inflation, and extremely low economic growth, Ireland was very much the poor man of Europe at the start of the 1990s. However, from about 1995 up to 2007, largely through the availability of cheap credit, the country experienced an unprecedented period of economic growth now commonly referred to as “The Boom”. Suddenly we were being proudly informed by the Fianna Fail government that we were one of the richest countries in the world. Things quickly accelerated from grim to greed. Not everybody benefitted, of course, but second homes, foreign holidays, designer clothes and brand new cars became the norm for many as the country embraced rampant materialism like a new religion. People ignored the warnings of economist David McWilliams (who was basically decried as a heretic) and listened instead to taoiseach Bertie Ahern who brazenly claimed “the boom is getting boomier” even as the cracks began to show. It all went to hell in a handcart around 2007, and suddenly the party was well and truly over. Sadly, the bill for this extended period of excess still had to be paid. And we’re still paying it today.

RYANAIR TAKES OFF (Mid-‘90s)

Say what you like about Ryanair, but nobody can argue with its success. Since its establishment in 1984, the Irish-owned company has grown from a small indie airline flying the short hop from Waterford to Gatwick into Europe’s largest carrier. They now own more than 300 Boeing jets, employ over 11,000 people and have revenues measured in billions. Not bad going for an airline that started off with just one small 15-seat Embraer Bandeirante turboprop plane.

This success is largely down to the business and marketing genius of Michael O’Leary. The motor-mouthed CEO has toned down his schtick in recent times, and you’d almost miss it. This after all is the man who once told a newspaper, “One thing we have looked at is maybe putting a coin slot on the toilet door, so that people might actually have to spend a pound to spend a penny in the future. Pay-per-pee. If someone wanted to pay £5 to go to the toilet, I’d carry them myself. I would wipe their bums for a fiver.”

It’s expected that Ryanair will eventually start flying to the US. When asked about this, O’Leary declared, “In economy, no frills. In business class, it’ll all be free – including the blow jobs.”

THE BLAIR YEARS (1997-2007)

Tony Blair’s rollercoaster decade of power kicked off to the strains of D:Ream’s ‘Things Can Only Get Better’, but by 2007 things could hardly have been worse. In May 1997, riding the Cool Brittania wave, the 43-year-old won a landslide general election for Labour and became Britain’s youngest Prime Minister since 1812. Initially things went well, with his government introducing the National Minimum Wage Act, Human Rights Act and Freedom of Information Act. His government also devolved power, establishing the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales, and the Northern Ireland Assembly (he was also instrumental in signing of the Good Friday Agreement). Blair’s political downfall began with his puppy-like support for the aggressive foreign policies of the George W. Bush administration. He ensured that the British Armed Forces supported the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan and, more controversially, the 2003 invasion of Iraq (drumming up popular support by misleading the public on weapons of mass destruction… which turned out not to exist). By the time he ceded power to Gordon Brown in 2007, his reputation was fairly in tatters. In 2016, the Iraq Inquiry strongly criticised his actions and described the invasion of the country as “unjustified and unnecessary”. Many believe that Blair should be tried as a war criminal.

THE GOOD FRIDAY AGREEMENT (1998)

As coincidence had it, the 1998 Heineken/Hot Press Awards ceremony took place in Belfast on the very same snowy April night that the Good Friday Agreement was signed. So while Morrissey was giving U2 their ‘Best Band’ gong in a televised ceremony broadcast live on the BBC, Irish history was being made just a few miles away in Stormont. Absolutely unimaginable a few years previously, the power-sharing agreement between the British and Irish governments, and most of the political parties in Northern Ireland, brought an end to 30 blood-soaked years of The Troubles. Also known as the Belfast Agreement, it aimed to set up a nationalist and unionist power-sharing government in the Six Counties. There have been many wobbles and hiccups over the years, but the Agreement has been held to date. Here’s hoping that Brexit doesn’t scupper it…

CLIMATE CHANGE

(Late ë90s onwards)

Scientists used to think that the hole in the ozone layer would eventually trigger a new Ice Age. That thinking has changed, with the consensus being that the planet is rapidly warming up rather than cooling itself down. Either way spells trouble for humanity. The fact remains that our climate is rapidly changing – 2016 was the warmest year on record – and human activity is at least somewhat responsible. Currently some 800 million people (11% of the world’s population) are vulnerable to climate change impacts such as droughts, floods, heat waves, extreme weather events and sea-level rise. Something needs to be done. In 2016, 194 countries signed the Paris Agreement, agreeing to limit global warming and adapt to climate change, in part through the use of nature-based solutions. Unfortunately, there’s a very real possibility that President Trump will pull the US out of the accord. Before he became POTUS, he tweeted, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.” The big worry is that he genuinely believes that…

THE ARRIVAL OF THE INTERNET

(Late '90s/early noughties)

While the Internet had been in existence for a number of years before, Ireland’s very first ISP, Ireland On-Line, was actually started in the Galway home of an entrepreneur named Barry Flanagan on May 15, 1992.

During a 2012 interview to celebrate 20 years of Ireland on the internet, Flanagan recalled, “The aim was as simple as the name suggests – I wanted to put Ireland online. To bring the world to Ireland, and Ireland to the world. The internet was as yet unheard of except within the hallowed halls of academia, but I was convinced that this global network had the potential to transform this country, and would ultimately affect every aspect of our lives and businesses, and allow a new generation of Irish to remain in Ireland yet enjoy the benefits of a global economy and opportunity.” Flanagan wasn’t wrong. It took a few years to go mainstream, but now almost all of this island is online. The internet has certainly transformed all of our lives but, for all of its myriad benefits, it has also proved financially disastrous for many industries… including the music business.

THE BIRTH OF THE iPOD (2001)

Although the late Steve Jobs is widely credited with inventing the iPod, of course he actually didn’t. A genius marketer, Jobs simply took an already existing product and vastly improved it. Portable MP3 players had been around since the mid-1990s, but most of them offered a lacklustre user experience. Flash-memory-based players of the era held only 20 or so songs. Hard-drive players held far more, but were big, heavy and difficult to navigate. Jobs hired top designers and software engineers to create a new MP3 that would work well in tandem with iTunes. On October 23rd, 2001, at a low key event on their Cupertino campus, Apple launched the very first iPod, which packed an impressive 5GB of music storage into a sleek white box no bigger than a cassette tape. Although the tech press and Apple fans alike initially met the new device with scepticism, within three years it was one of the company’s most famous and bestselling products.

MOBILE PHONES

(Early noughties onwards)

Remember the Yuppies? Despite most early models being the size and weight of a brick, the mobile phone was the ultimate ‘must have’ for the Young Urban Professionals of the 1980s. But mobiles had been around for a while before that. Motorola was the first company to produce a handheld mobile phone. On April 3rd, 1973, Martin Cooper, a Motorola researcher and executive, made the first mobile telephone call from handheld subscriber equipment, placing a call to a rival in Bells Labs. Things have taken off since. The fastest growing manmade phenomenon ever, with almost eight billion devices in existence, there are now officially more mobile phones on the planet than there are human beings.

9/11 (2001)

Everybody remembers where they were on that fateful day in September 2001 when Al Qaeda terrorists took over three hijacked passenger jets and carried out coordinated suicide attacks against the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC, killing everybody on board and nearly 3,000 people on the ground (a fourth plane crashed into a Pennsylvania field after the passengers attempted to wrest control from the hijackers). The whole planet shook that day… and it is still shaking following the subsequent US invasion of Iraq and the destabilisation of the entire Middle East region. While most of the American public accepted the official narrative, there are numerous conspiracy theories surrounding the events of 9/11 (some of them focusing on the fact that WTC Building 7 totally collapsed without being hit by anything at all). There are still far more questions than answers… and the unfortunate reality is that we may never know the real truth.