Recent weeks have seen renewed discussion of the scars left by the financial crisis that unfolded here almost two decades ago.
Much of this was sparked by the release of CMAT’s song Euro-Country and its reference to fathers “killing themselves all around me” in the fallout of the crash, with one of the main protagonists of the period (and song) – former taoiseach Bertie Ahern – also contributing by re-emerging briefly as a potential presidential candidate.
All this must have been grist to the mill for Gill Books, the publishers of RTÉ Business journalist Adam Maguire’s debut examining the experience of the “the last cubs of the Celtic Tiger”.
These bailout babies, as Maguire terms the generation born between 1990 and 2007, “grew up with the assumption that if they wanted anything – from a good job to a high-spec car – it would be there for the taking”.
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Yet “by the time they were assessing their college and career options, the outlook had become very different”.
The book opens by setting out a plausible case for why this generation “is shaping up to be the first generation that does not have a significant improvement in earnings and living standards when compared to its parents”.
However, missing is any interrogation of the underlying causes of this malaise, or how the policies of successive governments have acted to compound its effects on the bailout babies.
For example, in a fleeting chapter on our ageing population and its implications for the sustainability of our pensions system, there is no discussion of the decision made to scrap a long-planned rise in the State pension age and instead hope that higher taxes on bailout babies will plug the hole.
Instead, we are presented with some superficial – if occasionally entertaining – chapters about how this “generation are rewriting what adulthood looks like in post-boom Ireland”, replete with dubious examples of supposedly unique bailout-baby culture (for example, getting coffee and cake after walking the dog).
Ultimately it is hard not to feel short-changed by what could have been a more substantive – and much needed – polemic about how the bailout babies have been failed by those who have governed this country over recent decades.
Barra Roantree is an assistant professor in economics at Trinity College Dublin
