For many, the photograph of Troika officials walking past a beggar in Dublin city centre in November 2010 is among the images most closely associated with Ireland’s spectacular economic crash.
A wave of reckless lending by Irish banks was one of the main contributors to the crisis.
The years that followed were marked by emigration, rising unemployment, business closures and recession.
Ireland effectively lost its economic sovereignty and was forced to accept an EU/IMF bailout followed by painful austerity measures. The years that followed were marked by caution.
With the benefit of hindsight it is possible to see that this crisis, and the extraordinary measures taken in response, offered a chance to reimagine Ireland’s economy, and in particular policy around land use and affordable housing.
A failure to do so in any meaningful way is one of the contributory factors for Ireland’s current housing crisis which is responsible for making home ownership unattainable for many in their 20s and 30s.
Behind big picture headlines from the crash, including the €64 billion loaned to Irish banks to cover large their property losses, there are personal stories within families across the country who saw the trajectory of their lives sharply and in some cases irrevocable altered due to the crash.
This weekend Jessica Doyle shares some of those stories of people in their 20s and 30s who experienced the crash as children and witnessed the impact it had on their family including unemployment, housing insecurity, and the fracturing of relationships.
One of those people was Daragh Fleming (30), is a writer, poet and mental-health advocate from Glounthaune, Co Cork.
Fleming remembers that times were good for his family before the 2008 crash, with his parents adding an extension to their house and the family going on holidays to stay with friends in the US. Such trips becoming unthinkable after the crash.
He feels people are still recovering from the impact of the crash and many younger people are struggling. “It’s just strange because we’re a wealthy country. But that’s only because of all the corporations coming in. The actual people on the ground, your day-to-day people, are struggling a lot in this wealthy country. It’s bizarre.”
Another person who shared their experience about their childhood during the crash is photography student Caireann Flynn (34) from Lisnaskea in Co Fermanagh. She is currently living in Glasgow.
Her memory of that time is conversations between the adults almost exclusively on money and jobs.
“It just nosedived, and in 2008, 2009. All the conversations about money in the house were: ‘don’t know how I’m going to pay this bill, don’t know how I’m going to keep the lights on’. We got our electricity changed over to one of those meters so it could be tracked more and it just wouldn’t be topped up half the time.
“It was really confusing, because we lived in this large house, so outwardly it looked like we were loaded.”
Flynn said 2008 was a really hard year as her mum died and she went from feeling she could “do anything” to feeling pressured to pursue a stable career.
“I obviously had a very extreme year in 2008, but I don’t think that my circumstances are uncommon. I think a lot of people lost parents, whether they took their own lives or families fell apart, or people split up or became depressed,” says Flynn.
“And I think, for a lot of people my age, it stripped away an innocence that people had as teenagers, where actually your life isn’t just this little bubble with you and your friends and your family.
“There’s this thing called the economy that affects everything that goes on around you, and it can actually just turn on its head and make everything very hard for you.”
Flynn also believes the legacy of the crash has imbued her generation with “really cautious with making big decisions.”
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