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Has the Celtic Tiger ruined Ireland?

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  • 28-05-2009 11:05am
    #1
    future_plans
    Closed Accounts Posts: 380 ✭✭


    Possibly a little over the top/sensationalist...however, a valid discussion none the less.

    I grew up before the tiger and between 1996 and 2006, the tiger seemed to pull Ireland deeper and deeper into this mirage of endless credit and "anybody with property can get rich" syndrome. Now for most people in these years, they had more money in their pockets and quality of life did improve. This stretched to the least well off in our society. Everybody got their honey. Some, far more than warranted and of course, greed set in.

    Now the money river has stopped flowing and the landscape is looking pretty bleak and baron. Dole queues are at record highs, we are in debt for a generation, those who only tried to get on the property ladder in the later years of the boom are now left with the prospect of having small apartments or houses miles from home with little or no prospect of selling them due to negative equity, whole estates of semi finished houses in the middle of nowhere...need I go on? Even those who believed they were bullet proof during the boom and thought that they were destined for greatness have fallen back with a bang. And of course, those on the fringes of society are suffering most.

    So with despair, I am left thinking, what have we gained from the boom....or more importantly, what have we lost? We've gained a few new roads, trains and some other infrastructure. The what have we lost list goes on much further. I'll let other posters add their views on what we have lost and if they feel we are worse off now than prior to the tiger.


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