MORE ON THE DEMISE OF THE CELTIC TIGER

All about Ireland's boom times: Read it all at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/10/ireland-financial-crisis-emigration

Here are some interesting snippets:

There are plenty of astonishing figures in this boom. There were 6,507 racehorses in training in Ireland in 1992, yet by 2008 some 12,119 thoroughbreds were kicking up the gallops. From four private aircraft, the numbers of helicopters and jets rose to an estimated 80, with more being bought in Ireland than in any other EU country. Where once there were only a few thousand people who could afford to follow Munster's rugby players abroad, an estimated 65,000 arrived in Cardiff in 2006 to watch them become European champions.

And now? Well, in the 2006 census there were 200,000 empty homes, a figure that will now have significantly worsened. Horses are being offered to trainers by hard-up owners, or being left by the side of the road, or even shot. "All those planes and helicopters are for sale," I am told by one businessman.

Still, for many, the good times had been grand. In the late 1980s, economists close to Fianna Fáil, the broadly centrist political party that has clung to power like few others in Europe, had slashed taxes, regulations and corporate rates in order to make Ireland third only to Hong Kong and Singapore as the world's most free-market country. The move, satirised by journalists as the "Doheny & Nesbitt School of Economics", after the pub they claim had given birth to it, would see 40 per cent of all American money invested in Europe wash up on Ireland's shores.

Ireland had two booms, explains Fintan O'Toole, commentator, critic and historian. The first came in the 1990s. Foreign investment offered work and opportunities to the well-educated, English-speaking workforce. The whole country rose on the tide, and many of those who emigrated in the 1980s came home. As the millennium turned, however, a parasite embedded itself in the economy. Recessionary interest rates set by the European Central Bank allowed Irish bank executives to borrow huge sums, which they lent to their chums in the property business (and sometimes to themselves). When Anglo Irish Bank, the worst offender, called in the government in December 2008, it had lent 15 people more than €500m each.

This money fuelled an explosive burst of confidence. A series of spectacular new buildings appeared downstream from those starving figures on the banks of the Liffey. The "Builders", as the big property developers are called, sold land to each other at spiralling prices. These men - they were all men - whose fathers might have ended up working on English construction sites, were commissioning skyscrapers not just in Ireland, but in New York, Chicago and London, arrowing around the globe on Falcon jets. They set an example that every Irishman who had ever put mortar to brick followed.

The Builders became glamour figures. In 1999, one of the most notorious bought a plot, perhaps a quarter of an acre, in Shrewsbury Road for Ir£3m, and then promptly sued the neighbour who had sold it to him in a boundary dispute. As he built his house, Sean Dunne, 54, compact, likeable, with neatly groomed grey hair and small, terrifying blue eyes, must have sensed he was where he wanted to be, a long way from his childhood in County Carlow, in southeast Ireland, where, as he once put it, "If me or my siblings needed a bath we went for a swim in the River Slaney."

Much of the country was going crazy. The German ambassador caused a diplomatic incident when he complained that Irish life had become coarse. The church, so long a moral force, was silent, muzzled by a succession of scandals involving paedophilia and the abuse of children in care.

According to O'Toole, "People bought into the idea that this wasn't just an economic boom - it was a national vindication, a healing, the sense that our bad past was gone, and gone for ever." But he warns against confusing a sense of humiliation with an understanding of the past: "One of the most ridiculous clichés about the Irish is that we are obsessed with history. In recent decades it's been the opposite; we have been living in a continual present, in the sense that now is the only place that ever existed."

So who is to blame for all this? The Builders? Well, only a fool would have mistaken them for angels. The banks? Certainly, Sean FitzPatrick, Anglo Irish's ex-chairman, makes Sir Fred Goodwin look prudent. But as O'Toole argues, such conjecture is to let the guilty go free: "To place all the blame with the banks is a cop-out. This was crony capitalism, a political problem. We've had two prime ministers in the past 20 years who were on the take - Ahern and Haughey. Which is a lot, considering we've only had five."

................. Beyond such glamour, the collapse of the property bubble has seen unemployment rise past 11 per cent, banks nationalised, the economy forecast to shrink by 8.3 per cent, negative equity engulf great swathes of the population, the nation's international credit rating downgraded, economists warn of national bankruptcy, and taxes rising by €4,000 for the average family. As Paul Krugman, the Nobel prize-winning economist, recently wrote, "As far as responding to the recession goes, Ireland appears to be really, truly without options."

I take a train out of Dublin to Adamstown, and step out into a weird semi-wilderness. The station is like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, manned by a lone ticket collector almost mad with boredom. Outside, a single building stands in a churned-up field, the centrepiece of a new town once heralded as the model of Irish development. I follow the deserted road east, beside a plyboard fence announcing a yet to be built swimming pool - "Come in, the water's great" - until I come to two primary schools and a few apartments. It is playtime and all the children are clearly from elsewhere. Which, I confess, comes as a shock.

Mena Baskarasubramanian is from the south of India. Until three years ago, she was living in England, but her husband's job in the IT department of a bank ("I know," she cries. "I know,") had been reassigned to Dublin. "When we arrived I heard about Adamstown and so I came to look for a house," she tells me. "It was 2006 and you wouldn't believe it, people were queueing all night." She secured a two-bed apartment for her family for €300,000.

Now chairwoman of the local primary school, Mena explains that 95 per cent of the students are from non-Irish backgrounds, with 26 nationalities. With an open face and wonderful optimism, she talks of the connections she is making, the beginnings of a very Irish network of Croats and Kazaks, Brazilians and Somalis, and Indians, and, more importantly, her fears for it. "Because of the recession, people are going back to their countries. The Polish workers are going. Doctors are moving to the Middle East. I don't want to lose this beautiful structure we have at the moment."
The value of Mena's flat has fallen by €50,000, and many of the cranes over Adamstown are no longer moving. "Some of the units have been stopped. The retail spaces were supposed to be open last year." I ask if her small boy will take up hurling. "Probably. My daughter is becoming Irish, she loves Irish dancing. The other day, two children arrived not speaking a word of English, but after four days they were singing Irish songs, thanks to our four language-support teachers." Again, the enthusiasm falters. "Due to the cutbacks it's been reduced to two. We don't know what we'll do next year."

The Celtic tiger is dying, and nobody knows what will be left. Mena's fears - about jobs, about negative equity, about the community drifting away - are every woman's fears in Ireland. Some people tell me that this time it won't be like the 1980s, that with the whole world in recession there is nowhere for the young to go.