Irish singer CMAT (29) lit a spark earlier this summer when she released her song Euro-Country, in which she shares her memories of the 2008 economic crash in Ireland and its aftermath. In the song widely hailed as an “Irish millennial anthem” on platforms such as TikTok, the Meath musician, born in 1996, sings: “All the big boys/All the Berties/All the envelopes, yeah they hurt me ...”
In the starkest line, CMAT sings: “I was 12 when the das started killing themselves all around me.”
CMAT and her band performed the song for the first time at the All Together Now festival in Waterford in August, where she introduced it by saying: “I can’t explain to you the politics of what happened back then, I can only explain to you my memories of growing up as a kid during the crash that we all experienced, and it was a horrible, horrible time for the entire country, and I believe people in their 20s and 30s have been really adversely affected by it,” to which a supportive cheer rose from the crowd.
Molly Furey (26), a writer and documentary film-maker from Stillorgan in Dublin, who was in the audience, says: “Standing in that crowd, I felt emotional, I could see people around me were emotional. People were screaming that song at the top of their lungs, they were all around my age and the song was only out a week and everyone knew every single word; it was just really powerful.
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“I was just so taken aback by, whoa, okay, we were all there. We do all remember that and we were all affected by it, even if we were still children at the time.”
CMAT’s song has prompted many young Irish people to share and also question their experience of the recession. Without such interrogation, Furey argues, “you allow cycles to repeat”.
“I think we have a very short-term memory in this country, especially when it comes to governments and the parties in charge, and there seems to be an assumption that people are willing to forget and maybe for [our parents’] generation they are, because it was so traumatising.
“But I wonder, with this younger generation, if there’s a willingness and an ability to think about it, because they weren’t trying to keep the doors of their business open or trying to put food on the table for their family. And I think we need to, I think that’s what’s so great about that CMAT song is it’s an invitation for us to be like: what do you think about that and what did go wrong and how can we avoid that again?
“I don’t know how you avoid a recession again, but it’s maybe not that, but how to avoid the assumptions or the value system or the mode of thinking that produced it.”
Crash, part one: Brian Cowen and the unravelling of Ireland
Dr Lee-Ann Burke, a lecturer in the department of economics at University College Cork, wrote a 2020 paper on the psychological effects of the recession on young people. Using data from the Growing Up in Ireland Study, which surveyed a cohort born in 1998, she looked at changes in participants’ mental health from when they were aged nine (2007-2008), 13 (2011-2012) and 17 (2015-2016).
“The things that were coming out very strongly in the analysis [as factors negatively affecting children’s mental health] were a mother’s poor mental health and housing stability, which is so important in today’s economic context,” says Burke. “The homeownership analysis in the report highlighted that children from households that owned their own home were less likely to experience poor psychological outcomes.”
A household’s ability to make ends meet, as well as parental unemployment were also key factors, according to Burke. “Unemployment shot up during that time, especially the construction industry,” she says.
“I’m wondering now, although I can’t say for sure, but parents whose kids were small during that time are now talking to their kids about what to do after school, and perhaps after what they’ve been through themselves in 2009, 2010, 2011, it’s affecting what they’re advising them to do or not do.”
Penny Warnock (28), a marketing professional and writer from Castleknock in Dublin, says she emigrated to Amsterdam five years ago partly in search of more opportunities to work in a creative field, but mainly because she wanted to “run away”.
“I always felt the whispers, where everyone knew what was going on with my family, so I wanted that anonymity.”
Warnock describes how when she was a child during the Celtic Tiger, the success of her father’s company made her family wealthy, “and we moved into this absolute mansion and loved it.”
“We went on holidays all the time, [we did] things like always going out for dinner, we weren’t crazy flashy, but there was just never a worry and there was never any issue in terms of money,” she says.
But Warnock remembers a lot of tension in her house around the time of the crash. Her parents split up.
“We went from having this huge house where we had gardeners and it was well maintained, to it being completely overgrown to where it looked like an abandoned house.
“I remember being very, very cold and my mom bought those plug-in heaters and put them everywhere, put them in front of us when we’re eating breakfast, and [we were] shivering.
“That was tough, the few years after [the crash]. It looked like we were super rich, I was going to this private school, all my friends were like, do you have this new schoolbag, and I was watching my mom really struggle.”
Warnock says she has been processing the emotional effects that time had on her. “I think it affects me always, because I do think it was a traumatic time, and also I was living a weird double life of wealth and then a few short years later of having the total opposite side. But now I feel like I’m a grounded person because I’m very grateful for everything that I have in my life.
It’s just strange because we’re a wealthy country but ... the actual people on the ground are struggling a lot
— Daragh Fleming
“And when people hear me speak, they’re like ‘you’re posh! You obviously had family privilege.’ But then if they saw how I lived for my teenage years, it was a different story, you know? So, it also makes me not judge people and I’m a super empathetic person, and I think that’s probably a lot because of it as well,” she says.
Warnock has been sharing “Celtic Tiger core” stories on her TikTok page, describing her childhood experience. In one reel she lists “things we seriously had in our house,” such as a vibrating power plate exercise machine and an indoor sauna. She says the fact that she and family have come “full circle” is probably why she’s now able to look at that time through a somewhat lighthearted lens.
“It’s clearly just a moment in time right now that people are – I guess, like my family – coming out of it enough that they can talk about the crash and process it, and actually share the experience without fear, because obviously [mine’s] a privileged story, but it’s also not as well.”
Daragh Fleming (30), is a writer, poet and mental-health advocate from Glounthaune, Co Cork.
His memories of the post-recession years are somewhat overtaken by the tragedy of his best friend dying by suicide in 2012, he says, which led him to pursue a degree in applied psychology and to the mental health advocacy work he does now.
Fleming does remember 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, with such trips becoming unthinkable after the crash.
Now, as an adult, reflecting on the impact of the crash, Fleming says the current housing crisis is causing people in his age cohort distress, “because there’s a sense that you’re failing or falling behind or not doing the right things because you might not be able to afford a house.”
“I think when I was a kid, it was kind of like there’s this algorithm for life, where you go to school, go to college, you find a partner, you buy a house […] But the way things are now, that’s not reality for a lot of people, it’s not a reality for me at the moment.”
“We’re still recovering from [the crash]. You can look at the economy and be like, oh, we’ve a high cost of living, and that’s usually an indicator of how good the economy is. But the standard of living for most people in that economy is quite bad,” he says.
“It’s just strange because we’re a wealthy country, but that’s only because of all the corporations coming in, and the actual people on the ground, your day-to-day people, are struggling a lot in this wealthy country. It’s bizarre.”
Fleming, who returned to Ireland in February after living in Barcelona for two years, adds that the many young people continuing to emigrate is also a sign of how they are struggling.
“The reason I went to Barcelona is because one, I had friends there, and two, I couldn’t afford a place to even rent in Cork,” he says.
“I think [there’s] obviously been lots of people going to Australia, Canada was big there for a while, people are just leaving, and it’s more out of necessity. I always think it’s either the call to adventure and you want to go travelling and see the world, or you can’t afford to live in the country you call home, and I think more and more, it’s the latter.”
The Growing Up in Ireland report that revisited the 1998 cohort at age 25, published earlier this year, found that one in eight contacted respondents had emigrated.
Speaking about what might happen in the future, he says: “How on Earth are people affording to have children the way things are now?”
“I can barely afford to sustain myself, let alone another human,” he says.
Another woman who used TikTok to share a reel about her childhood during the recession is photography student Caireann Flynn (34) from Lisnaskea in Co Fermanagh, who rents a flat in Glasgow with her husband, who is from Dundalk, Co Louth.
She posted a carousel of photos with captions explaining references from Euro-County, to which she received some messages telling her she couldn’t have felt the effects of the recession in Northern Ireland. However, living in a Border town, she says, she most certainly did.
“I grew up in a really nice housing estate that had really big houses in it. And I remember it was this big deal when we bought this house a few years before the crash, I was probably like 10 at the time.”
Her memory of that time is that conversations between the adults around her focused almost exclusively on “money and jobs”. “It was just like that defined you as a person. And I don’t know if that was symptomatic of money being everywhere, but I remember my dad talking so much about the mortgage.”
Flynn’s father set up a company in 2007, which was “an awful time to start a new business,” she says, in hindsight.
“Then 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 massive house, so outwardly it looked like we were loaded, but inside, it was like there was nothing going on,” she says.
“And it was a really hard time because in the middle of 2008, that’s when my mum died. My mum didn’t live with us, my parents were separated, and my mum was mentally unwell, and she was living in a care facility for mental health at the time,” says Flynn.
Flynn describes feeling “a shift” in 2008 where she went from feeling she could “do anything” once she turned 18 to feeling pressured to pursue a traditionally stable career. She later went to Edinburgh to pursue a law degree but returned to Northern Ireland shortly afterwards due to ill health caused by endometriosis. She then went on to spend a decade working in hospitality and customer service in Belfast before moving to Glasgow four years ago to study photography, where she also dog-sits on the side.
“I obviously had a very extreme year in 2008, but I don’t think that my circumstances are uncommon, because 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.
“I think it’s made people my age really cautious with making big decisions. [We have] that awareness of how things can change.
“But then, maybe there’s another side to it that’s made us resilient. We’ve been through so much as a generation, we’ve learned so much.”
She says the knock-on effects of the recession have left her generation struggling to secure stable long-term housing and to maintain close friendships “because people are living everywhere”, as a result.
“We love living in Glasgow but I always open the conversation [with my husband] to, would you like to move closer to your family in Dundalk? And he says it’s just not an option because it’s a commuter town, it’s on the train line [to Dublin] and when you look at the house prices, it’s just mad.
“The options feel so limited and anyone I know who has bought a home, they’ve had help from their parents, but there’s a whole wave of people that can’t have that help because they were crippled by the recession and they’re still recovering from it,” she says.
She has begun to think about potentially having children, “but, I never want to burden them the way we had to be burdened by things. And because I don’t have a set career now, because I’m back at university, it’s something that really makes me question whether I would have a child, because it’s so expensive, and you want them to have a certain quality of life.
“I just want that security, so I am always researching my next step and always trying to stay prepared. I’m always researching what I can do just to be stable.”
As CMAT belts out in the song that appears to have connected with so many of her peers: “No one says it out loud but I know it can be better if we hound it.”
The Samaritans can be contacted on freephone: 116 123 or email: jo@samaritans.ie
