The singer CMAT shared a short clip of her new single on social media last week, with a sample of the lyrics: “All the big boys / All the Berties/ All the envelopes, yeah they hurt me /I was 12 when the das started killing themselves all around me ...”
You don’t need to be a scholar of 21st century Ireland to follow the references. This isn’t the first time she has made known her feelings about Bertie Ahern, who as taoiseach merrily led Ireland headfirst into the banking crash. In a Hot Press interview she said that if he ran for President, she would make it her “personal f**king mission” to make sure that he didn’t win.
CMAT – or Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson – described the inspiration for the track in an interview with The Guardian: “I was about 12 and it all happened around me, it didn’t really happen to my family directly.”
CMAT grew up in Dunboyne, Co Meath. “My dad had a job in computers. We didn’t really have any money, we weren’t affluent, but we were fine. Everybody else on the estate we lived in worked in construction or in shops and they all lost their jobs. Everybody became unemployed. Then in the village I grew up in there was a year or 18 months where loads of the people I went to school with, their dads started killing themselves because they’d lost everything in the crash.”
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She wondered whether she could possibly have remembered this correctly. “But I dug deep, did research and the amount of male suicides that happened in Ireland at that time was astronomical.”
As her research will have uncovered, data collated by the National Suicide Research Foundation (NSRF) for the period 2004 to 2014 showed that, after years of decline, there was a sudden upward surge in the number of suicides between 2008 and 2010.
NSRF researchers have estimated that the rate of male suicide by the end of 2012 was 57 per cent higher than it would have been if the recession had not happened. In human terms, that’s almost 500 additional deaths. Self harm also rose by 12 per cent during the period 2007 to 2012.
A study of 190 deaths by suicide in Cork city between September 2008 and March 2011, the darkest of the post-crash years, found that 38 per cent of those who died were unemployed and 32 per cent worked in construction. And those were only the cases where a coroner’s inquest was able to determine a verdict of suicide.
This is the real pain of that period we still seem unable to account for. We talk about the economic and infrastructural fallout, and even about the breathtaking stupidity and greed that blithely allowed three quarters of the total lending of the Irish banks – €420 billion, economist Stephen Kinsella wrote in Recalling The Celtic Tiger – to be diverted to essentially a single asset: property and land.
We mention the grotesquely overblown scale of the bailout that followed the inevitable collapse: but again, we only talk in terms of numbers. We refer to the construction workers who “vanished” from the sector after it all went wrong as though they were a structural issue, not human beings whose way of life was obliterated by greed.
The years after the crash were a time of collective bloodletting – not the blood of bankers, builders, bondholders or politicians, of course, but of ordinary people. Yet the real human cost of those years is rarely accounted for: the Das who couldn’t take it any more and tragically took their own lives instead. The death notices on RIP.ie with their suggestions that a donation could be made to Pieta House in lieu of flowers, whose concise wording could not possibly contain the vast oceans of grief of families left behind.
The human cost is also the Mams with their backs against the wall trying to hold the family together; the children who should not have had to grow up without a father, the ones who should never have had to go to school cold and hungry.
And it includes those who kept going, but only just, sliding slowly, inexorably into alcoholism or depression. It’s also the ones who got away, 420,000 of them between 2011 and 2015: the breakfast roll lads who decamped to the mines of Perth or the bar stools of Bondi, the grandparents who only see their now-teenage grandchildren on WhatsApp video chats.
In the years after the crash, I remember having conversations with publishers and agents about whether there would ever be a definitive novel of the Celtic Tiger. There have been some writers since who have stepped up to the task – none, perhaps, more brilliantly than Donal Ryan or Paul Murray – but they are part of the generation that was most directly affected. Maybe what it needs is the perspective of CMAT’s generation – the children of the crash – to finally be able to make sense of it.
For years afterwards, I think we adults were walking around in a kind of a daze, unable to articulate what had happened to us and unwilling to relive it. Some of us are still in a daze. As CMAT succinctly put it in the Hot Press interview: “We’ve been traumatised by the last 20 years.”
The ripples of those years of austerity, uncertainty and the crippling shame go on and on. It is a relief, in a strange way, to know that there was a little girl in a housing estate in Dunboyne taking notes and storing up her rage about Bertie and the bankers to be unleashed at a later date.
- The Samaritans can be contacted on freephone: 116 123 or email: jo@samaritans.ie
- Pieta’s freephone crisis helpline is 1800 247247 or text HELP to 51444
