The Boom is Over

...But don’t cry into your last latte. The Celtic Tiger gave us opportunities and material things we’d never imagined, but it had no personality – it moulded Dublin into just another prosperous European city. With a bust comes conversation, artistic integrity and camaraderie. Bridget Hourican is looking forward to the downturn

The best-dressed woman I know gazes with snobbish disdain at a magazine. “Back in the day,” she moans, “you needed flair and style to look good. Now everyone’s at it. You can buy a good look in Top Shop for €70, or Brown Thomas for €700. Either way, you don’t have to make any choices.”

I look at the magazine: five models are cleverly dressed in clothes ranging from €50 to €5,000. They are like girls you see on Grafton Street. They look good – but my friend is right. There’s no personal inspiration. They haven’t designed a look, they’ve bought one.

In Dublin in the early 1990s, nobody could afford BT’s – it was a museum where you studied the exhibits – and there was only one high street shop, Oasis. Twenty people on Grafton Street would be wearing the same coat. So you went to charity shops, or you customised. I recall my then flatmate, a well-known model, sewing buttons and cuffs on a coat, and my sister taking scissors to her t-shirts. You had to work at a look.

Back then, if you weren’t bothered, you wore Levi’s and looked like everyone else. The streets were less colourful and the prevalence of rugby shirts was depressing. You could count the stylish girls in college on a hand with amputated fingers. But when someone stood out, she deserved to.

The old fashion adage – hemlines go up in a Boom and down in a Bust – has to be re-worked, because now hemlines are up and down like crazy, regardless of the stock markets. So I’ve got a new one: groom for a Boom, radical chic when Bust. And since I’d take radical chic any day, I’m half looking forward to the downturn coming our way – to the ill wind blowing across the Atlantic...

In the States they’re bravely heralding the end (well the temporary suspension) of materialism as ‘the upside of the downside.’ At least, clever New York journalists are. It is, of course, easier for journalists to see the upside of the downside because they don’t make big bucks. They (we!) spent the last decade watching our friends get rich – no one ever quite told me that you are what you own, but then, they didn’t need to say it. It was just so obvious. Now I’m rubbing my hands in schadenfreude as I wait for my rich friends to descend to my level.

It is not death, but the economy, that is the great leveller.

The poor fall from lower heights; we may stumble, but we won’t break a leg or die, like those stockbrokers jumping from skyscrapers in 1929. We don’t want our rich friends to die either, but we don’t mind seeing them hobbled. It’s all in the name of egalité.

I’m a veteran of boom and bust cycles. Brought up in Brussels – booming thanks to Euro institutions – I arrived in Dublin in 1991. There were two shops where you could buy anything – Caviston’s and Roy Fox’s – and everywhere else sold variants of pork, beef, dairy and Cadburys. Once I asked for olive oil and was directed to a pharmacy. The tea was great and the coffee was awful. There was one black guy in college who everyone said was gorgeous (he wasn’t). If you went on a date, it was to Tante Zoé’s. There was nowhere to go but the pub and nowhere after midnight but Leeson Street or back to an apartment (ours – everyone else lived with their parents). We spent a lot of time in the apartment because no one had money, even for a drink. My sister and I had an allowance, but since we had to stay in touch with parents and friends in Brussels, it was eaten up by the two state monopolies: Eircom and Aer Lingus.

Our Eurotrash peers, also dispatched here by parents, wilted and returned to Brussels. Why did we stay? Well, the repartee was good, and one night we were told dismissively that Dire Straits and Genesis were crap. We received this information with the joy of Newton when the apple fell on his head – a platonic truth. Ten years of uneasy acceptance of Europop fell away. Late into the night, we bonded with people way more than we ever did club-hopping in Brussels.

Conversation, artistic integrity and camaraderie – that is the upside of the downside.

I went east in 1996 to get a look at cities in transition, but Budapest, Prague and Warsaw didn’t change half as much in the mid-1990s as Dublin did. Adjusting from communism to democracy was nothing to the Tiger’s roar. What I chiefly remember about my return to Dublin in 1999 was how badly dressed I was (clothes again).

Once I was made-over and looked indigenous to this bustling, shiny city, and less like a gastarbeiter (although they too are intrinsic to a boom), I began to enjoy myself. There was a new restaurant to visit every night, good(ish) coffee on tap, ten types of olive oil in your corner shop, weekend breaks to Berlin. Everyone was packing in their routine jobs, going travelling, setting up dotcom businesses, launching magazines, sky-diving, buying up old tenement houses to knock in. Open plan, veranda and mezzanine were buzz words.
Anything you wanted was a credit card or a mouse click away.

Then a friend of my parents’ – a Scottish curmudgeon – came to visit: “Ach,” he said, “it’s just like everywhere else now.”

He was talking, of course, about M&S, Starbucks, multiplexes, soccer, rush-hour frenzy, gallons of coffee, short lunch hours, mineral water, conversations about real estate. And he was right. This is what happens when an economy goes global.

All happy (boom) countries resemble each other.  Each unhappy (bust) country is unhappy in its own way.
In their student years, my parents took a rail trip from Ireland to Spain. Each country was unique. Retailers and fast-food chains didn’t cross borders, neither did habits or façons de vivre. In Dublin you stopped work for the Angelus, in London you stopped for tea, in Madrid for the siesta.

Until recently every traveller to Ireland was in ecstacy over our idiosyncrasies. Sure they patronised us – cows on roads, nuns with beads, trains delayed, safety-pinned trousers – but they genuinely delighted in this eccentric, slow-paced country – “so exaggeratedly itself,” as Nancy Mitford wrote in 1962, “restless Europe already far away.”

For the past decade we’ve been the most restless country in Europe, and we’ve ended up not “exaggeratedly ourselves” but “just like everywhere else now.” Maybe the recession will bring out our buried eccentricity. That has to be an upside.

How will you fare in the downturn? Depends on your mentality. There are boom mentalities and bust mentalities. Like most of us, I’m a mixture of both. I get a ludicrous kick out of cooking up leftovers and sending shoes for re-heeling. I prefer fleabitten guesthouses of dubious charm to the certainty of expensive hotels; knocked-up Trabants to the latest Porsche; the spirit of the Blitz to Thatcher’s Britain. All of that comes under bust mentality. But I also like working my own hours, cultural diversity, exotic holidays and designer shoes, and those come under boom. The Chinatown around Parnell Street, the Jimmy Choos in Brown Thomas, the weekend dash to Prague, the variety of nixers which mean I don’t have to get an office job – these are all products of the boom and may disappear with it, leaving Dublin (and my lifestyle) a lot duller.

But I suspect my bust mentality is uppermost. I get off on contriving and salvaging (in fashion, cooking, holidays etc); I don’t like seeing my cobbler replaced by a high-street retailer; I like my iPod but it wouldn’t bother me if we’d never moved on from vinyl. I like money but I obviously don’t like it as much as I like other things or I’d have spent the last decade chasing it. I know what Raymond Carver’s talking about when he writes: “My goal was always to be shiftless,” and Samuel Beckett: “All I ever wanted to do was sit on my arse and fart and read Dante.”

This bust mentality is pretty widespread (and less nutty than it sounds). It’s associated with certain professions – writers, artists, environmentalists, religious – and certain professions depend on it – cobblers, tailors, carpenters, hardware shops, fishmongers (i.e. the people who fix stuff/provide the tools for us to create stuff) – but it’s not profession-specific. The axiom is that artists thrive in a depression, but it depends which type of artist. Film-makers, pop singers and zeitgeist novelists – those who can easily go global and whom the money backs – do a lot better in a boom. Poets, theatre actors, folk singers and the radical chic emerge when we go bust. The bankrupt 1970s produced Lou Reed, the New York Dolls, and Robert Mapplethorpe in New York; Vivienne Westwood and the Sex Pistols in London. We think priests should wear sackcloth and sleep on boards, but the Renaissance popes and televangelists favoured the boom.

Your profession doesn’t really determine whether you like things high-powered, luxurious, up-to-date, time-saving, action-packed, new; or traditional, idiosyncratic, makeshift, re-worked, slow. (Although you could devise a quiz around it: Do you constantly update your mobile phone? Do you favour LSD or cocaine? Convenience foods or the Sunday roast?)

Sitting on your arse and farting and reading Dante doesn’t move anything along. On the other hand it doesn’t destroy anything either. Which is probably why boom and bust are inextricably linked, and why we’re laughing at Gordon Brown for claiming he’d eradicated bust, like we’d laugh at a doctor who claimed to have defeated death. The bust is the sound of the balloon bursting when it’s bloated – the first world war pricked the balloon of colonial expansion, the Depression the spending splurge of the 1920s. Today the Earth’s ecology needs us to stop building on flood lands, taking flights, and buying new cars; while after 12 years of competing and consuming, the ‘bust’ part of your mentality is probably looking forward to eeking out, recycling, downsizing, and doing nothing – enjoying a field as a field, not speculating how many houses you could build on it.

Yes, we’re greedy, materialistic and obsessed with the new, but we’re also salvagers, recyclers, and plain lazy. A Darwinist could probably explain why we developed like this; all I know is what the psychologists say – too much materialism makes us depressed.

Everyone has their moment and we feckless, contriving, traditionalist downsizers are about to get ours. It’s gonna be tough – there’s plenty I’m not looking forward to. But maybe Newgrange will be saved from a bypass, maybe the Skelligs will escape a luxury hotel, and maybe a new Thin Lizzy will wipe out the memory of Westlife and the Thrills.

Comments

[Jamie]

Hi Friends, i am new here and .
I am from Canada.
I am from East and learning to write in English, give true I wrote the following sentence: "razor a kick spark scooter."

Best regards 8-), Jamie.

[susan]

I like seeing what a bust can bring out in people.This is the 2nd recession i have experienced in Ireland and i think a lot of how a person fares during a recession is to do with their frame of mind.I do not think it is the end of the world if i dont have a job because i do not believe we should define a human being by their profession.I volunteer in Oxfam and i have a great time doing it.People could use this recession as an opportunity to retrain and regroup.