There's nothing worse than when Paddy-the-Peasant comes into money, the muck savage who now considers himself to be Lord Muck.
The Celtic Tiger.
Enough said.
Or maybe not.
I was already out when the real shit hit the fan. I mean on the ascent rather than the descent. Around the late 90s when things started to move really fast and everyone on the shitty little island started to smell cheap money. Rents, daily spends, everything started moving twice as fast so money was being flung around like confetti. I watched in horror as knackers started booking tables in expensive restaurants where they shoveled whatever was brought to their table down their necks like a bag of chips.
Steak dinners. Everywhere I went, people flashing cash, people telling me I was mad to move to Finland, even if I was coming back a few times a year for gigs. Hit and run for me: agree to the work, fly in, get things done, take it in cash, leave again. That way I was able to build two fat bank accounts in both Finland and Ireland. I was living high on the hog's back: no taxes (which I dodged like Ali v Frazier) and my flights and expenses drafted into my fees.
That I was working mainly in bars and restaurants gave me the bird's eye view on what Paddy and Bridie were all about: planning skiing trips in winter, visiting exotic islands during summer, the three cars in the driveway, the massive house in the middle of nowhere, blah, blah, blah. It stank to high heaven. But I kept my nose to the wheel and worked twice as hard for several times the fees I was previously used to. Money for nothing, almost.
Muck savages is the perfect description for them.
I found pretty much all of it rather disgusting, but then I have no allegiances to Ireland: she fucked my life up more than once so I felt perfectly justified in raping her coffers every chance I got. If I had too much work going on, I'd simply raise the prices by 20% and see who was still interested. They all were, that's when it really sank in: '
this is not going to end well for you guys'.
Fast forward ten years and what have you got? The bills are being sent out, the banks want their money back. They want the keys if you can't pay. So things starred to choke up and stagnate. By then I was on firm footing in Helsinki. I did a few more years of hit and run until it started becoming less and less worth the stress and effort of enduring Dublin and Ireland in general. By 2013 I was winding down my affairs in Ireland and concentrating all my efforts here instead.
Now it's all over, the field is in a rotten state; it can't be fixed under the current conditions and if you want to see a fast-forward repeat of the entire debacle, then watch that €13.7Bn from Apple Inc turn your island upside down all over again. Give a monkey a calculator. See what happens next. That Apple windfall is going to strangle you guys all over again: they'll destroy what little potential the country has with it, then blow it all away and wait another ten years to see the results.
Honestly, I don't understand why any young person would even contemplate staying there - it's a fucking death sentence.