And now, it’s all over

I’m not going to pretend that this is a new age of regular entryification for me. As much as I enjoyed NoJoMo, it was hard to think of something to write about every day. My life is fine if you’re me, but if you’re not it’d be stupifyingly boring.

For example, I have a small, controlled obsession with roads. This is nothing to be worried about, I could quit at any time. It costs me nothing to keep an eye on the pace it which Ireland’s new motorway network is coming onstream and they’ll become such an integral part of so many people’s lives that I want to be there when the cones are removed, when the covers come off the signs and a new road is thrown open to the public, winding its way around former bottlenecks and connecting towns and cities so much faster that it’ll soon seem strange that we ever did without. Highways, freeways, call them what you want. Ireland’s had hardly any in the time I’ve been on this planet. Driving anywhere in this country meant squeezing through bewildered, choked little towns, one after the other as you proceeded so slowly that you watched snails speed past, find a nice lady snail, settle down, have a family, get a heart attack, get a stent inserted, take up golf, reduce his cholesterol only to die from slug cancer caused by all the exhaust fumes from the nearby traffic. His family gets compensation but it’s cold comfort as you watch the slimy cortege wind its way to the snail cemetery, after which the traffic finally ended.

But all of a sudden, we decided to build full, uninterrupted motorways from Dublin to Galway, Cork, Limerick and Waterford (cities number 4, 2, 3 and 5 respectively). And then build another one from Galway to Limerick and eventually down to Cork. And finish the one from Dublin to the border. And widen the one around Dublin. And build more road along the east coast south of Dublin as well as some going north-west – they were kind enough to build a motorway to Ashbourne, after which it stops (there’s a sign that says “beyond here be goblins”). By the time it’s all over, we’ll have 1,000km of motorway – ten times what we had when I left school. The UK, with 15 times our population, only has 3 times that much motorway. And we’re catching up. All in the last 5 years.

The breakneck speed at which we’re acquiring a proper inter-urban road system is a hangover from our golden age as a country. 1996-2006 was a period during which Ireland felt invincible. Economists might trace the start and end of what was known as the Celtic Tiger earlier or later than that, but for me the Celtic Tiger began the day the Blanchardstown Centre opened. All of a sudden, we had this huge….mall near our house. Inside were names we’d known from visiting the UK (or as we called it back then, “England” – Irish people referring to the UK as such is a recent phenomenon, stemming mainly from the “we’re finally ok with the English bastards” ethos of the post-1998 Ireland) like Boots, Top Shop, Specsavers, all this weird shit. And we were expected to buy stuff there. And you know what? We bought stuff. Tons of it. I had jobs while I was in school, first as a supermarket mop monkey and then as a relief postman (this was relief as in helping out and sadly not as a young muse upon whom the bored housewives of Ashbourne could get relief from their lack of nookie). Jobs that weren’t knocking around 5 years beforehand.

They also built a secondary school for us, so the daily trawl into Dublin could finally end (for the non-posh kids). More and more and more houses went up, whole estates. Tesco arrived and within 2 years, Ashbourne had 5 supermarkets (4 more than we used to). The main street was dead so they dug a huge hole in a field next to it that was best known for its sparse population of over-fed cows. A car park, Ashbourne’s first and the biggest in the county. On top of this, they built a new street. A shopping street! In my home town??!! Now you could actually buy socks and pants in a shop in Ashbourne. Progress indeed.

Then came Boots and Argos and we knew we had made it. A cinema is topping it all off later this year. Ashbourne’s population has probably trebled since I was born and we’re 10 minutes’ drive from the battlement surrounding Dublin that is its orbital motorway, the M50. We’ve arrived. I come from a Celtic Tiger town; a town that’s become unrecognisable because of it. I hasten to add that I don’t think this is a bad thing, Ashbourne was a dark hole of nothingness before all this. For God’s sake, there were cows crapping in a field where now an award-winning craft butcher sells mouth-watering steaks. That’s progress in any language.

And now it’s all over.

Ireland is still building roads; the money has already been spent. But there’s no more where that came from. Turns out that planning government spending on the presumption that the economy will grow by 4% every year is a bad idea. In fact, it’s a tremendously bad idea. But hindsight is 20/20. How were we to know that bankers were so corrupt that they passed around a few billion between them to prop up their end of year accounts, like a bag of sugar under a wobbly table leg. The regulator, who looks out for wobbly tables and checked them all, one at a time, and found them all to be sturdy. Now it turns out our banks are not only wobbly, they’re missing whole fucking table legs. One bank appears to have no legs, just a table top held up by its directors to vaguely assume the stance of a table. But one thing’s for sure – it’s all rotten.

So thank Stephen (Fry, atheism’s God) for the EU. If what’s happened to Ireland – a complete loss of confidence in its banking system, mounting debt, rapidly-shrinking tax receipts and, oh I dunno, horses eating each other – were to happen outside the EU, the country’s currency would head towards parity with the Zimbabwean dollar and we’d all have to boil our shoes for dinner. As it happens, the euro is a marvellous barrier against what should be happening to us. Ask Iceland. If their phones still haven’t been cut off.

Lots of job losses have ensued, but in the world’s most globalised country (apparently), that’s a sad fact of life and we just have to get ready for the upswing. We have no power over a lot of this. But here I am, tapping away on my tiny laptop, connected to a 3G phone network and sat on a brand-new train with plugs at every seat and a nice man announcing each stop. Very polite. There could be storm clouds coming and we’ll need all the help we can get.

Luckily we’re well in with the EU. We proudly wave the European flag at all our state buildings, we use the metric system, we ratify every treaty, especially that really important Lisbon one…….

Oh. Yeah.