It started innocently, as all unhealthy obsessions do. A documentary here, an article there. But before long I was spending hours on Wikipedia letting one blue hyperlink take me to the next without a break. I was chain-smoking information.
Was I researching something that would make me money? No. Was my latest hyperfocus likely to produce a scientific breakthrough? A disease cure? An undiscovered star? A new way of getting the shower glass free of streaks? All no.
My research concerned itself with more worthy topics like holiday homes in Bulgaria, helicopters and Holy Communions with stretch hummers. It was scouring over esoteric sources for clues into a bygone civilisation via reruns of Fade Street and Paisean Faisean.
What did they do with their shining optimism? Bought spa baths with hard-to-clean jets and went shopping in New York discount outlets
Then I started getting other people involved, which is when I really knew I had a problem. I became an absolute pest to friends, acquaintances and strangers I had just met in smoking areas. I would badger them with questions about what it was like during the Celtic Tiger and the immediate aftermath. I’d look up at them expectantly for their answer with little regard to whatever trauma I had accidentally brought up, like a wide-eyed child asking “Daddy what did you do in the war?”
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The main reason I am enthralled with the Celtic Tiger is that from the outside it looks like a point in Irish history where, for one brief shining moment, our collective belief was “everything is great and will be so for the rest of time”.
The nation believed the hard times were over, its luck had changed and their horse had come home on 99-1 odds.
What did they do with their shining optimism? Bought spa baths with hard-to-clean jets and went shopping in New York discount outlets.
See, I wasn’t here for the Celtic Tiger so I don’t know what it was like. Like the Victorians fascinated by ancient Rome, I can only cobble together an idea of the past by what was left behind.
I sift through the remains like an archaeologist. Photos of First Communions happening at castles here. An Ugg boot there. The odd house for sale on Daft.ie with a 10-person cinema room in Cavan. I root through archives of old photocalls of models freezing in bikinis on Grafton Street like the dedicated Celtic Tiger historian I have become. Possibly the first of my kind.
I focus a lot on oral history because it’s easy to badger people to tell me their memories of this time. So far I have gleaned that helicopters featured heavily. There are tales of helicopters being taken to the races, to hotels and to staff Christmas parties.
“I remember one of the neighbours landing his helicopter in the back yard once, in the fields. I can’t remember why though,” said one source.
The reason, in my historical opinion, was to show everyone on the street he had a helicopter.
My favourite elements of the Celtic Tiger revolve around the instant “celebrification” of everything
The remnants of our brief love affair with helicopters can be seen today. If you look closely at some hotel establishments, whose “4 star” description is largely optimistic, you will see helipads located on the grounds, as if the Aga Khan is going to be the next guest flying in rather than a couple from the Midlands on a Groupon deal arriving in a Nissan Micra. But the large painted H on the ground remains, alongside the hope that things might one day return to how they were in the good old days. That prosperity, even debt inflated, might come back to the land again.
Almost every Irish person has a story or an object in their house “from the good times”. They will tell you about skiing holidays, show you their purpose-built tanning bedroom or collection of Abercrombie and Fitch polos, but end the reverie with “that was back in the Tiger” – the way a parent might talk about the cream carpet and white sofa they used to own “before the kids”.
My favourite elements of the Celtic Tiger revolve around the instant “celebrification” of everything. Models launching building companies. Opening parties for envelopes. International acts being flown into regional nightclubs for one night only. I strongly believe that although we owe many Irish models an apology for the way we treated them in the press and for making them stand in bikinis under grey skies and chilly winds, they were unrivalled. Could Naomi Campbell or Bella Hadid wear potato skins down their bikini briefs or lie across a supermarket checkout in a tight dress and manage to still look convincingly sexy? I doubt it.
It might have been the Golden Age for cringe but there is something hopeful, something naive about these years that make me feel protective of this time. Everyone just wanted the hardships to be over and to believe they were striving forward, making progress and coming up with new ideas. Moving from dark into light, like the Renaissance but with fake tan and nightclubs.
Not every country has experienced that kind of hope, even if it was brief. What a time to have been alive.
