Aoife Kilbane McGowan compares the economic climate faced by young people during 2008 and today, reflecting on CMAT’s Euro-Country as a ballad for the post-Crash generation.
Earlier this year, Irish singer-songwriter CMAT released Euro-Country, the titular track from her third album, a contemporary political ballad for the generation who came of age in the aftershocks of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Pre-crash Ireland had enjoyed over a decade of booming expansion, the Celtic Tiger roared and brought us from a primarily pre-industrial agrarian economy to a thoroughly modern services-based one. Housing estates were popping up all over the country, middle class Irish children were jumping on trampolines for the first time ever, and shopping trips to New York City were not uncommon over a bank holiday weekend. For many people, however, the boom was simply a step into financial security, or at least the appearance of it. Home ownership became attainable for the many working class families, construction jobs were well-paid and abundant, dazzling new shopping centres were being built, and Ireland became a net immigration country in 1996. AIB, Bank of Ireland, and Ulster Bank were all attending college careers fairs to market mortgages and high limit credit cards to prospective graduates. No longer the underdeveloped backwater of Western Europe, nor the land of saints and scholars, but the shiny emerald home of pharmaceuticals and multinational tax-avoiders.
However, things did eventually all come crashing down. Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy on September 15th 2008 marked the point of no return in the collapse of the international financial system. That same month, the Fianna Fáil-Green coalition acknowledged Ireland was in a recession for the first time, the first eurozone state to do so. Over the next three years, unemployment rates would more than double, over 600 estates in development at the time of the Crash would be abandoned mid-construction, and as CMAT touches on in Euro-Country, rates of male suicide would increase significantly. Researchers at University College Cork found that between 2008 and 2012 there were 476 more suicides than would have been expected without the recession. This was a different Ireland, the one we still live in today: where housing is undersupplied and overpriced, where the government and financial system came together to bail each other out, and where austerity ended many of the public services that facilitated upward social mobility during the Celtic Tiger years.
This year, the first cohort of post-crash babies will be entering college. To see how the country has changed over the course of their lives, I spoke to Patricia Vesey, who graduated with a degree in Food Science and Nutrition from Letterkenny Institute of Technology in the late 2000s, and subsequently moved to Dublin to work in her field of study. During her college years, just as the Crash was beginning to hit across the Atlantic, Vesey said professional jobs in Ireland remained easy enough to come by. She was employed immediately out of her degree, moving to Dublin to begin her post-grad life: "Me and my boyfriend could afford our own two-bed new build apartment for a grand a month. It was in Tallaght... a bit far out, but I also was working in Tallaght." Dublin at that time was optimistic, young people could afford to go out all night long, multiple nights a week. She recalls the change in atmosphere creeping in slowly - "The full effect of the Crash became very apparent. Layoffs everywhere, and very difficult to get into another professional job once you were laid off. A good few of my friends emigrated, with some only returning in the last year. Others will never come back... By late 2010, early 2011, Dublin had completely changed."
During this time, as the Government began the national recovery effort, the groundwork for the housing, healthcare, and cost of living crisis of today were first laid. Both during the Celtic and before, most people in Ireland lived either in social housing or privately owned their own homes. The private rental market remained small, and largely as a result of this, unregulated with few codified tenants' rights compared to countries with older long-term rental cultures, such as Germany. Vesey recalls: "Landlords were kicking students out and increasing the rents by €500 for new tenants." She saw how the mortgage market was disadvantaging working families and young people as well, "2008 onwards, people who had a bit of cash bought for cheap and rented it out for very high prices, whereas people who bought just before the crash were left paying mortgages off properties that would be in negative equity for decades."
A good few of my friends emigrated, with some only returning in the last year. Others will never come back...
Where does the situation for young people sit almost two decades later? Not far off the post-crash years. The private rental market has expanded significantly, but tenancy rights continue to lag far behind the rest of Europe, and even some of the modest gains in rent controls were rolled back in 2025. Rental prices hit record highs year-on-year, and many people live in unregistered, unregulated rental properties that sit well below regulatory standards. The cost of living crisis has exploded the ability for young people to sustain themselves only working part-time while in college. Comparing the current economic atmosphere to the height of the recession, Vesey said: "I don't know if they are saying we are in a recession now or not, but the inflation was not this high during [2008]. Yes, rent and mortgages went up, and it became very hard to find rental accommodation. However, the rest of our living expenses also did not rise like it is now. Energy, fuel, food, clothing... have massively increased this time."
While Ireland may have recovered from the Crash on paper - Ireland is now the third wealthiest country in the world by GDP per capita - the housing and cost of living crisis have stagnated any increases to quality of life. In 2024, 7 in 10 young people were contemplating emigration, and roughly the same proportion of 25-29 year olds are still living at home. My own two best friends have left to work abroad, one in France and the other in Thailand. In CMAT's Euro-Country, half pop-ballad and half open letter to Crash-era Taoiseach Bertie Ahearne, she cries out the feelings of many young people in Ireland towards him: "Everything I thought that I could be / He cut it in half."