ALMOST TEN YEARS AGO

This was the year of the financial crisis but at the time I was not aware of what was about to happen.

The day before St. Patrick’s Day 2008 I decided to visit Killiney even though the weather was not good. While walking along the beach I met a gentleman who had been a senior civil servant. What was of interest was that he had accepted an offer of early retirement in 2003 and he claimed that it was the best decision that he had ever made because he had believed that bad times were on the way. Not long after this chance meeting I received a similar offer which I did accept and it turned out to be a very good decision.

The post-2008 Irish economic downturn in the Republic of Ireland coincided with a series of banking scandals which followed the 1990s and 2000s Celtic Tiger period of rapid real economic growth fuelled by foreign direct investment, a subsequent property bubble which rendered the real economy uncompetitive, and an expansion in bank lending in the early 2000s. An initial slowdown in economic growth amid the international financial crisis of 2007–08 greatly intensified in late 2008 and the country fell into recession for the first time since the 1980s. Emigration, as did unemployment (particularly in the construction sector), escalated to levels not seen since that decade.