Book review: How the housing crisis has created Ireland’s unique bailout babies

Adam Maguire believes the bailout baby generation is part-financing and part-subsidising Ireland’s current financial success. Picture: RTÉ/X

• The Bailout Babies: How Ireland’s financial crash reshaped the next generation — and what it means for the future.
• Adam Maguire 
• Gill Books, €22.99

Those born in the 20 years after the end of the Second World War were given the name baby boomers. Since then, each generation has been given a distinguishing title. 

The recent titles include gen Y (millennials), born from 1980 to 1994; gen Z, born between 1995 and 2009, and the world is currently rearing gen A (Alpha) — those born from 2010 to 2024.

RTÉ journalist Adam Maguire believes he has discovered a new subspecies; a generation that is particular to Ireland. 

He has called this subspecies the “bailout babies”. The bailout babies were born in Ireland between 1990 and 2007. Those born in 2007 are “officially the last cubs of the Celtic Tiger”.

The Bailout Babies: How Ireland’s financial crash reshaped the next generation — and what it means for the future is the title that Maguire has given to his first book. 

He begins by telling us that Ireland has never had it as good as we have at the moment. 

What makes today different from the Celtic Tiger era is that, as a nation, we are not spending on the credit card. Ireland is a cash-rich nation.

Maguire believes that the bailout baby generation is part-financing and part-subsidising this financial success. 

He argues that the bailout babies are underpaid for their work. This is despite the fact that this generation is better educated than any previous generation.

Bailout babies cannot afford to buy or rent houses

The fallout from this is that many of the bailout babies cannot afford to buy or rent houses; many are still at home with mam and dad. 

According to the 2022 census, there were 522,000 adults living at home with their parents, a 19% increase on the 2011 figure.

Many of Maguire’s arguments are compelling, while some are open to further interrogation.

For example, he argues that the inability of the bailout babies to get on the housing ladder is unique to this generation.

This is not true. Every generation has had difficulty with the housing market. 

The baby boomers are the one exception. However, that period only lasted for a short while during the 1970s and ’80s. 

Even that era ended badly, with the baby boomers having to pay exorbitant mortgage rates of up to 20% by the end of the ’80s.

Maguire tells us that studies show that bailout babies drink less alcohol and have less sex than previous generations. He cites living at home with parents as the major factor.

This is not to say that the bailout babies are hermits — far from it. With no mortgage, and less overheads like food and rent, many bailout babies treat themselves regularly.

There are interviews with people who drive 100km to purchase designer chocolate, takers of regular short foreign holidays, and those who like to purchase experiences such as Taylor Swift concerts (where the average spend for the Croke Park concerts was more than €1,000 per person). 

These examples show how the living-at-home bailout babies spend their money.

And who could blame them? Regardless of how hard they save, the chances of saving enough money for a house deposit are next to nil — especially those who want to live in or near Dublin.

The final section of the book — the future — is the most riveting. 

Maguire raises fears about Ireland’s falling birth rate. It has fallen below what is needed to maintain our population. 

If this trend persists, by the time the bailout babies reach the age of retirement, there will not be enough people at work to sustain Ireland’s social welfare and old-age pension packages.

Maguire would have us believe that much, if not all, of this potential population disaster springs from the housing crisis and its consequent fall in home ownership. It is difficult to argue against his evidence.

Some 150 years after the Irish Land League’s call for the ‘three Fs’, these demands have not been met. 

There is still no fair rent, no fixity of Tenure, and no freedom of sale — because bailout babies cannot sell what they never owned.