Diary of a Gen-Z Student: CMAT is right about the recession — from the big boys to the Berties

CMAT, in a still from the Euro Country music video. Photo: Youtube/CMAT

I grew up in a housing estate in Dunshaughlin, in Meath. We moved there when I was about five, though I could be wrong. 

I was definitely still standing on a stool to be able to reach the sink in the bathroom. 

All I know is I was young and curly-haired and the village seemed very cosmopolitan to me; I had lived on a cul-de-sac on my grandparents’ farm until that point, so Supervalu being walking distance from my house felt like urban living.

For the majority of my childhood, the estate was unfinished. There were 14 houses finished before the 2008 crash put a swift halt to building across the country. 

So, playing in the driveways and inspecting the foundations of unfinished houses was a favourite activity of the kids in the estate. 

If we found a plank of wood lying around in the building site, we’d take it to make a ramp for rollerblading or skateboarding. I was probably 12 years old by the time it was actually finished.

At the time, I never particularly considered why there were so many unfinished housing estates around the village. 

“Recession” was a word that I heard often for most of my childhood, though I didn’t understand it. Hearing friends talk about their parents losing their jobs was the norm. 

I didn’t really know what a country looked like when it wasn’t in massive economic distress. And I hadn’t really thought deeply about that experience until recently, when I listened to CMAT’s most recently released song, Euro-country, part of her forthcoming album by the same name.

CMAT grew up 20 minutes away from me, in Dunboyne. Though she is a little older than me, so her memories of growing up during the recession seem more clear-cut than mine, I found myself thinking about how a childhood taking place at the time in Ireland was moulded by the recession. 

Because even though you weren’t an adult, losing a job or missing mortgage payments, you were hearing about these things happening, and having your world-view shaped by it.

Her lyrics have sparked interesting conversations around the legacy of the recession, how it impacted children at the time.

CMAT: an important voice on the long tail of the austerity years. Photo: Sarah Doyle

Memory often looks a little like a patchwork quilt, fragments of different materials sewn together. And when we’re talking about a memory that had a profound impact on us, the experience of memory can be felt physically.

That is what is reflected in the lyrics of CMAT’s song, as she recalls “ All the big boys/All the Berties/All the envelopes, yeah they hurt me/I was 12 when the das started killing themselves all around me/And it was normal/Building houses that stay empty even now”.

Like CMAT, there are certain aspects of the recession that have lodged themselves in my memory. I remember my primary school making cutbacks. Like the week our teacher told us that we wouldn’t be seeing the drama teacher for the rest of the year, because the school couldn’t afford the lessons.

I remember the day one of my peers asked our teacher where we would be going on our school tour that year. The teacher explained to the class that school tours were expensive, so no one in the school would be going on one for a while. 

And I remember my teacher explaining very carefully that the recession would impact Santa Claus, too.

So, we shouldn’t ask for too much and be grateful for anything we might receive at Christmas. If we didn’t get a big present, it wasn’t because we were on the naughty list. 

We were banned from discussing what Santa brought us for Christmas that year, a compassionate rule for a classroom of children with different home lives.

My family was fortunate enough that my parents continued to work throughout the recession. So, intense financial worry was something that I mainly heard from my friends.

At the age of eight, I had a friend tell me that she was worried about her father needing dental work that her family couldn’t afford. She explained that he worked in construction, and couldn’t understand why he hadn’t been going to work the way he used to. Fears that she never voiced to her parents; a heavy burden for a young child to be carrying alone.

That is my most profound memory of the recession: children experiencing the distress of the adult world, before they could ever fully comprehend it. All they knew for sure was the feeling of anxiety.

Those children had their childhood prematurely ended. And many still bear the psychological consequences, as CMAT perfectly illustrates in Euro-country.