Is Ireland on the cusp of a new boom?

DEFICITS are falling, employment rising, pints are €8 — we must be getting a new boom. It’ll need a name, I suppose. Let’s hope it’s a good name or at least better than the last one.

The Celtic Tiger was one of the most annoying phrases coined. Nothing against tigers, they are wonderful animals in danger of becoming extinct because of human greed, hubris and ignorance so a perfect name for our last economy. But we’re not really tigers. We don’t lie in wait for ages and then pounce majestically on the unsuspecting muntjac deer. We are more reactive and awkward, like a bullock. As for Celtic, the word evokes an image of overpaying for something poor quality that’s not even that Irish — again quite apt for the last decade — but we’re not Celtic. Our blood is more English or Iberian — if you want to get grandiose, call us the Milesians.

The Milesian Bullock is definitely on the rampage though, if one key indicator is to be believed: the presence of w*nky billboards advertising property developments. Remember them? Photographs of the kind of people who were going to be your neighbours — a good-looking man whose hair is slightly flecked with grey, a sexy woman eating an asparagus suggestively? Surely you recall ‘Gorgeous Living Comes to Dublin’ which showed various unhappy people in some sort of post-coital pout, one disturbingly involving strawberries. For a flat that was in Coolock.