Adam Maguire: Irish Bailout Babies still paying the price of the financial crash

People who were children during the 2008 crash and subsequent bailout are struggling on inadequate pay and living in insecure rentals with little hope of starting a family, writes Adam Maguire

A passer-by stops at the Sony shop in Dublin to watch then taoiseach and Fianna Fáil leader Brian Cowen speaking on November 24, 2010, the day the government unveiled its four-year-plan in the wake of the global crash of 2008. Picture: Laura Hutton/Photocall 

I can quite clearly remember where I was when the IMF bailout was announced. My now wife and I were living in a small flat in Finglas, which we’d only started renting that year.

When I say flat, it was actually the top half of an old, council-built, three-bed end-of-terrace house that an opportunistic landlord had split into two units. We had to go through the kitchen to get to the toilet, we had to feed €2 coins into the meter to keep the lights on, and the smell of weed from our downstairs neighbour seeped up through the hot press. But that didn’t matter, because it was ours.