25 years on from the Celtic Tiger: Ireland is still paying the price

Twenty-five years on, Ireland is still living with the consequences of mistaking rapid growth for lasting economic success

Former taoiseach Bertie Ahern with former finance minister Brian Lenihan. File picture

IT WAS a clumsy, tone-deaf phrase, uttered by then finance minister Brian Lenihan during a Prime Time interview in 2010, when pressed on whether politicians and regulators were to blame for the excesses of the Celtic Tiger era and the devastation that followed. Intended, perhaps, as an acknowledgement of collective complicity, it landed instead as abdication.

Three words that seemed to shrug at the wreckage. And yet the phrase has endured, precisely because it captured something essential about the era: The hubris, the denial, the dangerous myth that this was a free bar and that the hangover belonged to no one in particular. We all partied, Lenihan said, as if a society (fed by its government) can binge without consequence, as if the music stopping were an act of God rather than the inevitable end of a badly-managed stag party.