We may well be singing along to Depression-era classics as we go from boom to bust, writes MICHAEL PARSONS
CAN THE boom really be over? Have we fallen from the dizzy heights of "a delightful two-bedroom apartment in Stillorgan with panoramic views over the N11 for €1.7 million" to "Reduced to sell" signs in estate agents' windows? Gone from waiting lists for Porsches to queues for jobs at Centra paying the minimum hourly wage?
The band has stopped playing at the mother-of-all knees-ups and exhausted partygoers can be heard muttering: "Why, oh why, didn't we listen to George 'Grumpy' Lee"? But who wanted to listen to the school swot explaining the mysteries of long division when all the action was going on behind the school shed, which, along with the playing fields, was being sold off to a developer for a new "mix of retail and residential"?
And what memorable characters our conspicuous consumption spawned. A perma-tanned woman propping up the Horseshoe Bar in Dublin's Shelbourne Hotel wearing a dress cut rather too low, scent rather too floral and jewellery rather too large, knocking back her fourth glass of "Bolly" and braying about the Christian Louboutin shoes at Saks Fifth Avenue. And a spiv wearing a Louis Feraud suit that was rather too new, a Rolex rather too shiny and hair rather too jet-black for a 50-something solicitor from Navan saying "Rio de Janeiro is going to explode."
And you mumbled something about there being no flights from Dublin to Brazil and sure wouldn't it be a bit awkward getting there for the weekend and would you get any use out of the place? And they both looked at you with faces stretched by botox and incredulity and accused you of being a "wimp". Ah yes.
Like barbers and bell-hops on the eve of the Wall Street Crash, everyone had the hottest tip. And random conversations were peppered with startling revelations: "I've just bought three apartments in Budapest - dirt cheap" or "I've picked up a nice pair of Section 23s in Carrick-on-Shannon". And people discussed the logistics of flitting "down to Nice" on Friday evenings in time for an apéro before dinner rather than how to get to Clonee at rush hour.
And didn't we get one over on the Brits? There they were in their once-impregnable ivory towers - taking afternoon tea at "there'll always be an England" Claridges when in came a bunch of mohair-suited former "subbies" bellowing into their mobiles and one says to the other "Will we buy the place, lads?"
And they did. And a lot more besides.
And we became the landlords of Europe. And drove around in SUVs bigger than Dick Cheney's and went to pampering spas at the weekends and stopped washing our cars and babysitting our children and hoeing our gardens and cleaning our houses because Agnieszka and Marek were prepared to do it all for an hourly rate less than the price of a tall skinny latté and chocolate chip muffin in Starbucks.
In 1970, the New York journalist Studs Terkel published Hard Times - An Oral History of the Great Depression, a compendium of interviews with Americans reminiscing about the gloom which followed the Wall Street crash of 1929.
A man called Yip Harburg, whose electrical company was one of many to go wallop, recalled: "We thought American business was the Rock of Gibraltar. We were the prosperous nation, and nothing could stop us now. A brownstone house was forever. You gave it to your kids and they put marble fronts on it. There was a feeling of continuity. If you made it, it was there forever. Suddenly, the big dream exploded. The impact was unbelievable. I was walking along the street at that time and you'd see the bread lines."
By the way, Harburg, a son of Russian immigrants, reinvented himself in the best American tradition and forged a new career - rather improbably as a songwriter.
He went on to win an Academy Award for his lyrics to the songs in The Wizard of Oz.
He died old and rich in 1981. But he is best remembered for the most famous song about unemployment ever written, which has become the "theme tune" for recessions: "Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?/Say, don't you remember, I'm your pal?/Buddy, can you spare a dime?"
It's a refrain we'll be hearing a lot of in the months ahead.