The friend is now settled in Melbourne and only visits Ireland for “marriages, funerals and the odd All Ireland”, as he puts it. A week later on the infamous “St Patrick’s Day massacre”, Anglo Irish Bank shares slid 15% and the Irish stock market closed at its lowest level in three years. For those who lived through it, the “greatest recession in modern times” saw the fabric of Irish society changed at its deepest level. This was the time that a second new word entered the Irish economic lexicon, as the troika lenders of the EU, the IMF, and the ECB came to town. If the decade just passed had a theme song, it would surely be Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’ — a tune every Irish citizen knows by heart.

Source: Irish Examiner December 29, 2019 22:52 UTC