The Great Gatsby

 February 2025 


February 2025 Dublin has the feel of Christmas 2007. Last weekend we hosted a birthday party for my wife Lorraine in a top end city center Restaurant which was reassuringly expensive and packed to the gills. 

I was overcome by a sense of dejà vu. I was transported back to halcyon days of Celtic Tiger Dublin when restaurants bulged with property developers. The only difference now is that it’s  the corporate lawyers and accountants and tech executives who pack round tables in loud voices straining to be heard. 

My pessimistic and apocalyptic inner voice was screaming silently. This cannot last. This will not last. We are witnessing the last bonfire of the vanities. Deaf to the tragedies around the world and blind to our own demise thanks to the Trump tariffs the party continues on. 


We must fondly remember these days of Government trade and fiscal surpluses.  For we shall never see them again. Not in my lifetime anyway. There is a storm coming our way from the Gulf of America (we can’t blame Mexico for this cyclone). The storm threatens to raze the industrial strategy of the last seventy years. We have built our factories looking the wrong way. The storms from the West will flatten them. 


The last three decades will be seen for what they are. An exception in Irelands dolorous long history of struggle and pain. 


What will we have to show for it? The most expensive Hospital in the world, the most expensive non functioning bike shed  and a bewildering security hut. 

The Bourbons would be proud. They apparently forgot nothing but learned nothing. We have forgotten everything. But learned nothing. Bursting free from the shackles of recession and Covid we have chosen to live as if there was no tomorrow. No tomorrow? 


We are at the peak of the mountain looking down on the four green economic fields below. Let us enjoy this moment for what it is. Even take photos. For our children’s children. 

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