End of a decade when our world has come to nought

Date Published: {J}

The world never really warmed to the noughties – it never had a ring to it, like the eighties or the nineties, sounding instead more like a room for bold children. But now as the curtain comes down on the first decade of the new millennium, we remember how much things have changed in a decade.

Back in the year 2000, we listened to music – for the most part – on a cassette; if you had a CD player in your car, chances are it was a walkman on your seat attached to your cigarette lighter and your cassette slot like a badly constructed set of Christmas lights.

We put floppy disks into our computers; our televisions couldn’t be mounted flat screen over the fireplace or they’d have pulled the next door neighbours’ dividing wall in on top of you.

We found our way from A to B using badly folded maps that frequently obstructed the driver’s view, in an era before we had sat nav.

People smoked in pubs; indeed people drank in pubs. We only had wine at home if there was a special dinner or it was Christmas.

Travelling to Europe meant changing currency, but at least you didn’t have to take off your shoes and belt every time you passed through an airport.

W communicated by letter or – the height of sophistication – by fax; we paid for expensive purchases by cheque not by credit card, and we stayed in on a Friday night to watch the new boy, Pat Kenny, presenting the Late Late Show.

It was only twelve years since Galway hurlers had won an All-Ireland; the footballers hadn’t even won their most recent Sam Maguire. The GAA still had Rule 21 which meant the RUC couldn’t play hurling. Now we don’t even have the RUC.

Glenroe was still on the box and Dinny was still in the land of the living; Billy Meehan wasn’t dead in Fair City; Top of the Pops was on the telly until 2006; Bull Island was the cutting edge of political satire.

We’d only won the Grand Slam once before and were thrilled to win the Triple Crown in 2004; we didn’t have the euro; we’d rejected Nice but then we passed it and we never knew we’d be doing the same thing on Lisbon before the decade was at an end.

Half the country went to New York for the Christmas shopping, where they marvelled at the Twin Towers which were still standing.

We had foot and mouth, which meant we all had heavily saturated mats to wipe our feet on. Now half of Galway has heavily saturated doormats once again but it’s down to flooding and their homes are in ruins.

Bill Clinton was President of the US, and making full use of the Oval Office; Fine Gael was wiped out in 2002 and Enda Kenny – a man who held onto his own seat by the skin of his teeth – took over a party in disarray.

Waterford Crystal wasn’t just one of our most recognisable brand names on the world stage; it was also a horse who won Olympic gold with Cian O’Connor on its back before it was disqualified for taking drugs in 2004.

On New Year’s Eve of that same year, Bertie Ahern pledged €10m in Irish aid to the people affected by the tsunami in South-East Asia. That’s about the same amount as Brian Cowen pledged to the people of Galway and Cork three weeks ago.

We lost some sporting greats over the decade – close to home, Enda Colleran died in 2004; Sean Purcell died in 2005 and his fellow Terrible Twin Frankie Stockwell joined him in 2009; George Best died in 2005; Charlie Haughey died in 2006; John McGahern died in 2006.

Back in 2000, Roy Keane was playing for Manchester United and Ireland and seemed reasonably happy doing both; his home city of Cork was the European Capital of Culture in 2005 as opposed to the underwater city of Atlantis in 2009.

Pope John Paul died in 2005; Pope Benedict took over and Brendan Comiskey’s resignation was an early glimpse of the sort of scandals that have marked the entire decade for the Catholic Church.

The GAA opened up Croke Park to ‘foreign games’, and Lansdowne Road closed in 2006. Now we’ve won the Grand Slam in Croker and Lansdowne is almost ready for re-opening, giving up two world-class stadiums in the country.

The M50 was completed in 2005 – before they started to dig it up and start all over again so that we’d get in and out of Ikea easier for all the furniture we needed for our second homes before the bubble burst and we couldn’t even afford our first homes any more.

We had a heatwave in 2006 with the warmest temperature this century recorded at Elphin in Co Roscommon. July 2006 was the warmest, on average, since records began in both the Republic and Northern Ireland. Now we’re up to our necks in water.

Decommissioning became a reality in 2005 and the Greens – who started out the decade eating lentils and hugging trees – came into Government in 2007…just in time to take the rap for the spectacular bursting of the economic bubble.

Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end – the foreign holidays, the Galway tent, the two new cars outside the recently extended house; the holiday apartment in Kusadasi that’s now worth the cost of a packet of crisps.

And when you think of it, perhaps the noughties wasn’t such a bad name for it after all – we came into the decade full of promise and we leave it with nought to show for our investment.

For more read page 15 of this week’s Connacht Tribune.