The crash is now the new porn...
Fair play to the Irish, we'll knock a bit of crack out of anything. The property boom, for all that the official line now says it was the worst thing that ever happened to us, we treated as one huge game in which everyone could be a player. Even people who weren't investors as such, but who just happened to own a house because that's where they lived, had a great ride for 10 years as they constantly calculated how much their house was now worth and how much more they had made in the property game last year than they made by actually working.
Most people were never going to sell their houses, and if they were they were going to have to buy an equally overpriced one, but people just enjoyed the feeling of getting ever richer on paper. What other nation could come up with a whole new type of porn, based on fully-clothed people standing in their kitchens, often flanked by their cute children? And the sight of a Miele kitchen in a period house with an architect-designed glass box at the back of it turned us on more than any fake-boobed Californian getting some work done at the back.
It seemed that buzz was gone forever until last week. But last week we discovered our new buzz -- market chaos.
And let me tell you, if seeing Foxrock Fannies parading their bijou boxes was softcore "Debbie does D4" kind off stuff, market chaos is hardcore, top-shelf material. In a country jaded by regular cocaine, market chaos was just the kind of crack cocaine we needed.
So while the experts were all barrelling out of bank shares last week, every gifted amateur in the country was getting in -- just a little bit, for the crack. It would take the Irish to treat market chaos as an extended horse race that went on all the time. And so we did. And anyone who got into BoI on Thursday at five had the exhilaration of seeing their money increase by 50 per cent by nine the following morning, only for it to drop 20 per cent again in the space of an hour.
The best part of it all was that, like property, this was something everyone could get in on. Even if you weren't buying shares or spread betting, you could always just spend your time discussing taking your money out of the bank and putting it into prize bonds, the post office, or more thrillingly, just getting huge wedges of cash out and keeping them in the house for now, where they'd be safe.
Of course, we were aware that the backdrop to all this chaos was possibly a very bad thing and the end of life and credit as we know it. But, we're Irish and we're adaptable and we figured, look, it's happening anyway, we might as well try and enjoy it in some small way. And that, my friends, is why you'll never beat the Irish. The sky may be falling in, but we're the ones selling each other umbrellas.
Report by Brendan O'Connor - Sunday Independent.
Fair play to the Irish, we'll knock a bit of crack out of anything. The property boom, for all that the official line now says it was the worst thing that ever happened to us, we treated as one huge game in which everyone could be a player. Even people who weren't investors as such, but who just happened to own a house because that's where they lived, had a great ride for 10 years as they constantly calculated how much their house was now worth and how much more they had made in the property game last year than they made by actually working.
Most people were never going to sell their houses, and if they were they were going to have to buy an equally overpriced one, but people just enjoyed the feeling of getting ever richer on paper. What other nation could come up with a whole new type of porn, based on fully-clothed people standing in their kitchens, often flanked by their cute children? And the sight of a Miele kitchen in a period house with an architect-designed glass box at the back of it turned us on more than any fake-boobed Californian getting some work done at the back.
It seemed that buzz was gone forever until last week. But last week we discovered our new buzz -- market chaos.
And let me tell you, if seeing Foxrock Fannies parading their bijou boxes was softcore "Debbie does D4" kind off stuff, market chaos is hardcore, top-shelf material. In a country jaded by regular cocaine, market chaos was just the kind of crack cocaine we needed.
So while the experts were all barrelling out of bank shares last week, every gifted amateur in the country was getting in -- just a little bit, for the crack. It would take the Irish to treat market chaos as an extended horse race that went on all the time. And so we did. And anyone who got into BoI on Thursday at five had the exhilaration of seeing their money increase by 50 per cent by nine the following morning, only for it to drop 20 per cent again in the space of an hour.
The best part of it all was that, like property, this was something everyone could get in on. Even if you weren't buying shares or spread betting, you could always just spend your time discussing taking your money out of the bank and putting it into prize bonds, the post office, or more thrillingly, just getting huge wedges of cash out and keeping them in the house for now, where they'd be safe.
Of course, we were aware that the backdrop to all this chaos was possibly a very bad thing and the end of life and credit as we know it. But, we're Irish and we're adaptable and we figured, look, it's happening anyway, we might as well try and enjoy it in some small way. And that, my friends, is why you'll never beat the Irish. The sky may be falling in, but we're the ones selling each other umbrellas.
Report by Brendan O'Connor - Sunday Independent.