AS WE FINISH a decade we never really settled on a name for, it’s probably the right time to look back on it before the twenties comes along.
It was a very eventful decade in Ireland which began with Fianna Fáil’s Brian Cowen as taoiseach but was marked by Fine Gael in power for almost nine of the ten years.
Literally an unprecedented term in government for Fine Gael.
The decade saw the Troika taking over the reins of the country’s finances for a time and politics and social change brushed up against one another in some historic referendums.
So, to remember what happened we’re going to take a look at 10 events that defined the Irish decade.
The Bailout
The beginning of Ireland’s decade was marked by the country being in the grips of a banking crisis.
2008 saw the bank guarantee but Ireland’s €67.5 billion bailout agreed with the EU, ECB and IMF capped off a pretty grim 2010.
After days of rumour that saw several Fianna Fáil ministers deny any knowledge of what was to come, Taoiseach Brian Cowen and Finance Minister Brian Lenihan confirmed the news of Ireland’s bailout in a hastily-convened press conference on 22 November 2010.
The pair said they were acting “in the national interest” but refused to be pinned down on the details.
What followed was years of austerity as Ireland sought to repay the controversial banking debt and quarterly trips by ‘The Troika’ to review how it was all going.
The final visit by the Troika was in late 2013 but its legacy and much of the debt remains.
The death of Jonathan Corrie
Ireland ends the decade with over 10,500 people classified as homeless.
The monthly homeless figures are always stark but it often takes a specific tragedy to break through the noise and make people reflect on the reality.
That happened on 1 December 2014 when 43-year-old Jonathan Corrie was found dead only yards from Leinster House.
The father-of-two had long struggled with drug and alcohol addiction and had been living in Dublin for eight years.
His death, on a cold winter night, sparked nationwide outrage and demands for real and tangible action to be taken to tackle what had become a huge crisis.
It pushed the Fine Gael/Labour government to convene an emergency summit on homelessness, bringing together all of the key parties in one place to try to come up with a solution.
Two years later another, another summit took place.
Jonathan Corrie’s death proved to be a heartbreaking moment for many people, and TheJournal.ie published one of the last interviews he gave just months before his death.
thejournal_ie / SoundCloud
In it, Corrie said that he and many others were seeking a chance to change their lives.
Homelessness is a more complex problem than rough sleepers alone, with families living in hotels another concern, but the death of Jonathan Corrie stands out as an example of an ongoing problems this country faces with housing its citizens.
Ireland says Yes to marriage equality
The battle for LGBT rights in Ireland has had many significant moments, with the decriminalisation of homosexuality and the Gender Recognition Act among them.
None though, was perhaps as impactful on a global level as the May 2015 vote in favour of same-sex marriage.
The decisive referendum result saw 62% of voters back the amendment, while 38% voted against it.
It made Ireland the first country in the world to make same-sex marriage legal by popular vote. Two years later, Australia did similar.
Same-sex marriage was legalised in Northern Ireland only recently due only to the intervention of Westminster and the lack of a functioning Stormont executive.
The Republic’s vote was preceded by a difficult personal debate that saw gay people speak about their own lives and others joining in with the campaign.
Current Taoiseach Leo Varadkar spoke to Miriam O’Callaghan about his own sexuality ahead of the vote with Daniel O’Donnell even saying he was voting Yes.
The death of Savita Halappanavar
There have been many tragedies throughout the decade but it is arguable that perhaps none had such a transformative effect as the tragic death of Savita Halappanavar.
The 31-year-old dentist died on 28 October 2012 at University Hospital Galway. She was 17 weeks pregnant.
The cause of death was recorded as severe sepsis, E.coli in the bloodstream and a miscarriage. When she was admitted to hospital, doctors said she was miscarrying but with fetal heartbeat detected the plan was to wait for the natural outcome of events.
Two days after being admitted, Savita and her husband Praveen asked about using medication to induce the inevitable miscarriage. They were advised that due to Irish law this was not an option.
Five days later, and almost a full week after she entered hospital, she died after a cardiac arrest.
There was a national and international outcry following Savita’s death and several groups which had been campaigning for a change in Ireland’s abortion joined together in its aftermath.
When Ireland did begin to examine those laws after a Citizen’s Assembly, the Oireachtas Eighth Amendment Committee heard that doctors treating Savita were concerned about legal issues when making decisions.
Savita’s parents were among those who spoke in favour of a repeal of the Eighth Amendment and when it was repealed, Savita’s memory was cited by many as an inspiration for the movement.
The mural to Savita in Dublin’s Portobello became a focal point for people to leave notes and flowers and ‘Yes’ leaflets.
Dublin City Library and Archive later said that it would digitally archive the notes left for Savita.
Savita’s death also became a symbol of how the health of Irish women has often been seen as a secondary to other concerns, an issue which was also seen in the CervicalCheck scandal which followed in recent years.
Water charges protests
There was a point in 2013 when the question was being asked: ‘why don’t the Irish protest more?’. All that changed when water charges were introduced at the insistence of the Troika.
During Enda Kenny’s first stint as taoiseach, the anti-austerity movement coalesced around the issue of water charges and this culminated in a series of huge nationwide marches that eventually forced the government into a climbdown.
Tens of thousands took to the streets of Dublin to protest in October 2014 in the first ‘national day of action’.
One month later, an estimated 100,000 people took to the streets of towns and cities all over Ireland to protest against the introduction of water charges.
There were smaller local protests against the installation of water meters but it was the huge marches that had the government worried about things like RTÉ’s coverage and the phone habits of protesters.
Tweetgate
You could pick out several sliding doors moments from the Irish political decade but none is perhaps as stark or significant as that which occurred on 24 October 2011.
This is of course RTÉ’s presidential debate on The Frontline programme which took place only days before Michael D Higgins was elected president for the first time.
Seán Gallagher entered the debate leading in the polls but a disastrous series of events saw him defending his past fundraising for Fianna Fáil and ultimately tumbling to second place behind Higgins in the actual vote.
Central to the events was a tweet that was read out live on air which purported to be from an account linked to Sinn Féin’s 2011 candidate, the late Martin McGuinness.
It said a man who claimed to have given a cheque to Gallagher for a Fianna Fáil fundraiser would talk to the media at a press conference the following day.
The bogus tweet was not from the McGuinness campaign but Gallagher floundered so badly when it was put to him by Pat Kenny that he struggled to recover.
In 2017, RTÉ apologised to Gallagher and paid him “substantial damages” over the error.
Gallagher ran again for the presidency in 2018 but this time finished behind Higgins and Peter Casey.
What would or could have happened had the tweet not been read out on air is one of the biggest political debatables of the past 10 years.
Pope Francis visits Ireland
Pope Francis was named as Time Magazine’s Person of the Year in 2013, the year he was elected as leader of the Catholic church in that year.
His leadership of the Catholic church has certainly been more active than his predecessor but it has not been without controversy.
His efforts at reform have been criticised by some for not going far enough and by others for going too far.
That at least demonstrates that his papacy has not been slow to create headlines and Francis did just that when he visited Ireland in August 2018.
The visit was much-anticipated and the security operation put in place, especially in Dublin, ahead of his visit was on an enormous scale.
The visit was the first by a pontiff since the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1979 and comparisons between the two visits were inevitable.
In the intervening 40 years, Ireland had confronted its painful history of clerical abuse and the influence of the church had waned hugely.
As a result, the Phoenix Park being far from full for the Pope’s public mass became a major talking point.
Half a million people had signed up to see the Pope in the Dublin park but it was estimated that closer to 150,000 attended on the day.
There was also criticism of Francis’ keynote speech in Dublin Castle on the first day of his visit when he did not make a direct apology to victims.
The following day, Francis did seek forgiveness from survivors for the actions of the church.
‘Storm season’
It’s nothing new that Irish people love talking about the weather. But this was certainly the decade where it became somewhat of a national obsession.
The weather chatter really kicked up a gear in the first week of 2014 when Ireland was battered by a number of severe storms.
This was before Met Éireann started naming storms, but people were nonetheless referring to biggest of the storms as ‘Storm Christine’.
Met Éireann had only shortly beforehand unveiled the colour-coded weather warning system with which we’re now all familiar.
In 2015, Met Éireann and the UK’s Met Office announced they would begin naming storms (Abigail was the first ever official one) and that winter saw several memorable weather events.
The famous Teresa Mannion weather report that went viral was in the December of that year when Storm Desmond rolled in.
In the following years, storms Ophelia and Emma were among the Status Red weather events that brought the country to a standstill.
The increased media coverage of weather events has prompted some criticism, with Met Éireann among those saying that media sensationalism can lead to a dangerous weariness about weather warnings.
The focus on the weather is also part of a wider acknowledgement of the climate emergency with environmental issues becoming more and more a part of political debate.
#IBelieveHer rallies
In March 2018, former Ireland rugby players Paddy Jackson and Stuart Olding were found not guilty of the rape of a student that was alleged to have taken place in Belfast in June 2016.
The complainant alleged she was raped from behind by Jackson, and during this attack, she was forced to perform oral sex on Olding.
A third man Blane McIlroy was charged with exposure and Rory Harrison was charged with perverting the course of justice in relation to the incident.
All four were found not guilty of all charges against them in a Belfast court.
Following the acquittal, rallies took place around Ireland the following day over the treatment of women within the justice system, a central point of the global #MeToo movement.
Minister for Justice Charlie Flanagan also launched a review of the legal protection offered to complainants in sexual assault cases in the Republic of Ireland.
An entitlement to legal representation for rape victims who are witnesses in the State’s prosecution is one thing that’s to be considered as part of this review.
David Drumm is jailed
The rise and fall of Anglo Irish Bank’s David Drumm is somewhat of a mirror to the collapse of the bank itself and indeed Irish banking sector following the Celtic Tiger.
The bank’s former CEO was sentenced to six years in jail after being found guilty on charges of conspiracy to defraud the public and of false accounting.
His conviction came almost 10 years after he resigned from Anglo, an institution he led through a period of unprecedented profits but ultimately towards collapse and bailout.
After leaving Ireland, Drumm fled to the US where he filed for bankruptcy before being arrested on foot of an extradition order.
In June 2018, a jury found Drumm guilty on on a charge of conspiracy to defraud and one of false accounting. A number of weeks later he was jailed.
Drumm’s conviction was one of several relating to the collapse of Anglo.
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