Reasons to be cheerful: 20 ways we’re better off now than we were

We are a nation that is prone to begrudgery and to giving out, but sometimes it is worth pausing and taking stock of where we are and where we were. While anyone buying a house or trying to rent a home or struggling through the cost-of-living crisis or trying to cover the cost of their energy bills might reasonable point to how hard things are, in many other ways things have never been as good for Irish consumers. Here are just 20 ways we are better off.

1. Let’s start with the long weekend we are enjoying. It’s not long ago that St Patrick’s Day was a miserable affair, a cold and dreary day in the middle of a cold and dreary month. You’d wander into the town closest to your house and watch what was optimistically called “the parade”. In truth, all we got were some sad local children marching past, their lips and legs blue from the bitter cold as they blew earnestly but badly on unfortunate wind instruments. The only saving grace of these tortures dressed up as organised fun were the big sideburned men who would occasionally throw sweets off the back of trailers pulled by tractors advertising local hardware shops and feed suppliers. Once it was all over we’d wander home to watch some other parades on the telly. It was the epitome of dullness. Now it’s a days-long affair bringing millions of euro into the local economy with a madcap craic to rival Mardi Gras. There are even matching Paddy’s Day pyjamas for the whole family to enjoy.

2. Communication was tricky when Pricewatch were a lad. Anyone who had the cheek to apply to the P&T – and subsequently Telecom Éireann – was laughed at if they expected a landline to be installed within weeks when the process inevitably took months, if you were lucky. An absence of home phones forced people to make plans well in advance and then stick to them, and it led to long queues at public payphones. Now, we can wander into a myriad of shops and for half nothing buy a communication device more powerful than the computers used to send man to the moon. The mobile revolution has also spelt the end for public phone boxes – the last of them will be decommissioned in the weeks ahead – while the future is not looking great for landlines either. Most of us are now in contact with the outside world 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year via multiple channels and sure lookist, isn’t that just brilliant?

3. When this page wants to scare its children before bedtime, it reminisces about Irish television in the 1970s. Growing up in the west of Ireland, there was just one channel, which went live (as if that was a thing) at 5pm in the summertime and 4pm in the winter time before wrapping up at around 11pm after the broadcast of the farmers’ market reports, some Irish-language programme and, of course, the national anthem. It was a tough time for sure. Now we have all the television all the time. There are hundreds of channels at our disposal and an endless stream of streaming services coming on, er, stream? Admittedly we have to pay through the nose for all this content but we reckon it’s worth it.

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4. Food wasn’t really a thing in Ireland in the 1970s. Obviously we did eat but we didn’t eat all the exotic cuisine that is commonplace today. For most of us, spaghetti and salmon came out of a tin while any dinner plate that didn’t contain a mountain of potatoes was considered the work of the devil. Little or no food from the rest of Europe was commonly available while food from further afield was a thing of fantasy. Even as late as 1990 buying something as simple as a bagel outside of a handful of shops in big cities was entirely impossible. The idea of a takeaway coffee was as outlandish as a machine that could deliver all the answers to all the world’s questions in half a second. There were local producers for sure and the journey from food to fork was pretty short but we didn’t have all the blessed cheesemakers and artisan bread makers and fusion food makers that we have today. We also spent a much higher percentage of our disposable income on food so even though we are living through a cost-of-living crisis now with food prices climbing sharply, we are probably financially better off than we once were. And the choices are literally dizzying.

5. The numbers dying on Irish roads are far too high – with the trend for 2024 looking very bad indeed. Most of those killed are killed on rural roads with too many dying as a result of no seat belts. But it is worth remembering that in times past almost all roads in Ireland were rural as there were no motorways. The wearing of seat belts was also considered optional by those in the front of cars while those travelling in the back had no choice but to not wear them as they simply did not exist. There were no baby or booster seats either.

6. And while we are on the topic, cars have improved dramatically too, with all the air-conditioning and digital radios and airbags and parking sensors and on-board computers and power-assisted steering and instant demisted windows and space making the experience of driving now a million times better than it once was – and safer too.

7. Another aspect of getting from A to B that has improved dramatically is public transport. It is still not where it needs to be but things are much better. There used to be two ways to travel across the country (if you were lucky): the State-run bus and train services. They were slow, cold and uncomfortable and utterly unreliable. Now there are multiple private bus companies ferrying people from east to west and from south to north in luxury coaches with toilets and wifi while the bus services in urban centres – for all their flaws – are much more regular and muchless likely to be spewing disgusting diesel fumes into your face as you walk past. We have a tram service in Dublin that is splendid and – some day – we might even have some class of metro system linking our capital city with the airport.

8. In the 1950s Ireland was a nation of cyclists but by the 1970s the bike had ceased to be a serious mode of transport for adults, and by the 1980s anyone over the age of 20 who was cycling was considered something of a demented oddball (and just in case anyone gets cross with that characterisation – it happens – we are exaggerating, but only slightly). The unpopularity of cycling was despite the fact that it has always been one of the most effective ways of getting around both in terms of the environment, our finances and our health. Buoyed by a decent tax incentive to buy bikes and the multiple bike rental schemes that have popped up around the country (and survived the nation’s thieves and hoodlums despite dire predictions to the contrary), we have seen a resurgence in the fortunes of two-wheels in recent times and for that we should all be eternally grateful. Getting a taxi is also much, much, much easier than it once was.

9. We have little to be grateful for when it comes to the pandemic, mind you. This time four years ago we were all locked in our homes, scared and forbidden from travelling more than 2km from our front doors. It did usher in a new era of remote working for many people. While there has been a marked creep back into offices in the last year or so, a significant percentage of Irish people get to work a significant number of days each week from home. That has improved family life and commuter congestion at peak times while boosting local communities and – arguably – productivity too. Now, if we could just see the four-day week movement gaining some traction we’d be heading even faster in the right direction, but perhaps that’s a story for another day.

[ Compensation set for workers whose remote working requests are not reasonably considered ]

[ Four-day work week can significantly benefit employers and staff, study finds ]

10. Another thing the pandemic gave us was an extra bank holiday. It might not make a massive difference in the scheme of things but it is nice to have St Brigid marked in a more significant fashion than was the case and it is nice to have a day off in February, surely one of the grimmest months.

11. We can use that extra day to shop. And make no mistake, shopping has come a long, long way over recent decades. We have more choice and more competition than we ever had and although at least some of the stuff we buy has a built-in obsolescence that would shock our forefathers or is made with material so flimsy that it would make past generations shriek with laughter while shivering with the cold, all that choice is – on balance – a good thing. And along with all the new shops, the shops that we did have back in the day – Penneys, Dunnes, Arnotts, Brown Thomas, Moons and all the rest – have dramatically upped their game and turned themselves in to sweet-scented, brightly lit palaces of spendiness. You can get a manicure in Penneys now while Dunnes has done a deal with high-end fashion designers. It is, to quote Jasmine, a whole new world.

12. Along with more and better shops on our high streets, we have had the world of retail opened up to us thanks to the Internet. Clothes, tech, toys and make-up can just as handily be bought in Shanghai or Sligo or Colorado or Cork. And because we can compare prices from shop to shop on our phones in real time it has never been harder for retailers to pull the wool over our eyes. We can also buy our groceries online – and have someone drop them to our homes – and yes, we know home delivery used to be common enough in the first half of the century – but our grand- and great-grandparents didn’t get to place their orders on high-tech tablets, did they? No, they had to actually speak to people.

13. Speaking of deliveries, it has never been easier to order food from a restaurant so that you can eat it at home. In the 1970s home delivery was barely a thing at all and then in the 1980s, if you were lucky, you were able to order pizza, Chinese or Indian to your home. Now a huge amount of restaurants do home delivery and urban centres are constantly criss-crossed by delivery riders carrying outsize hotboxes on their backs. It is hard not to feel sympathy for these underpaid food couriers delivering food in the dead of night in the middle of an Irish winter, so do tip them generously if you can at all afford it.

14. The last couple of decades have seen Ireland grow increasingly diverse and that – despite the often unhinged shouts of rage you might hear from some quarters – is a good thing. There was a time when pretty much everyone in Ireland was white and Catholic and being a Protestant was, quite simply, the height of exoticism. Now we are a multicultural society and although we still have a way to go before everyone agrees we are in a better place as a result of that, we are at least on the road.

15. Depending on your perspective, managing our personal finances has either improved or disimproved over the last 30 years or so. We would be of the view that things are much better now than they once were. Yes, there are fewer bank branches, fewer ATMs – and indeed fewer actual banks – and the human interactions that were once common have largely disappeared but maybe we don’t need all that palaver any more. We can do all our banking online and on our phones without having to spend hours on hold waiting for someone to answer the phone, we can track transactions and pay for stuff simply by swiping our devices in the vague direction of a terminal, we can transfer money with ease – and sometimes in real time and yes, we are more vulnerable to scam artists and criminals and the banks’ love of tech can make it impossible to speak to a human being if we really need to, but that’s the price we have to pay.

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16. There was a time when we were being robbed blind by the gift voucher industry. Despite the fact that it was a sector worth hundreds of millions of euro it was an effective free-for-all and the people selling such things could impose the most random and unfair rule and there wasn’t a thing we could do about it. Vouchers could be legally sold with expiration limits of six months or even less, companies could refuse to give you change if you did not use the full amount of the voucher in one go, and they could refuse to accept them at certain times of the year. The stupid rules they were able to impose went some way towards explaining why as much as €50m of gift vouchers could go unused in any given year. Then, in late 2019 a law was introduced that stated that all gift vouchers would have to last for five years at least while retailers would have to give change – in one form or another – for the unused portion of a voucher as well as other consumer-friendly changes. There are still issues, notably the monthly maintenance fee companies can impose if a voucher is not used within the first year but we are, by any measure, in a better place now than we once were.

17. We are much, much better at recycling the rubbish we generate than we once were. While you may have views on bin charges and the much newer Re-Turn deposit and return scheme, it is hard to argue with the improvements made. According to Central Statistics Office (CSO) data, 74 per cent of our waste ended up in landfill in 2001 compared with 16 per cent in 2021. The recovery rate of packaging waste in Ireland increased from 25 per cent in 2001 to more than 90 per cent now.

18. The almost total disappearance of plastic bags from the hedges around Ireland is a clear bright spot and we have the plastic bag levy to thank for it. It was introduced in 2002 and almost immediately made a huge difference to our world. In 2001 plastic bags made up as much as 5 per cent of all litter in Ireland. Today it is less than 0.2 per cent. In one study from UCD academics, researchers struggled to think of “any another tax that induces such an enthusiasm and affection from those who are liable to pay it.”

19. Being charged scandalous sums by hotels to use in-room telephones for calls home used to be one of the more unpleasant features of going abroad. With the arrival of the mobile phone, the hotels lost out on a big earner but lest consumers had a chance to savour low-cost calls home, mobile operators stepped in and started ripping them off with spurious roaming charges. Irish consumers making a four-minute call home from France using their mobile used to pay as much as €5 while, for holiday makers travelling to Malta, the same call could cost an astonishing €9.76. Receiving a four-minute call while in France cost up to €3.97, and while in Malta it cost €7.96. Over a period of 15 years, the European Commission put manners on the telecoms sector and now you can use your phone in Spain just as you can at home without worrying about having to remortgage your home when you get back.

20. Travel: Where do we start with this? In the 1970s overseas travel was a rarity and when people left Ireland they often left for good rather than for a four-day mini-break somewhere lovely. When television crews were dispatched to interview young Irish people emigrating to London they did not head for Dublin Airport but to Busáras. The very notion that anyone fleeing Irish dole queues in search of work in the UK would be in a position to fly across the Irish Sea was absurd. The cost of the hour-long flight topped £200 which, allowing for inflation, is almost €450 today. The 15-hour bus journey, on the other hand, cost a considerably more modest £40, or €80 in today’s money. Today, a canny flyer can frequently get to London for less than a tenner. According to the European Commission, a family trip from Milan to Paris in 1992 cost 16 times more than it does today and the minimum price for a ticket on that route has fallen from more than €400 then to about €25 now. The same story is replicated in airports across the EU.