Every weekday around two, my friend Mark and I collect our football-mad lads from school, lean against the wall and put the world to rights in five minutes. We cover headlines, politics, prices, and the state of the country with the confidence of two fellas who have civilisation sorted before the bell stops ringing. We look back fondly on the Ireland of the 1990s in which we both grew up in, sigh, slag each other, and wonder where half of it went. Mark rightfully gives out about powerful global interests such as the “small-hats”; I usually save mine for the boomer generation.
Every generation gets boxed into labels—Gen Z,Gen X, millennials like me, and baby boomers—but boomers stand apart.
To me, the stereotypical boomer born from the late 40s into the early 60s can be fiercely hypocritical: lecturing younger people about entitlement while sitting on fat pensions, houses, and advantages they can barely imagine. Many praise and happily accept mass immigration as progress, yet cannot understand why their own children might want safer communities, stability, and a country that still feels like home. Too often, they see no further than their own front gate and assume the consequences are someone else’s problem.
Boomers enjoyed conditions that almost no earlier generation could have imagined. Apart from serious exceptions like the Vietnam War, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and other crises and recessions, many grew up amid peace, growth, affordable homes, strong social trust, and rising prosperity. Because abundance followed them for so long, some came to think of it as normal.
The baby boom began after the Second World War, when rationing and grief gave way to recovery, welfare states, the NHS, easier work, and a long economic boom. I understand why people say boomers inherited something remarkable. But the world has changed beyond recognition: work is less secure, wages lag behind costs, wealth is more uneven, and a modest income no longer buys the house, car, and family life it once did.
Many built wealth, protected their comfort, and backed policies that turned a low-cost, high-opportunity world into one of high rents, weak starting wages, inflated house prices, and shrinking prospects. It is not just envy; it is the feeling that one generation was handed one of history’s most prosperous societies and left its children and grandchildren to mind the decline. More spending, more immigration, more trade deals, deeper EU integration, rising deficits, and swelling debt did not feel urgent because they were not the ones who would pay the final price.
For decades, boomers have been one of the West’s most powerful voting blocs, and their instinct often seems simple: protect the pension, keep house prices up, and let tomorrow look after itself. After years of RTÉ, BBC News,CNN,Euronews, The Irish Times, and NPC opinions on loop, many seem to have lost the habit of asking whether the official story is true.
A big part of the problem is the self-made myth. Many worked damn hard, no doubt, but they were also rewarded by timing: post-war growth, secure jobs, rising house prices, and wider opportunity. Yet some lecture younger people as if success came from graft alone. It reminds me of Homer Simpson: an ordinary man with a secure job, family, car, and house. That is how many young people now view the boomer generation—not as uniquely brilliant, but as people who won a generational raffle and mistook it for genius.
The boomers were once the rock-and-roll generation: the swinging sixties, Woodstock, The Rolling Stones, Carnaby Street, civil rights marches and apparent fairness. They had the image of rebellion, yet many became loyal to the systems they once claimed to challenge
Boomers dislike being called selfish, but their voting record makes the charge hard to dismiss. Not every boomer is selfish, of course, but as a generation they too often defended their own comfort while leaving narrower roads for their children and grandchildren. Now even poorer boomers are feeling rising costs, shrinking fixed incomes, and cuts to benefits they once thought untouchable.
Generations below boomers were told to go to college, get the degree, find the safe job, work hard, and trust the system. For many, that promise is broken. The approved path now means high taxes, inflation eating savings, impossible housing, and the feeling that you have no real stake in the country. In Ireland, many young adults remain in childhood bedrooms far longer than expected.
I know I have already thrown hard words around, so a little nuance is needed. “Boomer” does not mean the same thing everywhere. In America, baby boomers were born into the great post-war surge: returning GIs, subsidised homes, new suburbs, and wages that could carry a family.
Britain had its own post-war bargain. The war generation threw Churchill out and brought in a Labour government under Clement Attlee that built the welfare state, expanded public housing, nationalised key services, and gave the country the NHS.After the war, many British people wanted “homes fit for heroes”, not just wartime leadership. They respected Churchill as a war leader, but they did not want him to run peacetime Britain.Children born in Britain through the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s grew up under that roof, and many later helped strip the slates from it.
That is why “boomer” has more real bite in Britain. In Ireland, it sits more awkwardly. Irish boomers did not all inherit the clean American suburban driveway, the two-car garage, and the television dream. Anyone who has read Angela’s Ashes or seen the film knows something of that damp heaviness that existed in Ireland.We were twenty years behind, too poor for a proper 1960s revolution, still half-rural, half-clerical, half-afraid of ourselves. Change came slower through the 1970s and 1980s, then roared in during the 1990s and the Celtic Tiger years like a mad horse through a village street.
In Ireland, some of the people we call boomers are closer to what David McWilliams called the Pope’s Children: late boomers, Generation X, and older millennials who entered public service, semi-states, banks, councils, or safe office jobs within the soulless civil service, bought houses during the Celtic Tiger days, and watched asset prices lift them like floodwater.
Saying all that, the Irish boomer, in particular, can be insufferable. Ireland is changing beyond recognition before their eyes, and they would still say, “Ah sure, I’ve voted Fianna Fáil all my life,” before settling back with Liveline in the background, and a question about whether the GAA is on the TV.
Self-hating boomers are especially exhausting in Ireland. Imagine inheriting an ancient Irish civilisation with all its faults and beauty, then being taught by pretentious lecturers, media panels, and RTÉ voices to feel guilty about your own people and country. Instead of defending what was handed down—the parish, family, stories, songs, humour, faith, and fierce loyalty to place—too many learned to sneer at it and help take it apart stone by stone. That is what frustrates me most: not simply that they were given so much, but that so many seem determined to leave so little behind, then expect the rest of us to stand among the ruins and say thank you.
I should say this much: I was blessed in my own parents. Technically, they are boomers, but never in the meaner sense of the word. Covid proved it. While fear moved through families like a cold fog and many people their age closed doors,soaked up the propaganda and measured love by distance, my parents kept the old fire lit. I remember ringing them in March 2020, asking whether they still wanted me to call over with the kids. I can still hear the answer: “What are you on about, Paul? Come over, bring the kids, and we’ll have fun in the back garden. Life is for living. Don’t be listening to that rubbish.” I was never prouder of them.
My parents put children and grandchildren first, and that is the line between wisdom and fear. During Covid, too many boomers treated family as a risk to be managed rather than flesh and blood. I heard people with grandchildren talk as if schools could stay shut forever and children were little more than “super-spreaders.” I found that shameful. Worse, many of the same people still vote for the parties that have damaged this island—Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Labour, Sinn Féin, and the rest of the establishment lackeys—then imagine themselves brave and modern for backing dangerous left leaning parties. I am tired of the act. Those who chose fear over family, comfort over courage, and fashionable opinion over country deserve to hear the truth plainly. Once supposedly pro-freedom and anti-establishment, too many boomers now seem terrified of what the neighbours might say and happy to swallow RTÉ-approved opinion while Ireland is reshaped around them.
On Covid, I still wonder about the experimental jabs, the fear around them, and the mass migration that followed across Western Europe. If you wanted to deal with ageing populations, unaffordable pensions, debt, and economic stagnation, the Covid years offered a brutal answer: reduce the elderly burden, bring in millions of young men from the Third World, quiet the pension crisis, reset the economy, and change the demographics. That is why many see Covid as the crime of the century: lives, families, and futures treated like numbers on a balance sheet. Why were boomers and the elderly targeted first? Why were alternative treatments suppressed? Why did mass migration rise alongside mass vaccination? To me, it was never about about saving lives. It was about control, replacement, and profit. Say that to many boomers and they will laugh, but their demographic is dying off left, right, and centre now.
The same normie NPC instinct showed in Belfast after the attempted barbaric, medieval-style beheading attack on a local man by a foreign national. After rightful anger spilled onto the streets, some boomers still joined protests and chanted, “Refugees are welcome here,” as if nothing had happened. To me, that says it all. It showed the power of the telly over the eye: if the screen, the political biased panel show, or the solemn voice on the evening news says the real problem is the far right, then that is that.
My deepest anger is that so many boomers seem determined to protect their comfort while leaving children and grandchildren to pick through the ruins. One more benefit, one more holiday, one more easy Sunday lunch—while the next generation struggles to own a home, raise a family, or feel the country belongs to them. To me, that betrays one of the oldest duties there is: parents are meant to build for their children, not the other way around. Our biggest import in Ireland to the world continues to be our young people.
Many boomers left school early and stepped into steady work, helped by cheaper education, family connections, and a country where turning up on time with your shirt tucked in could open a door. They could stay in one job, retire with a pension, buy young—often on one income, manage a week or two in Majorca,enjoy Friday,Saturday and Sunday pints, and a family life that now feels like another Ireland. A mortgage then did not need three side hustles, a spreadsheet,a begging bowl and a whispered prayer to St Anthony.
Their retirement was then lifted by a historic bull run they did not create but happily rode. Many can sell homes for dozens of times what they paid, keep collecting benefits, and still lecture younger people about saving, as if a job in the ESB, the council, Bord na Móna, the bank, or the local creamery still exists in Ireland nowadays. They raised children in affordable houses with back gardens, hot presses, good rooms, and greens where children played until the streetlights called them home. Then they watched those same children grow anxious, priced out, and slow to start families of their own—before wondering why the cradle is quiet.
Nobody denies they worked. Boomers often say life rewards hard work, and there is truth in that. Graft matters. But their money reached further, and Ireland once gave ordinary people a better chance—in market rural towns, council estates, small farms, and streets where everyone knew who belonged to whom. They inherited a high-trust country where the parish hall, local club, post office, credit union, pub, butcher, and church gate collection still mattered.
Many also went along with the weakening of family, state, and the older order that gave Ireland and the wider West its backbone. Every fashionable woke change was dressed up as progress, from radical cultural identity politics to changes around marriage, abortion, gender, demographics and national identity. It is easy to blame young impressionable lefty activists, but boomers had the numbers and cast many of the votes that has changed Ireland for the worst in my opinion. To me, this was comfort growing soft in the bones, until decadence dressed itself as wisdom and cowardice learned to call itself compassion.That is what makes the old hippie-to-wealth-hoarder arc so maddening. Many went from peace, love, and rebellion in their youth to asset protection, inequality, and a middle class hollowed out like an old cottage left to rot. They tell the young to work harder, save more, and stop complaining, but the young look at the bargain and see it was broken before they ever arrived.
It feels like a modern Marie Antoinette moment: comfortable boomers wondering why the young are angry while sitting in cosy gardens,sipping wine, reading The Irish Times in safe areas bought for peanuts decades ago, surrounded by the ruins of a destructive social order their choices helped weaken.
Not all boomers were selfish, entitled or fucking annoying; my own parents were living proof. They carried old Irish country virtues in their bones: thrift, faith, family, patriotism, poetry, restraint, and respect for what had been handed down. To them, Ireland was not something to be spent and passed on carelessly, but a sacred inheritance, a flame to be minded against the wind. They never ever voted for Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael, and while they may once have voted Labour or Sinn Féin in the 80s and 90s, they saw how those movements drifted from ordinary working people. Their views on the Constitution, the Lisbon Treaty,Nice Treaty, the Good Friday Agreement,gay marriage, and abortion came from conviction. Whether people agree with them or not, they were old Ireland in flesh and blood: wary of official narratives, loyal to family and country before party or applause. So it was no surprise during Covid that they did not trust the government line. I can only imagine how painful it was for them to watch so many of their own generation drift from the old loyalties of family, country, and common sense.
Too many boomers seem to have lost touch with the old Ireland they came from: rural Ireland, bogland Ireland, the Ireland of turf smoke coming from chimneys, and hands darkened by honest work in the fields.
Most of these boomers grew up close to rural Ireland, and surely many remember the sentimental value of turf: the smell of the bog , the dark shine of wet sods, and the scrape of a fork lifting earth that had slept for centuries. They must remember the briquettes, the turning of sods before machinery came in, the old rhythm of backs bending and straightening, the flask of tea, the sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil, the talk of weather, football, neighbours, and whose turf was drying best. They must remember being in the bog with their parents and grandparents, men smoking, women laughing, children half-working and half-playing, and everyone discussing turf like tactics before an All-Ireland final: when will we get it home, how will we get it home, will we bag it,will we foot it, what does the forecast say? They knew the feeling of the bog at six in the morning or eleven at night, midges in the air, turf mould under the fingernails, and weather deciding everything. That is why it is sad to see turf pushed so far from ordinary Irish life—not only as a practical heat source for homes, especially at Christmas, but as a living thread of rural memory and inheritance.
If it was not Covid, it was climate; if it was not fear of illness, it was fear of emissions. George Lee appears on the screen to the ever watching boomer, warning and worrying, and many follow along as if RTÉ itself had come down from the mountain with tablets of stone. The Irish Farmers Association which is boomer rural central, too, is far too close to government and Fine Gael thinking, with gullible older men nodding through policies that may sound sensible to trendy bourgeois Dublin or Brussels types but are working against farmers, rural life, and the agricultural heart of this country.
I worry that this part of Irish rural life is being totally squeezed out by EU policy, and a comfortable generation that does not always see what is being lost. Some of the same people who accepted these changes now sit in large modern houses, complain about paying €1,000 for 500 litres of oil, and drive expensive electric cars back to solar-panelled homes while calling it progress. My mother still heats the house and the stove with turf, and there is a beauty in which a EU boomer politician or middle class suburban wanker will never understand: the red glow in the range, the smell of winter, the old heat rising through the house, and my children carrying buckets of turf in for their granny like a small act of loyalty to those who came before them. It is simple defiant, ordinary, and deeply Irish.
You can see the result across Ireland now, from soulness Dublin commuter towns to rural villages where the main street has more shuttered shops than open doors. Electricity is sky-high, the cost of living is brutal, and young people can scarcely dream of buying homes in the places that raised them. Yet the answer to every hardship seems to be more sermons about compassion and less concern for people trying to keep a roof over their heads, heat in the house, fuel in the car, dinner on the table, and dignity in their lives. Then comes the old boomer line: “Ah sure, thank God we live in a great little country.” It drives me mad, because that same little country has become a hard road for the young, the working-class family, the apprentice, the nurse, the guard, the teacher, and the lad in his twenties it thirties still sleeping in his poxy old childhood box room.
My father, God rest him, was a funny man, and I miss having a pint with him and enjoying the craic. He was random, impulsive, sharp, deeply intelligent, and full of faith in God and Ireland. He loved Robert Emmet, Wolfe Tone, Michael Collins, the United Irishmen, and the old Fenian spirit, and he had no time for people who trampled on Ireland’s soul for a few extra quid. I remember one day in Kerrigan’s pub in Mullingar when a man proudly announced he had renewed his Fianna Fáil membership. Without missing a beat, my father said, “Drink up that pint. I’ll bring you down to St Loman’s to get you sectioned. You’re clearly a madman—and if you’re not a madman, you must be a simpleton.” There was an awkward silence, but that was him: savage humour, fierce instinct, and no patience for people voting the country into the ground.
It is no surprise many lost the run of themselves during the Celtic Tiger, that false economy dressed up as national genius. Fancy holidays, skiing trips, Spanish apartments, new cars, home extensions, and the endless theatre of keeping up appearances became the order of the day. This is not a rant against people enjoying money. The problem is that so much of it was spent with little thought for those coming after: one more holiday, one more property, one more upgrade, and little left behind but debt and framed photos from Lanzarote.
And through it all came the daily sermon: Joe Duffy on Liveline, Pat Kenny in the morning, The Late Late on a Friday, Ryan Tubridy with the faux solemn head tilt and gimpy smile, Newstalk panel and the endless RTÉ slop ladled out like parish soup.They sneer at Brexit, Farage and Trump. The message rarely changed: the problem was the young, the working class, the “far right,” or anyone asking awkward questions—anyone except the comfortable class staring back from the mirror.
James Joyce called Ireland “the old sow that eats her farrow,” and it still lands like a slap. Ireland has always had a gift for producing its own betrayers: people who rise from the soil, learn the songs, know the stories of Tone, Emmet, Pearse, Connolly, Collins, and Casement, and then spend their lives sneering at Irish nationalism and the ordinary people who still believe in it. It is an old wound in this country: the informer, the traitor, the soft-handed fixer, the man who knows the rebel songs but lowers his eyes when power walks into the room. You can see the same disease in the endless parade of establishment voices—Insufferable boomers like Fergus Finlay, Terry Prone, Fintan O’Toole,— always near a microphone, always ready with a polished sound bite, and always well paid enough to lecture the rest of us about decency.
Forever explaining a twisted, polished, obedient version of Ireland to the Irish, while treating ordinary people as if they are beneath them. The same faces move through media, politics, NGOs, and public life, diagnosing Ireland from comfortable chairs while blaming ordinary people for noticing what is happening around them. These obnoxious boomers should be given a mug of tea, a quiet corner, and a firm instruction to fuck right off!
I grew up in 1990s Ireland, and for all its faults, there was still an innocence to it. Then the 1990s turned, the Celtic Tiger arrived, and something in the country’s soul began to shift. We elected Mary Robinson in the 90s, the first female president and sell out globalist, and with her came a new official Ireland.Divorce was legalised, the institutional Catholicism was broken—perhaps deservedly in many ways—and Irish culture began to change at speed. Wealth did not sit naturally on us. Greed suited us even less. Coffee shops replaced pubs, one family car became two or three, houses abroad became status symbols, and the old modesty gave way to showing off. I know that sickened my parents. It was not begrudgery, and it was not a desire to stay poor. It was the sense that we had lost values, morals, principles, and something essential about what it meant to be Irish. We turned our backs on the sacrifices of our parents, grandparents, and ancestors. Money became the only tune in town. Politicians became fat cats. The Galway tent said plenty under “Bertie’s” rein.
Even the accents changed, with that Dublin 4, half-American tone spreading across Irish television until the screen no longer sounded like the country I knew. There used to be programmes that honoured craft, trades, hands, skill, and ordinary Irish life both rural and city; then, almost overnight, Irish television became a stage for a new class speaking to itself.
Before long, we legalised same-sex marriage, celebrated abortion at Dublin Castle, and became the eager pupils of global liberalism. If Ireland was going to arrive late to the new creed, by God we would overtake everyone else. Canada had Trudeau; we had Varadkar.Dont get me started on that little teaboy dweeb Simon Harris. The boomers and the “respectable middle class” clapped along, proud to prove to the world how modern they were, while old Ireland was treated like an embarrassment to be hidden in the attic.Boomer Paddy and Mary playing to the gallery and tipping their moronic Irish hat to the Yanks and EU masters for a little pat on the head. Somewhere, Cromwell and Thatcher must have been laughing: look at the Irish, doing to themselves what their enemies could never fully manage.
I am not naïve enough to think boomers are the only problem generation. Irish millennials have their own mix of cynicism, guilt, and performative virtue: voting Sinn Féin to stick it to “the man,” backing Holly Cairns or the Social Democrats as a badge of modern decency, or treating Palestine, open borders, climate slogans, transgenderism and online causes as more urgent than the broken housing market and dangerous changing demographics under their own feet. You see it in the uppity Dublin graduate class, in Trinity, UCD, Maynooth, NGOs, HR departments, media jobs, and publicly funded activism.I do not say that with hatred; millennials and Gen Z inherited sky-high rents, weak wages, broken and divided communities, and a virtue signalling culture that tells them to care about everything except the place they live. Still, the point remains: boomers caused, enabled, and got away with an extraordinary amount.
As I have said Irish boomers kept propping up the same establishment parties election after election for another small increase, another protected pension, another promise that comfort would be preserved. But this habit is not theirs alone. It runs through much of the Irish middle class, especially among those shaped by third-level institutions. Anyone who thinks the problem will disappear when older generations fade away is fooling themselves. It runs deeper than age: through class, education, institutions, and the national habit of going along with things while pretending we had no choice.
The divide is simple. For many older people, luxuries were dear but basics were manageable; for the young, the reverse is true. Food, rent, housing, heating, childcare, insurance, and transport take the wage before life has even knocked on the door. Older people remember saving, grafting, and slowly building a life. Younger people are grafting too, only to stand still. When an older person says, “At your age I had two children and a house,” the young hear proof that the social contract has broken. Boomers need to be told to fuck off in no uncertain terms when in preach mode.
That is partly why figures like Jordan Peterson caught fire among some male millennials and younger men. Whatever people think of him, he named the societal fog: uselessness, loneliness, debt, mockery, and moral homelessness. He told young men that life still required discipline, courage, and responsibility. Too many older people never even tried to understand that world; sometimes it is hard to know whether they were naïve or simply guarding their own patch.
Young people know the system is broken, and they need to stop whispering it like a secret. Ireland does not need more lonely lads shouting into phones or more clever posts that vanish by morning. It needs a living youth culture with backbone that truly loves Ireland and is not afraid of hurty words like “far-right” hurled at them.
The lesson is not to scream at every headline; it is to build. Organisation matters more than attention, and free speech is not the same as strategy.
Young Irish people need a real alternative: friendship, work, risk, rebel songs, new music, old stories, strength, history, service, and a rooted Irish way to belong. Polite middle-class lads and girls will not rebuild the country ; working-class lads and girls need to step forward. Without a serious Irish counterculture, too many will become passive consumers in the modern day hamster wheel repeating the opinions handed down by woke media, employers, universities, and parents. If you want to change young people, you cannot just lecture them. Give them the Irish flag, a song, a place to stand, a real Irish culture worth joining, and the fire to defend it.
I recently saw a large group of young people marching under their national flags somewhere in Europe, and what struck me was their discipline. The young men looked tough, strong, serious, and physically capable; the young women looked confident, composed, and equally committed. Their message was simple: they wanted their country back. That is the kind of seriousness young people need. They must organise, train, build confidence, and show politicians, policymakers, the media, and the wider establishment that the next generation is to be feared and is not to be fucked around with. The people in power are comfortable when young people are distracted shouting for Palestine, are anxious meek-looking lads who are feminized, or absorbed by identity politics causes imported from elsewhere.
They are less comfortable when young men and women stand together with discipline, pride, and love of country. Ireland needs young courageous people who care more about their own communities, families, history, and future than about whatever trendy woke slogan is now online. We need based young people with a polite good riddance to the selfish boomer!
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