Austin Hughes
speaker
415 appearances
6 recordings
2 series
first heard Oct 2025
last heard 19 Jun
Austin Hughes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 2.
Appearances
I don't think we can.
To borrow and butcher that phrase, the past is a foreign country and we do measure things differently there.
You know, the reality is that the current crop of 20 to 30 year olds are concerned about housing significantly, about the threat of AI, about job security, about a very uncertain world.
Whereas the
crop of 20 to 30-year-olds who exited the 80s and into the 90s were concerned about, in many instances, getting out of Ireland because it had been written off as an economy.
So now we're wondering, you know, things are possibly too good to be true for my parents.
So, you know, I'm worried about how the future will pan out.
Whereas back then it was a case of saying, you
things are going to remain rotten forever.
Remember, The Economist magazine, the late 80s, famously had a front page leader on the Irish economy, the poorest of the rich, showed someone begging on O'Connell Street Bridge and basically said, this economy is a write-off economy.
And that was a prevailing view back then.
The population was falling in the late 80s.
We were the last country in Western Europe until I think about 1995 that had net outward migration.
So it was a very different economy, very different focus.
We had, you know, much poorer living standards.
We had higher unemployment.
So in that regard, it was a very different place.
And the economist, you know, the straightforward economics 101 would say that things were, you know, dramatically worse then and that we have seen, you know, unbelievable progress in the interim.
But that
doesn't remove the anxiety and uncertainties, and it doesn't move the precarious nature of a lot of economic activity at the moment.
Showing 1–20 of 415 · page 1 of 21
Next →