ABSTRACT
One particularly painful element of the lack of opportunity for recession-era Irish youth was the puncturing of the fantasy that they had transcended such historical problems. The number of people under 26 in receipt of unemployment benefit was double that of the rest of the population. Rhetorical emphasis on economic recovery and return emigration is part of the consolidated new economic order in which the profit interests of elite transnational corporations serve misleadingly as a gauge of national economic health. The most crisis was at one point well on its way to matching those figures with over 228,000 Irish people leaving after 2009. Recessionary Ireland was marked by a popular culture that had to make some acknowledgement of youth unemployment/emigration if it was to be socially credible, and yet it has also tended to do so in particular ways so as to sustain the paradox that Ireland is open for business.
