Love or hate the 1980s? Shane Hegartyand Kevin Courtney kick off this weekend's special 1980s REVISITED magazine by offering two different perspectives on the decade.
SHANE HEGARTY: WE HATE THE 1980s
CAN WE BE nostalgic for the 1990s yet? Now there was a decade a person could like. There was a revolutionary music scene in full swing; emigration became a lifestyle option not a necessity; the people at the revenue office started being nice on the phone and everyone got the internet. A jolt in the economy became an explosion that became a boom that lasted for almost 20 years, only finally ending just after lunch a couple of Wednesdays ago. And there really was some lovely weather at times.
That was a good decade, a prosperous decade, a decade that you can't help but be nostalgic about. Let's celebrate that, not the 1980s. Let's celebrate anything but the 1980s.
Young people of Ireland, do not be suckered into believing that the 1980s were in some way great fun, or, worse, greater fun than recent years. It is their own youth that 1980s survivors are nostalgic about, not the decade. In Ireland, the decade was generally awful, poor, grey, corrupt, morally backward and punctuated by bi-annual general elections. It was populated by moustaches in duffle coats.
Sure, it perked up a little towards the end when Stephen Roche won the Tour de France and Houghton put the ball in the English net, but aside from isolated moments, most people in Ireland had a really miserable 1980s.
They couldn't wait to get out of this country and escape to the 1980s that other countries were having, an 1980s of champagne and fast cars and economic growth and good sketch-comedy shows. Britain had that. The US had that. Ireland did not. We had only our wits and, if Roddy Doyle was to be believed, our wit. There was little else.
And throughout the 1990s, there was no nostalgia for the previous decade. It is only a recent thing, that insidious warmth that has wormed its way into the collective memory. But if you could climb into the television set the next time Reeling in the Years is on, and ask all those people queuing to get out of here if they would ever want to look back with fondness at those years, they'd hit you over your head with their butter vouchers.
Nostalgia appears to be hard-wired into the human brain, but so is faulty memory. Don't believe the hype. And if you really want to know what the 1980s were like, then just hang around for a couple of years - it looks like we're about to get something close to a rerun.
KEVIN COURTNEY: WE LOVE THE 1980s
"HEAVEN IS A place on Earth," sang Belinda Carlyle in 1987, and she was right. The 1980s were, indeed, heaven on earth, a place filled with fluffy clouds and even fluffier hairstyles
I came into adulthood in the 1980s, and it was as if a curtain opened up to reveal a glitzy, day-glo party in full swing. MTV began broadcasting, cheap synthesisers became widely available and Miami Vice jackets came in all the colours of the rainbow.
We didn't have any money, but we didn't need any. Living in the 1980s was like having a 10-year membership to Club Tropicana, and everything was free. Duran Duran and ABC videos gave us our vicarious thrills; watching Simon Le Bon pose on his yacht or Martin Fry brooding in a dinner jacket was all we needed to feel part of the new elite.
The 1980s were "modern". David Bowie sang about Modern Love and bands were called things like Modern Romance. Modernity was the catch-all for fashion, art, architecture and music, and The Face magazine chronicled it with panache. Being modern was much more fun than being post-modern, I can tell you.
Things were uncomplicated in the 1980s - no mobiles, no spam, no Celtic Tiger or credit crunch. Hit songs were played on one-fingered synths, while digital watches and walkman stereos were the ultimate in gadgetry.
Girls just wanted to have fun, good news for any young man with a mullet, yellow bandana, green singlet, billowing purple pantaloons and pixie boots. By the 1990s, women's minds were poisoned against us by the likes of Alanis Morissette, but for one glorious decade, the ladies forgave us our crimes against fashion, taste and political correctness - they even lent us their eyeliner.
The 1980s are usually associated with ersatz pop, and certainly the decade had its share of cheese. But there were more catchy tunes packed into this decade than at any other time in pop history. And, lest we forget, the 1980s saw the birth of the C86 generation, whose soundtrack was music by such indie bands as The Smiths, REM and The Jesus and Mary Chain. No wonder today's bands are desperately trying to replicate the sounds of the 1980s.
If only Doc Brown's DeLorean time machine was real, then we could all go back to the future.