A trip down memory pain

Let's be clear about one thing first - the burgeoning nostalgia for all things 1980s is all very fine and well in other countries, where the decade is a synonym for bad taste, wide shoulders, legwarmers and loadsamoney, and ripe for the sort of affectionate parody we saw in movies such as The Wedding Singer. Nostalgia is a profitable product which constantly renews itself as each generation puts its wild years behind it, settles down and starts feeling wistful about the days of its youth.

But the 1980s in Ireland really, really stank. If you had the misfortune, as this writer did, to become an adult here at that time, the most useful information you could get was the route to the nearest ferry or airport. The cities and towns were crumbling, derelict, miserable wrecks; jobs were as scarce as hens' teeth. Northern Ireland was a bleak, hopeless morass. We now know that the country was being run into the ground by crooks and incompetents (truth be told, we had a pretty good idea of that at the time). Nostalgia? Bah!

RTE's new archive series, Reeling in the Years, takes a look at each year of that benighted decade over the next 10 weeks, beginning on Monday with 1980. Watching the first programme, one immediately feels that they've got the wrong decade. The footage of everything from PAYE marches to the singing Nolan Sisters looks irredeemably 1970s. And what genius decided to paint our buses that revolting shade of diarrhoea brown?

"Everything is second-rate, everything is shoddy," complains Bob Geldof, in full motor-mouth mode, at one point, and he has never said a truer word. It may take a while for the key signifiers of any decade to kick in, but with Ireland there's always a feeling that we're lagging a decade behind. How else to explain our experience of the 1980s as a decade of economic stagnation and unemployment, or the 1990s as a time of privatisation, conspicuous consumption and property madness?

An archive show mixing news and entertainment footage with pop hits of the year is hardly a new idea, as series producer John O'Regan admits, but RTE had been relatively slow in plundering its archives for nostalgia programmes before he pitched the idea for Reeling in the Years to the channel. O'Regan's own experiences are typical of his generation - leaving school in 1983, graduating from college in 1987, and hightailing it out of the country soon after.

After some 10 years working in British television - including a brief stint with Granada Television's similarly-themed archive programme, The Rock'n'Goal Years - he returned to Ireland two years ago. "When I came back, I found a very different country from the one I'd left," he says. "I hadn't actually lived in Dublin before, but the city I found reminded me very much of the bullishness and boorishness of London in the late 1980s - cranes on the skyline, yuppies making money, and this feeling that the boom couldn't end.

"It was great to see the country doing better, but the Ireland I came back to wasn't the country I remembered. If you look at the figures from the time, they were horrendous: 36,000 people joined the dole queues in 1983; 30,000 people emigrated in 1986 alone. That all seems to be forgotten now."

Dividing history up into 10-year slices is, of course, an arbitrary affair, but Ireland in the 1980s actually lends itself to a coherent narrative; one which begins to brighten towards the end. Putting together the series, O'Regan could see the beginnings of recovery reflected in the footage. "Certainly, the tone is set at first by events like the hunger strikes, and then the abortion and divorce referendums. But the interesting thing is that you can almost watch Ireland growing up. By the late 1980s you can see the first signs of improvement.

`One of the first changes is that, at the start of the decade, Ireland has little or no presence on the world stage, with the exception of the occasional Eurovision win . . . but then you start to see things like the soccer team reaching the European finals, Stephen Roche winning the Tour de France and, of course, U2 becoming huge international stars."

The bleak years at the start of the decade seem to have been airbrushed out in an act of collective national amnesia. "Well, I don't know if it's forgotten," says O'Regan. "But it's certainly been ignored, or brushed under the carpet. People like my kid brother, who's in his early twenties, don't know anything other than the virtual certainty of getting a job. When I've shown the programmes to people of that generation, there's a fascination with what things were like."

Reeling in the Years is on RTE1 at 8 p.m. on Monday, and repeated on Network 2 at 11.05 p.m. on Tuesday