The singer CMAT dances around a retail centre in a video for her new album. It is the elegy those of us who grew up in the post-Celtic tiger recession have been craving.
You wouldn't know it to look at the tourist board ads, but the emblem of modern Ireland is probably a shopping centre. And now that emblem has found its bard, in the form of Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, the Irish pop star and songwriter better known as CMAT. She is a woman wielding a creative energy that is completely her own, but which is also profoundly shaped by her experiences coming of age in a post-Celtic tiger, recession-era Ireland. This has never been clearer than on her new single, Euro-Country, from the forthcoming album of the same name—a project that reminds us that pop culture has the power to illuminate political and social realities that are otherwise being ignored. It is the elegy that we, Ireland's post-recession generation, needed—and it references at least two shopping centres.
The Euro-Country album artwork is a send-up of Jean-Léon Gérôme's painting Truth Coming Out of Her Well, with CMAT emerging from the fountain in Blanchardstown shopping centre, beside a giant euro coin. In an interview with the Guardian before her spectacular Glastonbury performance in June, Thompson observed that while Ireland is "a little more fetishised and trendy than it's ever been", it's also "a really hard place to live, a really hard place to grow up, unless you have money, which we didn't. So yeah, magical, beautiful, mystical Ireland: it's a shopping centre - that's what I grew up with."
And sure enough, the music video for the single is shot in the Omni retail park in the north Dublin suburbs, with CMAT dancing around the largely empty shopping centre and performing in a vacant shop display window. "Meet me behind the mall," Taylor Swift once sang, with all of the American mystique that carries, but for Irish people, there is something distinctly soulless about an out-of-town shopping precinct in the post-recession era. It represents the hubris and corruption of the Celtic tiger bubble, and the struggles faced by Irish people in the years since it burst. It's where everyone drives to get their groceries, of course - but it's also a microcosm of the economic downturn in the last decade and a half.
The YouTube comments on the music video show how much Thompson has struck a chord. Take one example: Euro-Country "isn't just a song, it's a reckoning ... pulling people all over the world back to the Celtic tiger, forcing that history into the light again. CMAT has managed to give voice to a whole generation's story." Thompson dances in front of a branch of the clothing chain New Look, which went into liquidation in Ireland in February, and the bakery chain Thunders, which closed all its stores in March.
The reality is that, post-2008, I do not know anyone in Ireland who has not struggled with money, been through lengthy periods of unemployment, or been forced to move back in with their parents (me included), thanks to catastrophically high rents. The statistics collected by Ireland's Community Action Tenants Union (CATU) are damning: the number of homeless families increased by 232% between 2014 and 2021. Meanwhile, there are anywhere between 92,251 and 183,000 empty homes; while in the north, there are an estimated 20,000 empty homes. The choice for most people of my generation is either to emigrate or to abandon the hope of ever being able to buy a house.
This is the "Euro-Country" CMAT is honouring: modern Ireland, which she wrote is "the love of my life, the most toxic boyfriend I've ever had, the place which has changed so much that I feel sad every day I can't return the version of it that is in my head". The title track is a stirring but melancholic earworm; an elegy for a generation affected by recession and austerity. Hearing it randomly you could be forgiven for missing the scathing politics woven through the song. At least, until Euro-Country's most devastating line. "I was 12 when the das started killing themselves all around me" is a shocking thing to hear in a pop song, but this is the Ireland that I know; this is the Ireland that many people of my generation know; this is the Ireland that CMAT sings of. Having lost everything of monetary value in the crash, some also lost their loved ones to suicide; a 2015 National Suicide Research Foundation investigation found that there were 476 more male suicides than expected between 2008 and 2012.
The economic crash in Ireland was caused by the global financial crisis, but it was also the product of unregulated greed and moneylending on the part of a small group of wealthy politicians, bankers and property developers. They get their own tribute in Euro-Country, with CMAT singing: "All the big boys, all the Berties / All the envelopes, yeah, they hurt me". The Bertie in question is the former taoiseach and leader of Fianna Fáil Bertie Ahern, who resigned from his party in the wake of the Mahon tribunal's 2008 conclusions that money from supporters had been deposited in his bank account. Political solutions to this malaise feel far away, especially as Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have consistently been returned to government in every general election since the crash. It can be so easy to feel disillusioned and complacent, but I take heart from a key line in the bridge of Euro-Country: "I know it can be better if we hound it". It makes me think of the rise of organisations such as CATU, branches of which have sprung up all over the island of Ireland to advocate for ordinary people's housing rights: carrying out research on the housing crisis; providing support and solidarity for those facing illegal evictions; organising large-scale protests.
CMAT's passionate, witty, defiant Euro-Country is part of that political milieu: it is a call to action to Irish people to reject the stranglehold of these parties and work towards better things together.