You're listening to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service with me, Vicky

Fankham. I'm taking you back to 2008 and have the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, the

nickname given to Ireland during its economic boom years, there are hundreds of abandoned

housing estates. It's the late 1990s and a mix of foreign investments, low corporate

taxes and European subsidies have helped Ireland go from being one of the poorest countries

in Western Europe to one of the wealthiest. The sudden riches result in outrageous

tales of excess as people on Twitter shared. At 15, me and six of the girls took a stretch

homer to see the pussycat dolls at the point. I remember being offered a tells and quit

to walk on New Year's Eve 1999 and torn it down. When my brother went to the cinema

on his own he would buy three tickets so he wouldn't have anyone sitting either side

of him. I left Ireland to go tour with Riverlands in 1995 and I remember coming home one summer

and a local in my village in Wicklow had bought a mini electric submarine. They ran out

of charge and he had to be rescued from the sea floor somewhere in Westcark. It was my

crack. Michelle Burke from County Limerick was

studying in England at the time so missed out on much of the Celtic Tiger boom years.

I saw it when I came home, oh God, I remember being in Westclair and seeing a lot of helicopters

going up and down to the hallway races from Westclair and that was very normal at the

time. You didn't have to pay for parking. In 2006, Michelle moved back to Ireland to be

near her parents. She and her English fiancé William started looking for their first home

in the picturesque town of killer Lou in County Clare but it wasn't easy to get on the

property ladder. In some parts of the country house prices had quadrupled in just 10 years.

Everything was very expensive. So this is why we had to start looking at buying houses

...