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TO hear anybody talk these days, the 1980s were down there with the last days of the Roman Empire . . . minus the fun. Doom peeped through the gloom every now and then.

Grey was the colour of the decade, misty rain the weather. We were, as a country, a nation, a people, crowded into a station, waiting on the last train to hell, or a boat the hell out of the place.

And Wham were top of the charts. The horror, the horror . . . never in the history of mankind have so many suffered so much in retrospect.

Was it all that bad? That largely depended on your station in life at the time. If the flower of youth was disappearing in the rear view mirror, and you had mouths to feed, stress was around every corner. 'Twas no country for the old, the middle-aged, the economically vulnerable. Unemployment kicked in around 100,000 in 1980 and within three years had trebled. The trend continued through the decade. Around 30,000 people on average left each year to look for work abroad.

At home, the queues lengthened outside the dole offices and the American embassy. Jobs were on another planet for most, but the substitute, a course in Anco (forerunner to Fas) was all the rage. Butter vouchers were in currency to ease the plight of the unemployed.

Industrial relations were far from harmonious, bringing us bus strikes, bread wars and power cuts. Today, Celtic cubs refer to the economy as if it is a living, breathing entity, assisting them to cut a swathe through life. Back then, the economy was a dark beast, threatening to visit each home like a grim reaper on the batter.

Political life was nothing to write home about either. The killing in the North continued unabated. It was as if the island was becoming mentally attuned to a 1,000-year war. Daily violent death was reduced to practical footnotes in media bulletins. Many, particularly in the south, became anaesthetised to word of another life snuffed out in its prime. Real outrage was reserved for those occasions when circumstances or numbers lifted the killing from everyday banal to the truly horrific. The bombing of Enniskillen on Remembrance Sunday in 1987 was one such occasion, in which 11 lives were lost and a new low plumbed.

In 1980, the Provos decided they were going to open the war on another front. The hunger strikes began and reached a zenith the following year when Bobby Sands and nine others died in Long Kesh. The spectre of young men resorting to the tactics first employed during the land wars of the 19thcentury stirred something in the national psyche. Confusion set in. After all, these men found themselves in prison because they took it upon themselves to go out and kill in pursuit of their political aims. The killing racheted up as the decade progressed, and even as the '90s loomed, few believed that lasting peace would appear from around the corner.

In the Republic, politics through the early part of the decade was dominated by two men. The caricatures had Garret the Good up against flyboy Charlie Haughey. Power oscillated between the two between 1981 and 1983 in a series of general elections, until Garret finally held sway and served as Taoiseach through the middle years of the decade. Within Fianna Fail, there was much blood-letting as a large rump refused to accept Haughey's leadership. There was a smell of cordite from the man, a factor that rallied some to his standard, and repelled others. Out of the maelstrom the Progressive Democrats were born when Des O'Malley refused to yield. In December 1985, the party was launched by O'Malley with the assistance of a young Mary Harney and gogetting barrister Michael McDowell. For a while, everybody saw the PDs as a new dawn. Then the five minutes passed and everybody went back to their pints.

Of course it would be many years before the real Haughey was unmasked. He regained power in 1987, and brought Fianna Fail into coalition for the first time in 1989 when he and O'Malley kissed and made up for the sake of a temporary little arrangement.

Yes, so far, so dreary, but hang in there, the sun is about to shine. First though, the darkest hour before the dawn. The '80s wrung the last out of the conservative element which rode shotgun for the Catholic Church and peeped through the keyholes of bedrooms throughout the state.

In 1983, an amendment was put to the people to insert a clause in the constitution banning abortion. It's not that abortion was legal or ever would be legal, but a hullabaloo had to be kicked up to insert it into the constitution, just to show who was really boss.

The politicians all tugged the forelock, still in fear of their lives of the church and its outriders. The amendment passed and Ireland was saved from the heathen forces, massing on its shore. In the intervening 24 years, that decision has come back to haunt successive governments, which in turn have continually thrust the problem into the lap of the courts, far from the sovereignty of the people, where it all began.

Two years later, the citadel had to be defended again. Divorce (anybody out there under 30 should desist from eating now as you are likely to choke) was illegal in the country, as if the place was on a par with Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran.

Finally, the nettle had to be grasped and FitzGerald's coalition government put forward an amendment proposal. Naturally, Haughey opposed them as there was hay to be made with the anti-divorce brigade. The campaign descended into heated debate over whether or not the introduction of divorce would lead to farmer's wives being left on the side of the road with their belongings, and holdings split up to such a degree as to make them unviable. The amendment was rejected and divorce was to remain illegal in the country for another decade.

Where was the joy? Go west, young man, or if not catch the next Ryanair flight to London. While the country at home fiddled and withered, there was a nation on tour in the great cities of Europe and the USA. For two centuries, emigration was a fact of life in Ireland, but during the '80s it entered a new phase. The tens of thousands who left a stagnant economy travelled with hope and bright eyes rather than the tears that accompanied their forebears.

The '80s emigrants were educated and had available to them the possibility of retaining links with home though cheap and relatively convenient travel modes, including Ryanair. The writer Joe O'Connor dubbed these emigrants 'The Ryanair Generation'.

In Britain and the USA, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were practising Reaganomics, the trickle-down economics that handed the running of the country over to the free market. For the native weak or vulnerable, the shift heralded further hardship and pain. For young emigrants eager to work, there was money to be made and escape from the last vestiges of a conservative basket case of an island on offer.

Paddy was having a ball.

The USA always held out promise to the Irish, but its lure received an extra boost in 1984 when Vincent Hanley began broadcasting MT USA on Sunday afternoons on RTE 2 television, as it then was. The programme was dominated by music videos in the days when MTV might as well have been the starship trooper. Hanley also brought viewers on a trip around New York, glamour on wheels compared to the dreary mood back home where the Sean Bhean was feeling particularly bhocht.

In July 1985, the pictures of an emaciated Rock Hudson made their way onto front pages. It quickly emerged that the movie star, always typecast as a teak tough son of the US soil, was suffering from Aids. That Hudson was gay was a surprise to nearly everybody. That his physical presence, and air of strong silent authority, could be devastated so quickly was shocking in the extreme. He died within three months, the first high-profile victim of the virus. Hanley would follow him some years later.

If the Sopranos has been the TV series of the naughties, then the '80s belonged to Dallas. It ran from 1978 to 1991 and was in its pomp right through the decade. Dallas offered vicarious living through the Ewing oil-rich family, which seemed to reinforce every preconceived notion of the rich and famous. For the more discerning, there was the gritty realism of Hill Street Blues, which spawned many imitators but few equals.

Elsewhere on the box, cartoonish heroes were in vogue. David Hasselhoff took on the world with Night Rider, an all-singing, alldancing car, while William Shatner descended from Star Trek to patrol the streets of LA as TJ Hooker. The action shot image of him barrelling down the streets was a sight to behold, as he simultaneously puffed and panted while holding in his considerable middle age spread.

Michael J Fox is now known as a high- profile campaigner for Parkinson's disease, from which he suffers, but through the '80s the pint-sized actor began his ascent from the foothills of Hollywood in Family Ties, a sitcom based around the Keaton family, that showed the changing mood in the USA.

Fox's character Alex was constantly at odds with his parents, themselves products of the 1960s, when there was nothing funny peculiar about peace, love and understanding.

Back home, there was little to warm the cockles on the box. Historical dramas like Strumpet City and The Year of The French were the highlight of RTE's output. Victory in the Eurovision Song Contest in 1980 led to the hosting of the event the following year, which nearly bankrupted the station. For a while there was talk of shutting down RTE Two. Then in '88 it was decided to rebrand it as Network 2 and the slow march to viability, and ultimately major success in areas like sport, got underway.

In cinema, the tone of the output from Hollywood reflected the administration in charge. Ronald Reagan's America loved its heroes and it wasn't a big deal how believable they might be. The five highest grossing films of the decade were, in descending order, ET, Return of the Jedi, Batman, The Empire Strikes Back and Ghostbusters.

Music threw up many imposters and few princes. Prince himself was one of the few gems to come through the decade intact, while U2's ascent to be the self-proclaimed greatest band in the world progressed nicely. In 1985 the band released The Joshua Tree and conquered America. Bono and the band had yet to discover irony but at least they had three chords and the truth, mister.

Elsewhere, the new Romantics, all shiny suits and shoulder pads, dominated the early years of the '80s, offering an antidote to the glam rock of the previous decade.

Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet led the way but faded quite quickly. Fads rather than enduring talent was the theme of the decade.

Bob Geldof spawned the rock-star-with-aconscience ethic with his Band Aid project at Christmas 1984 to raise funds for starving children in Ethiopia. This in itself wasn't new, but Geldof 's personal commitment to work for the cause, particularly in the follow up Live Aid in the Summer of '85 was a new departure. Obviously, Bono got jealous of a Dubliner in line for sainthood so he studied Bob's moves and trotted after him down the road in the subsequent decades.

In sport, Ireland won two Triple Crowns and finally took its place among the nations of the world by qualifying for a major soccer tournament, the European Championships in Germany in 1988. In the team's first game, 800 years of pain and oppression were erased when the Republic beat the aul' enemy 1-0.

On the athletics track, Carl Lewis emulated his hero Jesse Owens by winning four golds in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, but the real hero of the games was a scrawny little Irishman by the name of John Treacy, who limped to a silver medal in the marathon in the spirit of those Greek dudes who used to run across continents with the day's news a few millennia ago.

By '88, the darker and more realistic face of the games was personified by Canadian Ben Johnson, who had to hand back his gold in the 100m when he tested positive for drugs.

So who said it was all bad and grey? There was plenty to sing and laugh about in that other lifetime, despite the toil and blood. And if darkness was a virtue in those times, at least the road wasn't completely full of mud.

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My '80s Kevin Sharkey

THEN: A CHEF
NOW: AN ARTIST

In the beginning of the '80s I was a chef in Papillion, a restaurant on Grafton Street and I was very happy there until they discovered me one morning defrosting chickens in boiling hot water in the sink, which was the quickest way to give anyone salmonella. But I was late for work and I just thought 'Sod it, I'll just put it in the sink and put boiling water on them'. I had no idea. I thought I was just being clever but they freaked out when they saw it.

They sacked me so I took my wages and went to the travel agent across the street and I spent almost everything I had on a ticket to London. I knew a girl called Tanya who had gone to London six months previously. I didn't have a phone number and an address for her but I knew she worked in a pub called the Hole in the Wall. I arrived in London with 74p, Tanya's name and the name of the pub. I asked directory enquiries for the number and she said, there are 22 in the greater London area. I got amazingly lucky and it was the second pub I called. I slept on her floor for a while.

I came back to work on a programme with Flo McSweeney for RTE called Megamix. We thought we were the bee's knees. It was great craic and it was the first big pop show that we had in Ireland. I think we only got away with filming it in a church because it was a Protestant church . . . if it was a Catholic church we would have been burned at the stake. We had a great time doing it . . . we had all kinds of stars like Sinitta and Spandau Ballet.

What was it like being black in Ireland in the '80s?

A bit lonely! Jesus, you could count the black people on one hand in them days. For me it was a strange experience because I grew up in Donegal and I was 12 before I saw a black person. When I got to Dublin I felt like I was in Harlem! Really, there was about five or six black people who worked in and around the place on Talbot Street and between us, we used to sit down in the evenings and talk about the black people we knew, and I swear to God, we were convinced that we knew them all, one way or another. It would take you a bit longer these days. To be honest, all I can say about Ireland, Dublin and the Irish is that they are the kindest, most accepting, gentle, loving people that I've experienced.

I have lovely memories of the '80s. I used to go to Lord John's and get pissed on cider and we used to be disco dancing and had great craic. Really, it didn't feel at all depressing. I know people look back and they say there was no work. But people are very creative. As long as you can have a good laugh, you don't really notice the economic climate.

My '80s Colm Hayes

THEN: DJ ON SUPER PIRATE STATION NOVA
NOW: DJ ON 2FM

I started in Nova in 1981 just as it had begun and I was there until the end in 1984 . . . it was hugely exciting. The people who worked on that station have all risen to great heights. Brian Dobson, Ann Cassin and Mark Costigan, who is now the chief adviser to Mary Harney were newsreaders; Scott Williams who now runs Q102 and John Clarke, the current head of 2FM were both in Nova. The defining musical thing was that we were playing music from the States that nobody else had even heard . . . the Doobie Brothers, Michael McDonald, the Atlantic Rhythm Section, Kenny Loggins. We were also the first radio station to be on FM in Ireland and were actually clearer than listening to vinyl in your house. It really was like a big family. We knew we were onto something and there were no big egos because we were all pushing towards making the station number one.

What was interesting was that Radio Nova was turning over a huge amount of money, we were paying our taxes, and employing a huge amount of people and yet at any single moment the government could come along and turn it off. They used us considerably and during election time all the top politicians were in our news department on Herbert Street, . . . the Ray Burkes, the Charlie Haugheys, the young Berties. They knew that we were the voice of young people but they also knew they could close us down whenever they wanted to and they did.

I suppose anyone who looks back to their late teens and early 20s, whatever the decade, will think that it was a golden period for them. But looking back without rose-tinted glasses, I do believe that the '80s was a huge turning point for the radio business. The super pirates really made RTE stand up and take notice. 2FM changed because of the pirates. Before that it was all old-style BBC Radio One, the old-style jocks from the '70s that everyone used to hate.

I missed the freedom of Nova and still do. There was so much going on then and spearheading a whole new musical genre that wasn't here . . . you can't do that anymore. With the internet now, I can click onto Afghanistan and listen to their Top 40.

Everything is there and there's nothing new anymore, which is unfortunate.

My '80s Frank Kearns
THEN: GUITARIST WITH CACTUS WORLD NEWS
NOW: RUNS THE SALT MAP STUDIO IN DUBLIN

I went to school in Mount Temple where I was in bands. The U2 guys were in a band called Feedback and they got a deal in 1979, and my band supported them on their first Irish tour. Cactus World News started out in 1984. Eoin McEvoy, the lead singer, and myself started jamming together in a house in Cabra and we wrote a song called 'The Bridge'. Bono heard the song and loved it, wanted to produce it so we went into the studio with him, made an EP and that really got the attention of all the record companies at the time, resulting in a record deal with MCA.

You thought with a record deal you'd just won the lotto but it's far removed from the image of signing a cheque in a dressing room. Most deals are eightalbum option and after each album the option is always on the record company's side so there is no such thing as a million pound deal. For us what it meant it we were able to survive without being on the dole and go to rehearsal without starving. It wasn't a champagne lifestyle. We were a hardworking rock band who took ourselves very seriously.

When we were starting off, all the criticism at that time was 'You just want to be the next Thin Lizzy' and then when U2 made it, it was 'Oh, you just want to be the next U2'. It was very exciting because if they could do it, anyone could do it.

When we signed the deal we were full of hope and optimism and did really well. We had singles in the British charts; we toured America and played lots of big clubs and places in the States.

I was in the States last week and I turned on the radio and heard a Cactus World News song. It was great because we had a real connection with America and we sold a lot of records there . . . we sold more in a suburb of LA than we did in the whole of Ireland.

We were the loudest band in the country and we unfortunately paid the price for that which is Eoin's tinnitus in the ear. It's improving at the moment but it affected him big time.

We've all been through different things ourselves.

Wayne, the Cactus drummer plays with Damien Dempsey's band. I've just released an instrumental album under the title Francis Xavier and that's completely different to Cactus but it's still atmospheric and in that vein. The old Miami Vice episodes have just been re-released and Cactus are on a couple of them. Ferris Bueller's Day Off has a Cactus track on it.

When I look back I'm proud of what we've done. I would have had liked to gone on further and done some more stuff but life got in the way . . . we had difficulties with management . . . and sometimes these hurdles are too hard to get over.

My '80s Ferdia MacAnna
THEN: LEAD SINGER WITH ROCKY DE VALERA AND THE GRAVEDIGGERS
NOW: TV PRODUCER AND SCREENWRITER The '80s was a time of fierce recession, unemployment, drug epidemics, Northern Troubles and emigration and yet the nightclubs were always packed.

In Dublin, joints such as Wyles, Stubbs, Vile Bodies, The Pink and Risks were heaving night after night as though the entire young population of the city had embraced partying as the perfect alternative to reality.

It was hard to blame them. Outside in the real world, we were bombarded by a succession of tragic and often surreal stories such as the Kerry Babies, hunger strikes in the North and countless elections.

All of the above was chronicled by magazines such as Magill, In Dublin and Hot Press. The mags provided a commentary on the times and also offered a platform to a new generation of young writers and journalists including Fintan O'Toole, Colm Toibin, Declan Lynch and Michael Dwyer.

But the thing I remember most about the '80s was the fashion. People wore colourful, foppish costumes, mostly inspired by New Romantic groups such as Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran and eh, Adam Ant though local heroes U2 weren't entirely blameless.

If the clothes were scary, the hair was terrifying.

The 'mullet' hit Dublin like the bubonic plague of follicles. Almost overnight, it was considered immensely fashionable to get highlights done or have your hair sculpted into a frozen waterfall.

Many of us thought nothing of gadding about town wearing dead badgers on our heads. Maybe that's the reason I'm bald now.

It was also a time when couples preferred to cohabit rather than rush into marriage. 'Open' relationships were the thing. Why tie yourself down to the same person for life when there was so much choice out there? Sexual freedom was a lot more fun than mass and the afterlife seemed like a long way off. It was all very sophisticated and emotionally confusing and for a while it looked like the '80s might turn Ireland into a free-love commune, However, things adjusted themselves and eventually most co-habiting couples wound up getting married, though often not to one another.

The '80s was also the last decade when young people thought nothing of hitch-hiking on Irish roads.

Sticking out your thumb at the side of a roadway was a cheap way of getting home at weekends or of going to the big music festivals at Lisdoonvarna or Macroom or Balisodare. Most of the time you could travel in safety and be assured of a good chat. Looking back on it now, we must have been mad to put our trust in complete strangers. Never do it now.

My '80s Ger Philpott
THEN: COLLEGE GRADUATE
NOW: RESEARCHER ON THE TUBRIDY SHOW

Being gay in the '80s was illegal and there was a small but strong gay rights lobby group working towards law reform although it didn't actually happen until 1993. That said, it was an exciting time in terms of being politically engaged. It was also the time of referenda so you had the abortion amendment campaign and the introduction of a new criminal justice bill, which rallied the causes of many people on the margins of society.

I'd just finished university. I met someone while I was there, fell very much in love, and went to live in Dublin to live with him, so for me the world was my oyster, so to speak. That bubble was burst very quickly when my boyfriend developed Aids and became ill and died.

He was the first person to die of it in Ireland in 1983 and although he was symptomatically ill, he never had a formal diagnosis as the test wasn't available until 1985. At the time we thought it was some form of cancer. Doctors couldn't understand many of the symptoms he was presenting with, and it was very much ignorance all around.

The absence of an Aids test was one of the problems in the early and mid-'80s in Ireland.

When you're arguing with the departments and the politicians and the civil servants, you really have to beat them at their own numbers game so if you could say there's 110 teenagers getting pregnant, then they'll deal with that. If you say lots of teenagers are getting pregnant, then they won't deal with that.

It was very difficult to quantify the amount of people who were affected with HIV in the absence of a formal test but people would have been presenting with symptomatic illnesses, a lot of people died and a lot of people were unwell. You had the stigma associated with Aids that people had to deal with too.

There were lots of things that could have been done then in terms of responding to Aids and gay men in the Irish context that would have saved lots of lives and that weren't. The reason was that they couldn't be seen to encourage activities like safer sex because they were effectively encouraging people to break the law. But if you look at the response to Aids in terms of drug users, they had no problems dispensing clean needles to them to stop the spread of HIV. The resistance was to do with sexuality in the context of Ireland at the time, where contraception wasn't even legal for heterosexuals unless they were married.

It was a very strange time but part of who I am now is because of what I went through then, in a weird, philosophical way. But if I had a choice and I could turn back the hands of time, I certainly would have changed things about the '80s for me.