At the end of the day a lot of people from many sectors made money in the boom and thought it would last forever. We come from a people who had very little and suddenly we had so much. I remember growing up with no heating in the house, cooking off a range, fruit was a treat, a holiday was camping in Kerry. When the boom hit people got to live the way the other side live….and for most it was intoxicating. It made some people greedy and others foolhardy, it encouraged gambling and risk taking. Now we are suffering as a country, some a lot more than others. Some people will always be untouchable….we all know who they are. In one way I’m glad the boom is over, maybe we can get back some of the community spirit we used to have, start to care for each other again. I remember when you couldn’t walk down the street without saying hello a dozen times. Kids have so much they don’t really know the joy of working hard to get something. They believe it’s their right to have without earning. They don’t respect hard work. I think it’s very sad. I feel sorry for anyone struggling to feed, house and clothes their family. Bring back compassion there are few of us completely innocent.

I’m 29 and work in It but did a bit of working on sites during school holidays labouring and at 16 I was getting more money then than I am today, I always new it would never last so thankfully at the end of each summer I went back to school

Well I liked the photographs. Comment on the Journal never cease to amaze me.

I don n’t come from construction industry background but I know and deal with people who do. Growing up I always heard the mantra of “getting your trade” it meant people were taken in and thought how to do things properly. That seemed to start to lose its importance from the late 1990s onwards as wages started to shoot up, lads who left school who probably should have done some sort of technical training went straight into the work environment. Demand continued to grow along with wages. By 2003 it was starting to get difficult to get labour then the Eastern Europeans arrived and suddenly there wad loads of relatively cheap labour and output rose and standards dropped and them. Well we all know what happened next. Now there is a whole generation of relatively uneducated people out there and the older you get the harder it is to get back into education so these para ate trapped.

What about a series on unemployed Hi-Vis vest makers. Must be loads of those…

A better idea would be to take photos of all the 4 x 4 and 6 hollidays a year they all blew their money on during the good times. 2000 euros a week for a carpenter or fella laying a few blocks. Madness!

A great set of images and idea.

this is a poor reflection and an insult to all the good construction workers now unemployed.no attempt to use any qualified men why?I know some of the most hard hit are the unskilled fella that was getting paid nearly as much as the time served tradsman.with no outlay or cost compared to a carpenter plumber sparky etc.

but these photos are tacky and degrading,i know plenty of people who are stuck in this vacuum after the boom and many people are trying to make the most of the situation they find themselves in.

these photos send out all the wrong impressions of a sad situation.

Irish renters ,, bullshit ,,, I drive from Dublin to new Ross every day for a ten hour shift for 100 euros a day ,,, no man got a 1000 after tax for two years i worked in London with many other Irish because I did not want to sign on the dole ,,,there are a lot of hard working ppl in construction who are to proud to take hand out ,,, yes there are cowboys but not all of us are that way

Nice job Michael

As someone who works in the construction industry some comments here are a crock of shit ,,, I never had a 4×4 and for 6 holidays a year bullshit your thing of the likes of Wallace , Quinn and so on ,,,, did your house just pop up out of the ground ,,, no some hard working ppl put sweat and hard labour to put it there you fool

My American friend visited a few month back to attend a family wedding in Tipp and we drove out there…. Kept asking me if all these Mc’Mansions out in the country were property of people in the financial, legal or medical industry…

I had to tell him no, they were all developers and construction workers pet projects they built for themselves with the money spent by Drs, Lawyers and Bankers on apartments in the city and that they worked too hard, have too long hours, and too much intelligence to build these tacky things out in the middle of no where…

10 years , how do you work that one out ,, 26 years iv worked in construction long before the boom and am still employed paying taxes , if you read my comment I said yes there were cowboys but the small man on the ground did not make big money just a wage every week

When people hear about the boom, they think about the greed associated with it. At times we forget about the human cost, lads/girls out of work for months, having to emigrate etc etc.

In my experience, Irish builders are some of the laziest out there, have you ever got an Irish labourer in to do a job as opposed to a Polish lad?

My mother got some new wardrobes in last year, two Polish lads were done in three hours, no breaks, wouldn’t even accept a cup of tea or sandwich. A few years earlier, she had new bannisters put in, three Irish lads took THREE days doing it, at least 4 breaks per day!

I’m not trying to tar everyone with the same brush, but that’s just my own experience with Irish builders.

May i suggest that they use an hour or two of their time washing their working clothes, then they are ready when the next job comes along

And another thing ye all seem to forget is a subcontractor on 1,000 a week back in the boom payed vat @ 13.5% which then totalled €1,135.00,they would then be taxed 35% on that total,then tthey would have to pay the vat back €135 out of rest,which they prop took home then circa €600….now doing between 50/60 hours a week for that amount is roughly €10.00 an hour…..I know what it was like as that is what I payed myself and the 35 lads that worked for me…..so public sector workers wanna get their facts straight before they mouth on about construction workers…….

If the lighting changed in each photo to bright they would look as if they were in boom times. I didn’t think the images were great as a spectator.

I hope that con-saw is not stolen?

Can I ask about some of the really cutting comments on here. What benefit are they to anyone. F##k me theres a lot of healing to be done in this country. Maybe thats why the country is on its knees. Maybe the Irish cant move on. Are some of the people commenting prepared to let construction workers suffer forever. That wont work we will need them again to build the next generations houses. I hope we all learned that we lived a lie in the boom we all grew our egos through greed. Learn from that never let it happen again. As for the literacy comments on here they are the lowest comments of them all. Can the journal clarify if people like myself with very average or low literacy are banned from commenting here.

Cairan have you ever been unemployed ,, worried were the rent is coming from ..trying to look after kids ,

Here’s €20, sit down there and look miserable while I take your photo and win you a bit of sympathy.

You gotta love the Liverpool FC and Sinn Féin posters behind yer man in picture 4.

BTW is somebody expecting some bleeding hearts for these guys?!

I was just thinking yesterday as I was playing with my four-year-old nephew, you don’t see kids playing with construction-related toys anymore. No Tonka, no toy diggers, earth-movers, cranes. Bob The Builder hasn’t been put to work in ages, he’s probably emigrating to Oz too. Most kids probably wouldn’t know what a builder is anymore.

Serious bunch of begrudgers and down right sad individuals leaving comments here. Do you all have to find bad in everything? Maybe it would be better to send a photographer out to you and take a few shots of you sitting in front of your computer with nothing better to do than put down all construction workers because of one photographers view.Honestly how sad yous are. The construction industry fed money into many other industries during the boom, everyone prospered in some way from it, so spare me the ‘oh you earned 1000 euro a week’ spin, who didn’t make more money then than they do now?? So easy to point the finger, where were yous all during the boom? In Australia looking for jobs in IT? Retraining because there wasn’t enough work in your sector? No yous were out partying with everyone else.

I’m not married. But I suspect the closest you would get to someones wife, or breaking into a sweat would be alone in your bed every night, dreaming…

Why are they all wearing high visibility clothing if they are unemployed?

God we do go on

To Brian Dwyer, stick to being a cynic because you’re no photographer. I am one and know the lighting setup involved to achieve those images. You don’t like them, fair enough but people who do know a bit about photography have given that series awards.

Hold on!!! So you have a chip on your shoulder because while you were at college your friends had more money? Get a life mate!! Every job you ever have there will be people paid more and less than you, some work hard for it, others have it handed to them, but to generalise and then demonise thousands of workers because of the collapse of a whole economy is quiet simply nonsense…I done my work building your house,why didn’t you do yours and regulate the budget? If blame is what your after, everyone who got paid during the boom was overpaid and is to blame. Id imagine you even had lower college fees because I was paying serious tax on my 1000 euro a week wages.

Jump the cat ,, did I say I was on the dole ,, if you read it I say I travel 180 miles a day to work , even if I wanted to get the dole I can as I was self-employed ,, as to you comment about my spelling lol very funny cheered me up a lot

Not wishing to belittle anyone’s plight, however the pictures showed people who laboured on civil orientated projects most likely for the housing boom.
Can we not get it into our skulls that this is not an industry, it was, is and will always be a bubble.

I work in the the construction industry on bio-pharma and semi-conductor projects. These are projects that create wealth for the economy.

Well said Finbar, we were also one of those families that were affected by the greedy bankers and developers that have brought Ireland to its knees!! Had one overseas holiday that we worked damn hard to save for !! Let anyone who has never worked on a cold wet building site tell me that these lads didn’t work damn hard for their money only to line the pockets of the developers who are being let away with owing millions

Well said JP

Heart bleeds for them. As a public servant who is continually blamed for the recession I have no sympathy for the industry that was at the heart of the problem. People will come on here and say their just the ordinary worker well guess what so am I. I can still see the exorbitant quotes they were throwing out for the jobs they wanted and then not returning your calls for the little jobs. Then they want sympathy they should have kept some of their thousand a week pay cheques.

sher how bad they seem happy out…

I hope you don’t loose your jobs soon in a over paid sector ,, alas you are ,, the government will cut your wages so much won’t be worth your wile getting out of bed !!!!!!!

Lol god David I wish I could be more like you .must be great up there looking down on us poor dim working class

Sorry David ,, must have been your mother

i know both sides of this coin on this ( and i am not going to dog anyone ), but there aint a single person here that would have said “eeeemmm no thanks that too much money etc etc…” if i was going to be givin 2k a week as a chef i would have takin arms and all… but i have a good buddy he was fore man on a few sites and a pretty good carpenter to boot and he was earning 4k per week after what ever tax he earned.. and he was a proper bogger who traveled the world and and all he seen of the places were swimming pools in hotels and that was his 6 hols a year… he freely admits he blew about 2500 per week in coppers and the like.. but he enjoyed himself… like everyone else now he is long bust but he ain’t sitting around fecking moaning and he had the bills the rents and all that lark too like everyone has…