Celtic Tiger has been well and truly caged.

Dermot Flood and I used to go to the same hangouts, the same music gigs and the same clubs when we were teenagers back in the late 1970s in Dublin. We both had good education, good jobs, and we both decided to leave Ireland in 1988. We had had enough of high unemployment and higher taxes and up and left, me to Canada, he to various engineering projects around the world.

We both missed the boom years back in Ireland - the roaring of the Celtic Tiger. All we knew, as with many tens of thousands of the Irish diaspora, was the hoarse cries of bust. But Dermot and I will tell you that in the past 18 months we've met a whole new wave of Irish living overseas.

Everyone who visits the Emerald Isle always says that the grass is so green. If truth be told, the grass is green because we Irish walk on everyone else's around the world.

Today, the Celtic Tiger is back in its cage. Unemployment is close to 14 per cent, the next generation will have to pay a fortune in taxes to pay off a ballooning public deficit, banks are a quarter-owned by the Irish government, and property prices have fallen through the floor.

Things are so bad, the Fianna Fail government led by Brian 'Biffo' Cowan is setting up a bad bank to deal purely in toxic real estate assets, buying loans at 15 cents on the euro.

It's as bad as ever it was when Dermot and I left; it's probably worse. Why? At least Dermot and I never knew good times. After 14 years of unparalleled growth and prosperity, the bitter pills of bad times are hard to swallow.

I remember when Ireland joined the European Union in 1973 - the EEC as it was back then. The feeling was that it was good to sit at a table where there were many members, and if there was an economic benefit to joining, all the better. The Irish have always looked to Europe historically, even out of pure political and revolutionary pragmatism: If you've a historic tie with Britain as a conqueror, then the French, Spanish or anyone else in Europe was your friend. For the seminal 1916 Uprising against the British, Irish revolutionaries used German Mauser rifles smuggled in by U-boat; in 1798, French muskets; and in 1602, the Spanish navy.

So why the history lesson?

Well, it seems that when times were good - which was rare - we Irish got a little too big for our britches.

Two years ago, the voters of Ireland, flush with cash in their pockets, mobile phones to their ears, Mercedes under their backsides and designer clothes on their backs, rejected Europe. When I say they rejected Europe, they rejected the Lisbon Treaty, a complex plan to change once and for all the complex methodology of ruling Europe. When you have 27 members, large and small, rich and poor, east and west, north and south, powerful and pathetic, it's hard to agree on how the club should be run. The Lisbon Treaty fixed that, setting down voting blocs and rules, balancing the power of the large against the needs of the small.

The Irish rejected Europe - forgetting, for example, that the European handouts, infrastructure funds, subsidies to farmers, headage payments, money for living in "social disadvantaged areas" and "special disadvantaged areas", and a plethora of grants, paved the way for the prosperity of the Celtic Tiger. It removed economic barriers, allowing the noveau riche Irish to buy second holidays homes on Iberian beaches.

Today, the Irish electorate go to the polls once more, voting again on a slightly rejigged Lisbon Treaty.

When the dust settles tomorrow, the majority of Irish voters will have accepted the Lisbon Treaty, if all of the opinion polls are to be believed.

Today, the Irish vote for real; not deafened by a roaring Celtic Tiger.

In the past year, the small population of Ireland has seen the ranks of its unemployed rise by 10,000 a month, sometimes that many in a fortnight. They have trouble paying mortgages for homes in which there's no positive equity. They have seen public service workers hit with special levies on their pay, and the size of the bureaucracy trimmed back. It's about as bad as it gets.

In the course of his work dealing with dubious Nigerian officials requiring certain personal payments for work carried out, Dermot coined the phrase: "For local and national arrangements". It's a phrase so simplistic that it says little but says a lot, and was actually accepted by the auditors for explaining those particular arrangements.

When the Irish voted and rejected Lisbon the last time out, they did so having been impaired by "local and national arrangements".

Today, they'll vote yes, for "national and foreign arrangements".

Al Nisr Publishing LLC 2009. All rights reserved.

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