How did your upbringing shape your relationship with money? I don’t have a relationship with money. It’s like the tide; it comes in and it goes out — and I’m too busy building sandcastles to care. Was there ever a time you felt broke? In the context of the deprivation experienced in developing countries and perpetual war zones, I’ve lived a life of excess and privilege.
In the mid-1980s Ireland had been battered by a gale force recession and Cork was in the eye of the storm. By 1985 half the town was unemployed, the other half redundant. Verolme dockyard had slung its hook and abandoned ship.
Ford and Dunlop had padlocked their gates, never to open again. The dockers clocked out and shouted last call at The Donkey’s Ears, and a string of early houses stacked their kegs by the quay wall for the last time. Cork sank.
A whole generation of school-leavers and graduates clawed over each other to get a seat on the next plane, boat, train or Slattery’s bus leaving town. We were striking out to start a new life in the squats, kips and bedsits of Brixton, Berlin, Boston and the Bronx. Have you ever seen anyone spend money in a way that shocked you? I’m regularly surprised by the rich living like there’s no tomorrow, spending what they haven’t got, and the poor living like there’s no today, spending what they’ll never have.
What’s the most expensive place you’ve ever been to? Dublin. And the rest of the country is rapidly catching up. What’s your bigge.