Nicola Roberts Girls Aloud

Remember the years of dog blow dries, car valets, and personal wine importers? Remember declining charity-ball invites with excuses like "Soz, sourcing some new olive oil in Umbria this w/end." Or would you rather forget those times? When we were minted, dozens of previously non-existent services popped up online and in every village, town and city in Ireland to cater for our new lives. Too busy to do anything for ourselves, Irish people invested in and relied on new services which we were convinced were not only making our lives easier, but were indispensible.


If we thought for a second that we could pay someone for doing anything that meant we didn't have to do it ourselves, then the wallet fell open. Cook your own food? Pah! Walk all the way to the tanning salon? Sucker! But these days, when one weighs up weekly angel coaching against ESB bills, the more practical, less supplementary demand tends to win.


Still, our new outlook hasn't stopped new services emerging geared at making one's recession-riddled life handier. But are we just being taken for a ride all over again? Entrepreneurs multiply in times of recession as unemployed folk become self-employed and often latch on to new ideas and start up businesses quickly. It's often easy to confuse 'innovative resource that will save you both time and money' with 'laid off architect swindling suckers'. Just as the boom created plenty of useless and useful services, so has the recession.


Sean Gallagher, one of Ireland's leading entrepreneurs and a Dragon on RTé's version of Dragon's Den, has a lot to say about the entrepreneurial spirit of a recession. "In any sector where there's a problem, there's a solution, and in that solution there's a business," he told the Sunday Tribune. He highlighted the medical-device sector (thanks to both over training and obesity) and the home-care sector (thanks to people getting older) as two growing sectors in Ireland, and said companies were returning to three key principles. "Improved quality. We put up with poor quality for so long; just look at what went into buildings. Customer service. You used to go into a petrol station or a bar and the staff would hardly lift their head to look at you. And value for money. People used to go to New York for their Christmas shopping, now they're going to Newry."


Gallagher said that positivity is growing and now more than ever he's seeing an upsurge in people starting their own enterprises, in particular those who were working in jobs they didn't particularly engage with and were now keen to follow their passions.


Typical of those who availed of such services was Chloe O'Byrne who once paid someone to queue for her in the motor tax office, had a cleaner come to her house once a week, considered getting a sleep trainer for her toddler, was a fan of organic vegetable deliveries, and also recruited a company called Food Genie to make and deliver three low-calorie meals a day. "It's weird, because at the time you feel you really need all of these things," O'Byrne said. "You think it saves you time, but then when you look back on it, it's all just a bit silly and in fact all it did was add to my debt. That said, I did hear about a new oven-cleaning service the other day on the Ian Dempsey radio show, so maybe I'll give in just to that one."


We took a look at what services we used in boom times, and which enterprising businesses they are now being replaced with. Just don't mention the dog walkers.


That Was Then...This Is Now


Post Dinner Party Cleaners: Dirty dishes and merlot stains on the carpet were no more with the help of Latvia's finest while you slept off the hangover upstairs.


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Oven Cleaners: Kingdom Cleaning will buff your oven with a non-caustic prodcut for €45. Or you could just do it yourself.


Property Stagers: A property stager was someone who came around to your gaff when you were about to sell it for a billion euro and spruced it up or swapped your furniture to whack another €50,000 on the asking price.


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The Sheriff: Unfortunately, a much more common visitor to Irish homes these days tends to take the furniture for good and not replace it with something imported from Argentina.


Personal Shopper: Help me, I am a helpless fashion victim wanting to buystuff but my brain is too mushy from all the money I'm making to actually make a decision in Top Shop.


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Swap Shop: The biggest trend in shopping has been, um, not shopping. Fashionistas flock to jumble sales for a cheaper way to pick up crap you will never wear.


iPod Organisers: MP3 players as the main way to listen to music created the trend of randomers coming into your house to convert all your CDs into MP3 files. You so lazy.


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Spotify: Occasional glitches in the music streaming service mean Irish users can latch on to it gratis.


Hiring Skips: Thanks to house refurbishments and decluttering, skips and mini skips appeared to be outside every residence for a while, with waiting lists and high fees adding to the cost of revamping one's gaff.


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Dublinwaste.ie: Dublinwaste.ie and jumbletown.ie has taken the place of dumping items. Now they are swapped, collected and recycled in other homes. That makes sense, now, doesn't it?


Professional Make-Up: Once the pre-socialising ritual involved popping down to Mac for a make over that inevitably created the costly Tranny look. Why were we doing this again?


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Nice Friends: Who needs a 17-year-old Fashion TV enthusiast to make you over when your mate has a make-up bag full of No 7's finest?


Blow Dries: There was some sense in spending €50 on getting your hair dried, but we can't seem to recall what it actually was.


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Euro King Shampoo: €2 shops have provided an alternative to forking out bags of cash on Alterna Ten shampoo.


Mobile Spray Tanning: Too busy counting your bonuses to go get tangoed? The Beauty Cab mobile tanners would just whizz over to your penthouse and organeify you there. They also suggested tanning parties. The less said about that the better.


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Be More Like Nicola Roberts: Girls Aloud aren't always bastions of subtlety, but porcelain-skinned Roberts delved into the world of tanning in a recent BBC documentary to show us how silly orange is.


Organic Veg Box: Home-delivered organic vegetables were to become the backbone of boom meals. Even though everything was oddly shaped and dirty, no one knew what to do with sweet potatoes and they all went rotten the next day.


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Aldi: The discount supermarket offers us genetically improbable veggie solutions andd peppers that worryingly stay fresh for a month. Cheap tough.


Life Coaching: The '00s were very much an era of navel gazing and self-obsession; cue a spike in life coaches who read The Secret, set up business and charged through the roof.


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Fás Officer: Slightly less touchy feely and more concerned about your social welfare status than your yin and /or yang.


Luxury Gym Membership: Crunch in Temple Bar in Dublin with its Versace furniture and marble swimming pool typified the need not just to get fit, but to get fit in ridiculously over-the-top style.


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Running Clubs: Marathon running is the ultimate recession sport; cheap, effective, tiring and all about endurance. Running teams now populate the Phoenix Park and beyond for punishing leggers.


Dog Hotels: Having your pooch picked up in a Merc? TVs in each room? Gourmet meals? Why should Rover not have the same things you have?


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Lidl Kennels: And guess what, the dog doesn't even notice the difference. Too busy chewing on that pig's ear that has replaced macrobiotic luxury dog feed.


Importing Furniture From NYC: Taking inspiration from Cribs was probably never going to work out as a financially sound decision.


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Flatpack.ie: The nice flat-pack people will whack up your Ikea table in record time for €25.