'I haven't had a job since 1984, since the end of the "job for life" I march to the beat of my own drum'

"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."

"In the mid-1980s, Ireland had been battered by a gale-force recession and Cork was in the eye of the storm... Cork sank. A whole generation of school-leavers and graduates clawed over each other to get a seat..."

"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."

Read at Irish Independent