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What we did then:
Year 2000/2001 As I’m sure all of the avid readers of Sin are aware, this year Sin is ten years old. Reaching that milestone, we thought it would be a good idea to remind ourselves of those shiny silver Millennium years both within the pages of Sin and in the world around us. Remind ourselves of simpler times, without iPods and recessions, where the only thing we were frightened of was a giant computer virus taking over the world.
moves which were popular at the time, it was the era of S-Club Seven and the music taste of the entire country could’ve been a ten year old’s for the amount of times they appeared in the single charts that year. The age of pop music and boy bands dominated, Westlife were firm contenders in the singles charts also. So the whole country was reaching for the stars where they could then fly without cumbersome wings being
Of course one of the biggest topics of global interest itself was the Millennium, everything was silver for a time - silver cars, silver electric equipment and I distinctly remember some silver clothes, the jumpsuits of Mork and Mindy were not that far away. People were excited about a new century, the world becoming more developed, more computerized, which led to fears about the Y2K virus. However this was all placed upon the year 2000, which, according to the experts, was not actually the Millennium year - 2001 was. This is based on the assumption that you don’t start counting a new century/millennium until the first year, which makes sense, but who listens to experts? The years brought some interesting political upheaval, it was the year of George Bush’s election as President, defeating Al Gore in one of the most widely publicised elections that the world has ever seen. However, personally, my memory doesn’t recall much more about the actual elections. I do remember the wait, the time it took to announce the victor and merely that because of this the schoolyards lost interest. However the consequences of the election were to be far reaching and in the years that followed, our interest extended far beyond the schoolyard. The schoolyards that I remember often included strange re-enactments of dance
attached to their body (at least this is what the music industry would have us believe). The Den was in full swing on RTÉ 2 with new-guy Damien McCaul at the helm (its recent ending has caused much mourning on my part). The television sets were dominated with Pokémon and Digimon and
the schoolyards were dominated with debates over which was better (Digimon, definitely!). However, the slightly older generation were interested in programmes of higher calibre. In a 2001 issue of Sin an RTÉ conference was reported on where, the question of most contention was “Why did ye have to cancel Glenroe?” Hugely popular at the time, the article detailed the support of the lone, brave man’s question. Other articles of interest that year included the arrest of seven NUIG students at a protest in Glasgow over disturbing the peace at an Anti Nuclear protest, which over 1,500 attended. Environmentalism was highly important that year and there were a number of recycling protests within the college. And there were new things in focus that people were just getting used to, for instance there was an article that detailed one girl’s first experiences with a mobile phone. It was a charming not-so-little 3310 that had Snake on it - all together now “Awwww”. However there were articles in which the problems are still echoed today, one entitled ‘Corrib Village Lockdown’ where the writer in question was criticising the number of restrictions in the Corrib Village living arrangements, it’s nice to know that some things never change. Things that have changed; the word ‘Bootylicious’ is now in the dictionary, we can watch movies online and steal the internet for it from our neighbours and this newspaper has kept going. Sin has changed, for the better I hope, in the ten years that I lived, half my life, it has lived its. Happy Birthday Sin, here’s to reading another article much like this one in ten years time.* *By which time it will be just downloaded into my brain while I take my hover car for a drive. By Méabh McDonnell