also Dublin and the suburbs with a lot of contact with universities and university students....I’m glad your experience is different than mine. It could well be the case that it engulfed the country starting in the 90s, and starting in the universities and spread from there....and that is also basically the love affair the country has with islam and all things that can be classified as “refugees”....
The country certainly started getting “Europeanized” during the 1990s. This accelerated when Irish gave up its national currency in 2002.