Earlier this week, Irish Twitter user @garethoconnor tweeted this image, causing everyone to feel incredibly ancient.
That can’t be true, right? 2030 is
in the future. It's away!But no, we did the math, and we really are that old. Hell, come to think of it, I can’t really remember what 1998 was like…
All aboard the nostalgia train.
Atomic Kitten. Billie Piper. B*Witched. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. Britney Spears. Eiffel 65. Gorillaz. Ok Go. The Strokes. Sugababes. Thirty Seconds to Mars. Westlife.
Musical titans all - and all started out in '98.
Oh, and the biggest things we were listening to that year? Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On, Boyzone with No Matter What, Brimful of Asha, and Robbie Williams all featured.
Amazing.
The must-have game consoles released that year were the Sega Dreamcast and Game Boy Color (colours! in your pocket!).
The biggest games of the year were Metal Gear Solid, Ocarina of Time, and an obscure Japanese game no-one had heard of yet called Pokémon.
The biggest-grossing film of the year was the tale of a mining team saving the world in outer space called Armageddon, which made *much* more sense at the time.
Saving Private Ryan and Godzilla were also big, big winners, but it was Shakespeare in Love that took home the Oscar for Best Picture.
Oh, and a company called Pixar, who had made the well-received Toy Story a few years before, released their second movie, A Bug’s Life.
Actors born in 1998 include Jaden Smith, Elle Fanning and Peyton List.
In August, Ireland’s 1996 Olympic champion Michelle Smith was banned from competing for four years after she was accused of tampering with urine samples in drug tests. She appealed the finding, but her ban was upheld.
At 28, that ended her career, but she has always maintained her innocence - yet the controversy never really went away.
Microsoft releases Windows 98, which at the time Its system requirements were a 66Mhz processor, 16mb or RAM, 500MB of disk space.
Speaking of technology, on May 19 of that year, a communications satellite called the Galaxy IV broke down – which meant most of the world’s beepers stopped working. Yep. Beepers.
On September 3, two college students named Larry Page and Sergey Brin start a company in a friend’s garage in California with a cheque for $100,000. They call it Google.
In September, RTÉ’s long reign as the only English broadcaster in town came to an end, as new rival commercial station TV3 went on the air.
Sure, we had BBC coverage in parts and TG4 had been launched in 1996, but TV3 was the first independent commercial station.
Remember when we had a nun, Daniel O’Connell and the first President on our money?
In 98, we decided to be in for a penny, in for a pound with the EU financial system, and on December 31, the exchange rate to the euro was fixed.
We wouldn’t have physical euro coins for a few years yet - that began in January 2002 - but it was 1998 when we decided that £1 = €1.27.
Dermot Morgan died unexpectedly on February 28, in London, leading to an outpouring of tributes to one of Ireland’s premier funnymen.
He may be best known as Father Ted, but he did so much more than that – getting tributes from the President, Taoiseach and RTÉ itself.
Taoiseach since 1997, Bertie was in his first 18 months, and plenty popular. Here’s a picture of him with Hollywood buddy Sylvester Stallone in December 1997.
At the end of the day, we all remember the pop culture, but it was a big year in current affairs too, with the Planning Tribunal under way in Dublin (which would run until 2012), and Ireland entering the Monetary Union in the EU. But there was one landmark event that makes the history books.
On Friday, April 10, the Good Friday Agreement was signed, which led to the power-sharing government currently in place in the North, and the decommissioning of weapons, making it a symbolic, if not completely final, end to years of conflict.
The Omagh bombing, however, would happen on August 15, 1998, carried out by the Real IRA.