Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger

by Fintan O ' Toole (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2010

  $3.39

  For twenty years, Ireland's economic miracle was supposed to be the envy of the world. Low taxes, light regulation and an 'anything goes' attitude seemed to have created boundless prosperity. And then, as in Iceland, the glittering palaces vanished in the heat of the global financial meltdown. For years, those with economic power had been investing in a gigantic property bubble. In Ship of Fools Fintan O'Toole tells the story of this dizzying rise and sickening fall. Ireland may have had a tiger economy, but those in charge of it had not lost their taste for sweetheart deals, back-handers and bribery. This is the essential analysis of Ireland's economic suicide.

• Used

  Paperback
  2009

  $3.25

  Between 1995 and 2007, the Republic of Ireland was the worldwide model of successful adaptation to economic globalisation. The success story was phenomenal: a doubling of the workforce; a massive growth in exports; a GDP that was substantially above the EU average. Ireland became the world's largest exporter of software and manufactured the world's supply of Viagra. The factors that made it possible for Ireland to become prosperous - progressive social change, solidarity, major State investment in education, and the critical role of the EU - were largely ignored as too sharply at odds with the dominant free market ideology. The Irish boom was shaped instead into a simplistic moral tale of the little country that discovered low taxes and small government and prospered as a result. There were two big problems. Ireland acquired a hyper-capitalist economy on the back of a corrupt, dysfunctional political system. And the business class saw the influx of wealth as an opportunity to make money out of property. Aided by corrupt planning and funded by poorly regulated banks, an unsustainable property-led boom gradually consumed the Celtic Tiger. This is, as Fintan O'Toole writes, 'a good old-fashioned jeremiad about the bastards who got us into this mess'. It is an entertaining, passionate story of one of the most ignominious economic reversals in recent history.

• New

  Hardcover
  2010

  $31.78

  The death of the Celtic tiger is not an extinction event to trouble naturalists. There was, in fact nothing natural about this tiger, if it ever really existed. The Irish Economic miracle was built on good old-fashioned subsidies (from the European Union) and the simple fact that until the 1980s Ireland was by the standards of the developed world so economically backward that the only way was up. And as it began to catch up to European and American averages, the Irish economy could boast some seemingly remarkable statistics. These lured in investors, the Irish deregulated and all but abandoned financial oversight, and a great Irish financial ceilidh began. It would last for a decade. When the global financial crash of 2008 arrived it struck Ireland harder than anywhere-even Iceland looked like a model of rectitude compared to the fiasco that stretched from Cork to Dublin. There was an avalanche of statistics as toxic as the property-based assets that lay beneath many of them: type= disc The International Monetary Fund was predicting that Ireland's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) would shrink by 13.5 per cent in 2009 and 2010-the worst performance among all the advanced economies and one of the worst ever recorded in peacetime in the developed world. type= disc Government debt almost doubled in a year. type= disc In May 2008, &euro13.5 million was paid for a 450-acre farm in Warrenstown, County Meath-one of the highest prices ever paid for agricultural land anywhere in the world. By 2009 the level of debt among Irish households and companies was the highest in the European Union. type= disc The country's gross indebtedness was larger than Japan's, which has thirty times the population. type= disc Between 1994 and 2006, the average second-hand house price in Dublin increased from &euro82,772 to &euro512,461-a rise of 519 per cent. By 2009 Irish house prices had fallen more rapidly than any others in Europe. type= disc With a fifth of its office spaces empty, Dublin had the highest vacancy rate of any European capital and was rated as having the worst development and investment potential of twenty-seven European cities. type= disc The Irish stock exchange fell by 68 per cent in 2008 type= disc The average Irish family had lost almost half its financial assets type= disc Unemployment rose faster than in any other Western European country, increasing by 85 per cent in a year. type= disc Ireland's bad bank, the National Assets Management Agency (Nama), which had to take over &euro90 billion in loans to developers from banks that would otherwise be insolvent holds more assets [sic] than any publicly quoted property company in the world, dwarfing giants such as GE Capital Real Estate and Morgan Stanley Real Estate, which own assets of &euro60 billion and &euro48 billion respectively.And under all this rubble lay the corpse of the Celtic Tiger. How Ireland managed to achieve such a spectacular implosion is a stunning story of corruption, carelessness and venality, told with passion and fury by one of Ireland's most respected journalists and commentators.