Fintan O’Toole’s Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger is a coruscating account of how the Irish boom turned into biter bust. The sharpness of the prose as O’Toole recounts a tale of property boom, tax evasion and dodgy banking practices both entertains and obscures.
Along the way we have a blizzard of names and details about tax dodging, back handers and absent regulation. We also have the bitter irony of the failed exposure of politicians. When politicians were exposed yet their political careers continued unimpeded, the message to other politicians was – look, it does you no harm, so join in too.
Like the best of political writers, O’Toole has phrases such as ‘snorkelling in the cesspit’ which elevate his anger above mere ranting. Yet the prose also obscures, because for much of the book his story is simply that just about everyone was daft, short-sighted, greedy, corrupt or all four. It is as if the only thing wrong with Ireland was the Irish and the only solution would have been to make O’Toole himself dictator for life, for he alone has the wisdom to see all the failings.
The epilogue rescues the book in that respect, pointing out how many of the failings were the result of a cultural problem: “there was a price to be paid for skipping modernity. It was a little too good to be true that Ireland could go from the pre-modern to the post-modern without ever fully creating the structures and habits of a modern democracy. Large chunks of classic democracy were missing – the shift from religious authority to public and civic morality; the idea that the state should operate objectively and impersonally rather than as a private network of mutual obligations; the notion of the law as a universal and neutral check on everyone’s behaviour, whatever their status; the belief in an independent parliament that exists to legislate rather than to service clients and to make government accountable rather than to keep it in place at all costs”.
In other words, O’Toole’s conclusions are much more about how a poor country can best develop than about the rights or wrongs of a free-market approach in other developed countries. But whether or not you are looking for lessons for other countries, this is a book that entertains and makes the reader angry in equal measure.
You can buy Fintan O’Toole’s Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger from Amazon.
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9 Comments
Lest Liberal Democrats forget.
Your Chancellor, a certain Gideon Osborne, up until very recently strongly advised that Ireland was the model we should follow.
On this basis – you reversed your economic policy.
What Ireland tells us is that austerity economics has & will fail.
The one common lesson of all these boom and bust stories is about how a “there is no alternative” hypothesis seizes hold and then all interested parties are drawn in to support the hypothesis, usually abandoning all their critical factors in return for the pursuit of short term financial or political gain. If you read Gillian Tett’s book Fool’s Gold on the financial crisis you will see makes the same point with regard to the development of the collateralised debt securities market. Perhaps those LibDems in government (and not a few commenters here) who are increasingly mouthing their masters’ mantra about the markets requiring us to reduce the deficit over a single parliament and blaming it all on Labour’s profligate spending should note that they look to be in danger of being sucked into the next “there is no alternative” hypothesis. Groupthink can be a very dangerous thing and I am genuinely surprised how quickly it has taken hold on the LibDems.
I have not read the book but the review gives the impression that there were personal failings that contributed to the Irish failure. “daft, short-sighted, greedy, corrupt or all four”.
Surely what is more significant is the perverse incentives that are created by market forces that cause people to behave like that?
The point then is that markets have to be regulated to ensure that these perverse incentives are removed. The reason why many politicians do not see this is because they are in thrall to a free market fundamentalist ideology that denies the possibility that this could happen.
That ideology was the consensus view among all 3 political parties up until 2007 when Vince Cable called for the nationalisation of Northern Rock, and Labour agreed soon afterwards.
The Tories have never really learnt the lessons from this. Instead of blaming light touch regulation they blame the change in the regulatory regime.
Behind the scenes the Lib Dems are working hard to make sure that the banks are reformed. The main problem they have is that the have the wrong Coalition partners in order to achieve this. The UK is not the same as Ireland, but the danger is that we may yet repeat some of their mistakes.
Indeed, Ireland did what Britain did, but just in fast motion.
The tragedy of the 2010 UK general election was that the people responded to the mess that was caused by this by giving more votes than to any other party to a party whose only criticism of Labour’s doing this was to say they had not done it far enough or deep enough. Unlike Ireland, we have an electoral system which both major parties support on the grounds it twists representation of whichever of them is the largest upwards and generally gives them a majority even though they don’t have majority support. In 2010 the twisting did not quite work in the way Labour and the Conservatives praise it for working, but it almost did as it made a Conservative-dominated coalition the only viable stable government option.
The result of this coalition is that our party has been silenced from saying what it ought to be saying about all this, or at least its leaders interpret the existence of the coalition as meaning they have to keep silent on it.
“up until 2007 when Vince Cable called for the nationalisation of Northern Rock , and Labour agreed soon afterwards”
That will be shortly after Vince said it should be allowed to fail and be broken up. Vince also used to be a Keynesian. There were plenty of real Keynesian economists who were offering a real critique of deregulated markets before 2007 – Stiglitz and Krugman spring to mind – there is also something to be said for Gordon Brown’s failed attempts to improve financial regulation at a global level, which at least show they he had some recognition of the problem.
Behind the scenes the LibDems may be working hard to reform the banks – but the honest truth is they are not being listened too and they are achieving next to nothing.
@Cuse “Your Chancellor, a certain Gideon Osborne”
Its amazing you can come up with this insightful criticism. And soooo witty.
Hey, thanks @Simon McGrath.
I cerainly thought so!
Ireland cant practice anything but austerity economics as it is broke.
The greed of the bankers and the impotence of the government was what done it for Ireland.The government and bankers hoodwinked the good irish folk into thinking all was great and well.Shame on the banks and Irish government for sucking dry a great nation and people