Monday, December 27, 2010

David J. Lynch: When the Luck of the Irish Ran Out: The World's Most Resilient Country and Its Struggle to Rise Again

In December of 2010, the author said in an interview with Current Intelligence:
Well, these are really tragic days for Ireland. After overcoming its long history of poverty to become a high-growth economy known as the ‘Celtic Tiger’, Ireland now has stumbled into a financial debacle that will take it years to escape. The villains were reckless banks that binged on cheap capital to fuel a housing and credit bubble that was larger even that what we had here in the United States, facilitated by blind or cowed regulators and politicians who were happy to pretend that the good times could last forever. Some tried to warn them they were wrong, but while the boom lasted the Cassandras were ignored. Now, the Irish people – both the guilty and innocent – face years of unavoidable sacrifice and hardship. It’s going to be a long time before anyone again looks to Ireland as an economic model, as small countries from Colombia to Croatia did during the Celtic Tiger years. But if the Irish carry out some long overdue reforms, they can look forward to a decent future once the crisis passes. I’ve had the chance to report from other countries in the midst of just terrible economic suffering – Indonesia and Russia in 1998, Turkey in 2001 – and in the dark times it’s always impossible to imagine there will be brighter days ahead. But there were for those people and there will be for the Irish.
See the transcript to that interview here. The Economist (periodical) said this about the book and author, in November, 2010:
It is true, though, that Ireland’s political class has been tried and found wanting, a theme pursued also in David Lynch’s book, “When the Luck of the Irish Ran Out”. He begins, appositely enough, with a gathering of property developers and their political cronies in the Fianna Fail tent at the Galway races. Much of the rest of his tale concerns Sean Fitzpatrick’s disastrous mortgage bank, Anglo Irish. It was the troubles of Anglo Irish that led to the extraordinary decision by Brian Cowen, the Fianna Fail prime minister, taken in the small hours of September 30th 2008, to guarantee all bank deposits in Ireland—and hence to incur a bill that has now reached almost a third of GDP.
See that Economist piece here.

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