SHIP OF FOOLS How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger FINTAN O'TOOLE

"Despite the fact that much of the world's Viagra is manufactured in County Cork, this extraordinary upthrust could not be sustained. Irish GDP is now shrinking faster than in any other advanced economy, and the country's gross indebtedness is larger than Japan's. House prices have fallen more rapidly than any others in Europe, and the average Irish family has lost half its financial assets. Unemployment has risen faster than anywhere else in Europe. By 2007, the country was €10bn in the red and a banking system massively complicit in fraud and tax evasion was just about to enter meltdown. In September last year it finally imploded, awash with billions in bad loans to property sharks. In its rise and fall, as Fintan O'Toole remarks in this superb polemic, "Ireland made Icarus look boringly stable." It had moved from being the poster child of free-market globalisation to one of the great economic basket cases of modern history."
—Prof. Terry Eagleton, Guardian

"Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger offers an account of what was done to the Irish economy over the past 20 years which is lucid and convincing. It is an essential book for anyone who wants the facts and the background to refute the idea that what happened to the Irish economy was a sad accident."
—Colm Toibin, Irish Times

"Ship of Fools is a coruscating polemic, but also a heartfelt plea for a more civically-minded society to emerge from the smoking ashes of a wasteful, and wasted, era."
–Stephen Price, Sunday Business Post

"In this brilliant, coruscating polemic, Fintan O'Toole, for a couple of decades now the head boy of Irish journalism, shows just what we missed… When in 2007 the Irish spent billions more on property than the French (all 61 million of them), with hindsight there should have been some pause for thought. When one in five jobs was in construction, some warning sign should have flashed about an overheating economy. When developers drove a motorway through the Tara Valley, hard by the country's most ancient sacred site, priorities should have been questioned. When all of this was being done instead of spending the surplus billions on broadband provision, extensive computer training, better hospitals, improved public transport or ending child poverty, those questions should have been deafening. O'Toole's rage at all these lost opportunities burns fiercely throughout this brilliantly argued polemic. Nothing else will do, he concludes, other than to found a Second Republic based on probity and institutional reform and a complete realignment of the political party system."
—David Robinson, Scotsman