| Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger |  | Author: Fintan O'Toole
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Category: Book
Buy New: $12.77
as of 9/3/2010 12:50 CDT details
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Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 1,504,855
Media: Paperback
Pages: 240
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6 x 0.8
ISBN: 0571252680
EAN: 9780571252688
ASIN: 0571252680
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Product Description
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.
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 It's not just Ireland . . . . . January 1, 2010
Theodore A. Rushton (PHOENIX, Arizona United States)
7 out of 10 found this review helpful
Magnificent.
This is a magnificent description of past, present and future housing collapses. Change "Ireland" to "Phoenix" and change the names of the greedy, and it applies to Arizona. Likewise for every locale with a housing crisis. O'Toole is a masterful observor of the human folly that leads to ruinous speculation; it's a delight to read on that level alone.
Why do such collapses occur?
Any mother can explain it, in their answer to a child who wants to do something "because everyone else is doing it." Mom replies, "If all your friends were to jump off a bridge, would you do it too?" The answer is supposed to be, "Well . . . No." But, consider the logic: If everyone does it, then it must be fun, easy and safe. Left on their own, bankers revised this "monkey see, monkey do" reasoning to "banker see, banker do" logic.
As a banker once explained to me, "If the bank down the street is making this type of loan, then we must match them or do even better."
It's the nature of a competitive economy. You don't win if rivals out-compete you. Children are inveterate competitors; but, they play by rules and regulations. 'Lord of the Flies' speculates on what happens when children have no rules; perhaps we now need 'Flies of the Bankers.'
This book fits the bill nicely.
What happens when common sense is not applied? Consider Tiger Woods as someone who thought he was above the usual rules of marriage. Alan Greenspan, to his eventual sorrow, thought the financial community could restrain itself. Canada understands government exists to restrain irrational exuberance.
O'Toole details the results of builders and bankers allowed to compete with almost no rules, thanks to deregulation. It's not just Ireland or Arizona, it's human nature. When the housing market collapses, bankers picture themselves as victims rather than perpetrators; as victims, they have no sense of social responsibility. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, "Bankers are like babies. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other."
It's why babies are handled very carefully . . . at both ends. Bankers need the same handling. No such care was provided for bankers, builders or politicians. O'Toole has written a magnificent account of how people destroy themselves by not knowing when to say "enough."
Riveting and profoundly depressing March 12, 2010
David M. Giltinan (San Francisco)
7 out of 10 found this review helpful
"The role of sheer idiocy should not be understated. As finance minister, Charlie McCreevy's credo was a textbook statement of macroeconomic illiteracy: 'When I have the money, I spend it, when I don't have it, I don't spend it'. This childish mantra, ... obliterating at a stroke everything that governments worldwide had learned about the need to restrain a runaway economy by spending less and boost a flagging economy by spending more, was the economic equivalent of bulimia: binge and purge, binge and purge".
As the Celtic tiger lies puking feebly into the gutter, surrounded by the debris caused by the bursting of one of the worst real-estate bubbles on record, the Irish economic boom has come to a painful, screeching halt. By August 2009, the month when the Irish prime minister finally dropped his "Celtic tiger as a template for economic development" speech from his speaking portfolio, the level of debt among Irish households was the highest in the EU, GDP was predicted to shrink by 13.5 percent in 2009 and 2010, Government debt had almost doubled in the preceding year. 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 27 European cities. The Irish stock exchange had fallen by 68% in 2008....
The litany of depressing statistics goes on. In this book, Fintan O'Toole, a political commentator and columnist for The Irish Times, sets out in chilling detail the particular combination of factors that led to such a catastrophic end to Ireland's economic boom. Chief among them are:
* the enduring failure of successive governments to enact anything even remotely resembling regulatory controls on the banking and financial sectors
* a culture of cronyism and turning a blind eye to financial malfeasance of the most blatant kind - even when the taking of kickbacks by those in office was established beyond doubt by several investigative tribunals, penalties were nugatory to non-existent
* the Ahern government's continued feeding of the construction bubble through the creation of ever-more ridiculous tax incentives
* failure to invest profits during the boom years in areas that might provide long-term stability, such as infrastructure and higher education (probably the most depressing part of O'Toole's litany of governmental ineptness is the section that documents the abysmal ranking of Irish graduates in the areas of computer science and information technology)
Even though I've lived outside of the country for the last 30 years, I'm still an Irish citizen, and I found this book thoroughly depressing. O'Toole's jeremiad is not particularly well-written - one senses it was written in haste, and the editing is remarkably sloppy. Writing style may have fallen victim to his passion at times; nonetheless, he paints a picture which is quite clear and thoroughly depressing. I'd like to think that those shown to be particularly venal will pay the price -- I don't need Fintan O'Toole to tell me that this is altogether unlikely.
This will be of interest to anyone with some connection to Ireland, probably not all that interesting to anyone else.
Good book with a few minor flaws April 27, 2010
Ivan
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
In this book, Fintan O'Toole concentrates on corruption, massive housing/land bubble, irresponsible and regressive tax policy, lack of infrastructure development and the fanatical pro-business attitude of the Irish government as the key causes for the collapse of the Irish economy and the death of the Celtic Tiger.
The positives of this work is that O'Toole is a really good writer as far as pure mastery of language is concerned. His prose is very easy to follow and it flows very well for a non-fiction book. The book itself is pretty short and knows exactly where to stop, right before getting tedious. I also found O'Toole's disdainfully sardonic tone to be quite amusing and very appropriate for this type of publication. Instead of further trying to describe the language and the tone, I will just provide a short excerpt. This is O'Toole's take on the corrupt Irish elite that purchased vacation homes on the man-made "Island of Ireland", which is part of the "World Archipelago" just off the coast of Dubai: "The great men who 'shaped our modern, thriving nation' could have their Irish pride in villas with 'more than just a hint of Irishness to them', but they would not actually have to be in Ireland - a particular advantage for those among them who were tax fugitives. This would be the perfect Ireland, with a vague sense of history in its mock-Georgian squares but no politics, with a simulacrum of Irish conviviality without the bother of an unruly plebeian populace."
Unfortunately, there are a few negatives about this book and hence the four stars. For one, I thought it could have used a little bit more structure. I felt that the material in each section could have been subdivided into smaller sections, making the transitions between different issues a little easier on the reader. Also, I felt that there were parts where O'Toole, instead of providing a higher level synthesis, kept giving the reader more and more examples of government corruption or tax evasion schemes. I understand that he was trying to show how endemic these practices really were, however I really felt that he made his point in certain instances and was really looking forward to some quality commentary.
Overall, despite the few negatives, I think this is a great, short read for anyone who is interested in the downfall of the Celtic Tiger. As a matter of fact, I think it would be useful for anyone who is interested in reading a case study of how irresponsible fiscal policy, radical pro-business attitude and government corruption and incompetency can ruin what seemed to have been even the most successful economic phenomenon.
 Padded April 30, 2010
Brian G. Ruschel
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book has some interesting nuggets but is padded beyond belief. 3/4 easily could be eliminated from the 226 pages of text. And it appears to be just a bunch of recounting of generalized things like what one would have read in Irish newspapers. (The author points out, "Since this book is intended as a polemical, rather than a historical or academic work, it does not have an apparatus of references and footnotes" and admits that, "All of the facts and statistics . . . are . . . easily available on line [from various government and other sources]" and, "References to contemporary events are drawn from the archives of the Irish Times, the Sunday Tribune, the Sunday Business Post, the Irish Independent, the Sunday Independent and the Irish Mail on Sunday.") Also, it's irritating to read a recounting of something "bad" that happened in Ireland, but the author always needs to add some semi-clever, witty, "summary" sentence just to sum up what was just said. Here is a randam example from p. 130 of the pure padding (and painful reading) that is representative of the whole book:
"Any urge to beef up regulation after the DIRT and Ansbacher scandals was outweighed by the belief that the Irish tradition of looking the other way while banks passed funny money around was actually an economic asset. Ethitical banking went global. While the embodiment of Irish banking culture has been the bogus non-resident, now it became the bogus resident. The unreality of Irish people pretending to be elsewhere was replaced by the unreality of foreign people pretending to be in Ireland."
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