Ship of Fools - How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger, by Fintan O'Toole

Fintan O'Toole makes it clear from the start that Ship of Fools is not a piece of academic work and hence doesn't have conventional annotations and footnotes, but all the information is readily available and much has been taken from the newspapers. This helps to explain the tone of the book, since the reader gets the impression that the author was as mad as hell, could not wait to get the rage expressed on paper, and didn't have time to stop for such niceties as citations.

O'Toole unashamedly goes in with all guns blazing, launching devastating broadside after broadside at the cronyism of the Irish body politic, with most of the venom reserved for Fianna Fail. The targeting of FF is understandable since they were in government for most of the Celtic Tiger era and the years leading up to it, so it is only fair that they take the brunt of the criticism for what went wrong, as eager as they were to take credit for when things were going right.

Setting the scene of his nautical theme, he opens with shipping metaphors that symbolize the extravagant decadence with which money was spent like it was running from the water taps and how far the economy fell when the party was over. Property developer Seán Dunne's 2004 marriage to a former gossip columnist was celebrated with a €1.5 million party followed by a two week cruise for forty four people on a luxury yacht that cost €65,000 per day to charter, €575 per hour for fuel, and was owned by a group of Irish businessmen who bought and refurbished her for €65 million. Then there was the Irish national yacht, the Asgard II, which sank in September 2008. The government was so strapped for cash that they took the €3.8 million insurance payment and left the ship to its fate rather than salvage or replace her.

Ireland was once held up as an example to the world. People flocked from all over to see what the secret was and how they could replicate such economic success in their own countries. Market fundamentalists the world over claimed vindication. Bertie Ahern made a lucrative post political career on the speaking circuit extolling the virtues of low taxes and lax regulation. John McCain mentioned Ireland's tax haven status in his Presidential election campaign. But the Celtic Tiger was already on the rocks and taking in water quicker than you can say "the fundamentals of the economy are strong."

Ex Taoiseach Charles Haughey's corrupt dealings and those of his political contemporaries, many of whom are still in office, were transported from the realm of widely-known rumor to matter-of-fact public record, and the electorate responded by electing more of less the same candidates again, even increasing the vote of those implicated in the multitude of tribunals that exposed the cronyism. It was as if corruption generated sympathy for the perpetrators at having gotten caught rather than the outrage that it would cause in other societies.

The Irish Central Bank made a Freudian slip in referring to "etithical" (sic) banking in one of its reports into Guinness and Mahon Bank which was operating a tax scam on behalf of its clients. It was appropriate that the regulatory system could not even spell "ethical" much less enforce such a novel concept. The central bank and its successor, the Financial Regulator, looked the other way and allowed banks to collude with customers large and small in massive tax evasion scams. Even the more "etithical" banks were forced to join this race to the moral bottom since adhering to the spirit of the law by insisting on proof of eligibility for certain tax breaks would have resulted in massive loss of custom to the other banks that were turning the Nelson's eye to such requirements.

Those who exploited the system in their favor, often at the expense of the Irish taxpayer, were elevated to the status of celebrities. They were the nouveaux riche, the new gentry, lavishly waving the money and the trappings of wealth in the faces of anyone who would watch or read the gossip columns. They bought up acre after acre of land, indulging in the old Irish obsession with that commodity, secure in the belief that the only thing that the value of the land could do, like the value of the houses built upon it, was to go up. Politicians ensured that their developer friends had no obstacles to deal with, and the bubble kept on growing.

The International Financial Services Centre in Dublin became an unregulated wild west to which unscrupulous lenders and tax-dodging front companies flocked from all over the world to ply the dubious trade that they would have gotten away with nowhere else.

Meanwhile, for all its proud boasting about an educated workforce, Ireland failed to update its education system to take account of the massive changes in the IT industry in the previous decades. Technical illiteracy infested society all the way up to the bluffers in government who produced buzzword-compliant "strategies" full of obvious generalities and no specifics. IT projects in various government departments were abandoned in failure one after the other with an enormous bill sent to the taxpayer every time. The government was in a position to put 21st century broadband infrastructure in place via the semi-state telecoms company, Eircom, but in 1999 sold off its controlling stake for ideological reasons. As a result, the broadband penetration objective was never met while Eircom was raped for every penny that could be extracted from it by its various owners over the years.

All of this took place in a culture of denial, where morals and civic duty were not understood, where previously the difference between right and wrong was defined in terms of church-defined rituals which were promptly dumped and no concept of civic morality took its place.

The final salvo is reserved for Anglo Irish Bank, a debt-ridden pseudo bank that was up to its neck in tax fraud and used sleight of hand tricks to disguise its true financial state, but had enough clout to get the government to bail it out when the party was over and reality came knocking at the door with a bill in hand.

As well argued as his points are, O'Toole doesn't leave the reader with much in the way of a specific course of action, and it is easy to walk away from this book with a sense of hopelessness. He asks for people to change their attitudes, to learn to think differently about morality, to ditch the "every man for himself" attitude, and to build a society that truly understands the need for the rule of law rather than clinging to the mistrust of authority that frequently exists in post-colonial societies. It would help if Irish voters had a choice, but as long as Fianna Fail and Fine Gael remain almost identical in policy but are run more like family businesses with little more than civl war memories keeping them apart, there are few significantly different alternatives on offer.

Perhaps the book is aimed at policy makers, politicians who are looking for a niche and a way for voters to tell them apart from the herd. Either way, it looks like this "what went wrong with the Celtic Tiger" book genre will be one of the few growth industries in Ireland for the next few years.