The bust, part two: this time it’s personal
Given the bestselling success of books on the boom and the bust, it's not surprising sequels are in the pipeline for autumn. And it's not all gloom and doom. Enough is Enough : How to Build a New Republicis Fintan O'Toole's sequel to Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger. Due in early November from Faber, it asks the question we all want answered: what next?
What's needed, argues O'Toole, assistant editor of The Irish Times, is for Ireland to become a fully modern republic – in fact as well as name. "Politicians have been let get away with murder, and there is a fatalistic sense that nothing can change," reads the advance blurb.
Among the paths to change recommended are a takeover by the State of the education system, for which it already pays , making it fit for the 21st century and the building of institutions that can accomodate the influx of migrants Ireland has seen in recent years.
In October comes Wastersby Shane Ross and Nick Webb. Subtitled "The people who squander your taxes on white- elephant projects, international junkets and favours for their mates – and how they get away with it", this is Ross's sequel to The Bankers: How the Banks Brought Ireland to its Knees. Its theme is the scandal of public waste and the people who benefited from the culture behind it.
“Vast overspending on infrastructure [including a number of white elephants], extravagant use of overpriced consultants, the creation of dozens of quangos whose primary purpose seemed to be jobs for the boys, the culture of junketry that took hold in the semi-state sector and the Oireachtas – these and other dubious practices flourished during the years when the State’s coffers were overflowing. The insiders benefited; the rest of us got ripped off,” say publishers Penguin Ireland of the book, due in October.
From the same publisher in the same month comes Sunday Tribunecolumnist Simon Kelly's Breakfast with Anglo, billed as the first insider account of what it was like to be a property developer in Ireland during the boom and the bust. Kelly, whose involvement in property development began as a child in the 1980s making spreadsheets for his father, developer Paddy Kelly, gives his take on why it all went wrong, explaining "how it was that debt always begat more debt'' and taking readers into Anglo Irish Bank, main lender to the Kellys.
Politicians will also come under scrutiny. Snouts in the Trough: Irish Politicians and their Expenses, is the unedifying but graphic title of a book due from Gill Macmillan in October by Ken Foxe. Billed as "an eye-opening glimpse into the world of unearned privilege, unreasonable expectation and gross extravagance that characterises our political and administrative elite", it also looks at "the excesses of the semi-state agencies of which Fás is simply the most notorious".
How the economic meltdown manifest itself in court is the topic of Dearbhail McDonald's Bust: How the Courts Have Exposed the Rotten Heart of the Irish Economy. With a cast of bankers, developers, judges, solicitors and ordinary mortage holders who found themselves on the wrong side of the law, Bust promises to portray the human cost of the economic catastrophe as played out before the law. It's coming from Penguin Ireland next month.
You might think it’s bad enough living through all this without reading about it as well but, as the runaway success of Irish books in this vein has shown this year, there’s a hunger out there to understand how the country got into this state – and how it can be got out of it .
