The Irish Bust

The Irish bust
Learning to make do and mend
Nov 26th 2009

From The Economist print edition

The Bankers: How the Banks Brought Ireland to Its Knees. By Shane Ross. Penguin Ireland; 312 pages; £14.99. Buy from Amazon.co.uk
Follow the Money. By David McWilliams. Gill & Macmillan; 298 pages; £14.99. Buy from Amazon.co.uk
Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger. By Fintan O’Toole. Faber & Faber; 240 pages; £12.99. To be published in America by PublicAffairs in March. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

FOR over a decade from the mid-1990s until 2007, Ireland’s economy grew more rapidly than any other in western Europe. Foreign investment poured in. Success at selling abroad made Ireland one of the world’s largest exporters per head. Opportunity attracted the enterprising. In less than a dozen years, a country long known for exporting its people welcomed immigrants in droves. From having few foreign residents a decade ago, by 2008 one in eight of the population was foreign-born—a far higher proportion than Britain and France where large-scale immigration has been taking place for decades.

As the boom continued, a certain sense of invulnerability seemed to take hold. The Irish took to buying property with such abandon that there was soon a credit-inflated bubble in property prices. Since that bubble burst in 2007, everything has changed. The economy has shrunk by a tenth—economists’ definition of a depression. The rate of joblessness has tripled. Banks are hobbling and Ireland’s public finances are in tatters.

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