The Celtic Tiger

Examines how the Celtic Tiger, an economy that was hailed as one of the most successful in history, fell into a macroeconomic abyss necessitating an unheard of bail-out. It covers property market bubbles, regulatory incompetency, and disastrous economic policies. A highly readable account of the unprecedented near collapse of the Irish economy.

Paul Sweeney surveys the processes and economic circumstances that have worked to produce the modern Irish economic miracle. He also casts a critical eye on the conditions that create a have and have not society in modern Ireland.

Since the first edition there have been fundamental changes in the Irish growth model. The sudden collapse of the Irish economy in 2008 raises questions such as: why the sudden and deep decline in economic growth? What are the prospects for a return to growth? Answering these questions and more, this book is the definitive work on the Celtic Tiger.

Ireland's Celtic Tiger economy has been held up as a model of successful development in a globalized world, offering lessons for other late developing countries. It interrogates the principal theoretical approaches which have been used to analyze the Celtic Tiger, particularly neo-classical economics, and finds them inadequate to capture its ambiguities or address its developmental deficit. Elaborating an alternative approach, drawing particularly on the work of Karl Polanyi, the book offers an interpretation which captures more fully the ways in which the Irish State has made itself subservient to market forces. The options now facing Irish society are mapped out through a critical examination of globalization, identifying possibilities for development and social action.

Ireland appears to be in the throes of a remarkable process of social change. The purpose of this book is to systematically scrutinize the interpretations and prescriptions that inform the deceptively simple metaphor of the "Celtic Tiger." The standpoint of the book is that a more critical approach to the course of development being followed by the Republic is urgently required. The essays collected here set out to expose the fallacies that drive the fashionable rhetoric of Tigerhood. Four of these fallacies--that Ireland has cast off the chains of economic dependency, that everyone is benefiting from the economic recovery, that personal freedom and liberty are at an unprecedented level for all citizens, and that Ireland is also experiencing a period of strong cultural renaissance--are vigorously challenged.

All across Ireland, thousands of people are living in apartments and houses with serious fire safety and structural defects. Some of these have made the news, many more have not. Defects: Living with the Legacy of the Celtic Tiger tells the horrifying story of these people and how they came to be trapped in dangerous homes. In this follow-up to Home, his hugely popular and acclaimed manifesto for public housing reform, Eoin Ó Broin reveals how decisions made by successive governments from the 1960s to the 1990s led to an alarmingly light touch building control regime. This regime, when combined with the hubris and greed of Celtic Tiger-era property development, allowed defective and unsafe properties to be built and sold in huge numbers to unsuspecting victims. Who was responsible? Why were they allowed to get away with it? And who will foot the bill to fix these potentially fatal defects? All these questions and more are answered in this hard-hitting and shocking investigative work.

The death of the Celtic tiger is not an extinction event to trouble naturalists. There was, in fact nothing natural about this tiger, if it ever really existed. The "Irish Economic miracle" was built on good old-fashioned subsidies (from the European Union) and the simple fact that until the 1980s Ireland was by the standards of the developed world so economically backward that the only way was up. And as it began to catch up to European and American averages, the Irish economy could boast some seemingly remarkable statistics. These lured in investors, the Irish deregulated and all but abandoned financial oversight, and a great Irish financial ceilidh began. It would last for a decade. When the global financial crash of 2008 arrived it struck Ireland harder than anywhere - even Iceland looked like a model of rectitude compared to the fiasco that stretched from Cork to Dublin. There was an avalanche of statistics as toxic as the property-based assets that lay beneath many of them And under all this rubble lay the corpse of the Celtic Tiger. How Ireland managed to achieve such a spectacular implosion is a stunning story of corruption, carelessness and venality, told with passion and fury by one of Ireland's most respected journalists and commentators.