# Washington Post Critique of Irish Economy



## amgd28 (19 Aug 2013)

Steven Pearlstein has published an interesting article on the Irish economy in the Washington Post - his last such report on Ireland was early 2006 and was remarkably prescient.



> Can Ireland’s Celtic Tiger roar again?
> By Steven Pearlstein, Published: August 16
> DUBLIN — Much of Ireland has been riveted this summer by recordings of phone conversations from 2008 that revealed not only shocking levels of greed and bad breeding among some of the country’s top bankers, but a deliberate effort to snooker the government into bailing out the country’s banks by concealing the extent of their insolvency.
> As Dan O’Brien, the business editor of the Irish Times observed, the tapes gave new life to a simple narrative that many Irish desperately want to believe: that Ireland was put on the path to financial ruin on a single night five years ago when a small group of regulators and politicians, pressured by bankers and European leaders, foolishly decided to guarantee all of the outstanding debts of all Irish banks. In this telling, it was that one boneheaded decision that wound up bankrupting the government and plunging the economy into a prolonged recession.
> ...



Read full article here:


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## Purple (19 Aug 2013)

Excellent and balanced piece. The best summary I've read of where we've come from and what we still have to sort out.


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## amgd28 (19 Aug 2013)

Yep, he's a fine journalist with a good eye for cutting through the spin.

Quite a pity our legislators will probably not read as they are all on holidays....


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## Delboy (19 Aug 2013)

The Alan Dukes bit at the end



> “We have a very insular political system here,” agrees Alan Dukes, a former finance minister and leader of the parliamentary opposition. “The influence of interest groups makes politicians incapable of making hard decisions. We wind up doing a little of everything and not enough of the things that really matter.”



Insular alright....we share the juicy state appointed jobs around the well connected, that right Alan!


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## mercman (19 Aug 2013)

amgd28 said:


> Quite a pity our legislators will probably not read as they are all on holidays....



Does it really matter where they are or what they are doing ?? It really is a case of short termism -- all for the sake of a wage, expenses and a pension, if they are able to fool Joe Public long enough.


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## amgd28 (19 Aug 2013)

The trouble is none of them actually see their role as being legislators. In fact I was wrong to describe them as such...

Anyway, back to the article - any key takeaways that people haven't seen already or simply a case of a generic description of the rise and fall of a lot of western economies in the last 10 yrs?


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