Fintan OToole - Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger
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Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger: summary, description and annotation
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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 Irelands most respected journalists and commentators. OToole ... has produced a coruscating polemic against the cronyism and corruption that in his view helped to fuel the boom.... [H]is highly readable book is a salutary reminder that cronyism, light regulation and loose ethics can be a deadly combination. Brian Groom, Financial TimesAn interesting and readable post-mortem.... Ship of Fools is not just for those drawn to Irish politics or economics. Americans, in particular, will relate to Irelands battle to restore its economy and renew faith in its leaders. Cleveland Plain Dealer Fintan OToole is a columnist and critic for the Irish Times. He was elected Irish Journalist of the Year in 1993 and was a drama critic for the New York Daily News from 1997-2001. The author of several previous books, he is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, Granta, and other publications. He currently lives in Dublin.
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Table of Contents
Also by Fintan OToole
SHAKESPEARE IS HARD, BUT SO IS LIFE
A TRAITORS KISS
WHITE SAVAGE
A TRAITORS KISS
WHITE SAVAGE
To JOHN OREILLY and JOHN CONNOLE,
better builders
better builders
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Dr Jim Stewart and Professor Justin OBrien for help and advice with parts of this work, though neither of them is responsible for my use of those gifts. I am also grateful to Geraldine Kennedy, editor of the Irish Times, and her predecessor Conor Brady, for allowing me to express many of the ideas that are developed here, even when they were badly out of kilter with the mood of the times. Paddy Smyth and later Peter Murtagh on the opinion pages have been particularly patient and supportive.
This book would not have been undertaken without Neil Beltons support and perhaps misplaced optimism, and would not have been possible without Charles Boyles acute work on the text. I am also grateful for the work of my agent Derek Johns.
My debt to Clare Connell is, as always, both incalculable and inexpressible.
Glossary
Dil - the lower house of the Irish parliament
Fianna Fil - the dominant party in Irish politics since 1932
Fine Gael - the largest opposition party
IFSRA - the Irish Financial Regulatory Authority, established in 2003 as the separate supervisory arm of the Central Bank; it was subsequently known as The Financial Regulator
Progressive Democrats - a small but highly influential neo-liberal party formed in 1985 and wound up in 2009
Protestant Ascendancy - the governing and landowning class, adhering to to the Protestant state church, that dominated Irish society from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century
Tnaiste - the deputy prime minister
Taoiseach - the prime minister
TD - member of the lower house of the Irish parliament, Dil ireann
A Note on Sources
Since this book is intended as a polemical, rather than a historical or academic work, it does not have an apparatus of references and footnotes. All of the facts and statistics used here are, however, easily available on line from the relevant Government departments, the Revenue Commissioners, the Comptroller and Auditor General, the Central Statistics Office, the reports and transcripts of the McCracken, Flood and Moriarty tribunals, the DIRT inquiry, the reports of the all-party Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution, the National Competitiveness Council, Eurostat, the OECD and the International Monetary Fund.
References to contemporary events are drawn from the archives of the Irish Times, the Sunday Tribune, the Sunday Business Post, the Irish Independent, the Sunday Independent and the Irish Mail on Sunday.
PROLOGUE
Three Ships
1
In July 2004, the property developer Sen Dunne celebrated his second marriage, to the former gossip columnist Gayle Killilea, in a seventeenth-century villa on the Italian Riviera. The guests, as Ms Killileas newspaper gushed, were a fascinating sample of Irish society: bankers and footballers, designers and theatre directors, not to mention, given the grooms background, political deal-makers. The only notable absentees were the serving Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, and his Minister for Finance, Charlie McCreevy.
Ahern had been due to arrive for the wedding, flying straight from the National Day of Commemoration ceremonies to honour Irelands war dead, and to stay as a guest of the property magnate at the Hotel Splendido in Portofino. When news of his plans to travel to Italy was leaked to the press, he decided not to go. During the speeches, however, a phone call from Ahern was played on speakers to the guests: Dunner, you and I go back a long way. I wish I could be there, he said. Im sorry I couldnt come but I would have been more trouble to you than Id be worth. The Taoiseach, Killilea explained to the Sunday Independent, didnt want our wedding to turn into all being about him. Then Charlie McCreevy said he better not come either.
The party cost 1.5 million, but it was merely the prelude to a longer, more lavish nuptial celebration. The couple had hired Aristotle Onassiss old yacht, the Christina O, venue for the wedding receptions of Onassis and Jackie Kennedy in 1968 and of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier in 1956. Forty-four guests were taken on a two-week cruise around the Mediterranean. The cost of chartering the yacht is 65,000 a day, not including food, drink and fuel. The fuel charge was 575 an hour.
But the real cost of the Christina O was borne by a couple of million people in Ireland, who probably did not know that they had paid for much of it. The Christina O Partnership Limited is registered in the Cook Islands but owned by a consortium of Irish businessmen, who purchased it in 2000. It cost them 65 million to buy and refit the yacht in lavish style, including a bronze-bordered swimming pool inlaid with mosaic frescos of ancient Crete that, at the push of a button, could be turned into a dance floor.
The expense was largely borne by the Irish taxpayer. Under Irelands beneficent tax regime for the rich, the wealthy businessmen who put up the cash got most of it back from the state. In November 2008, the Revenue failed in a court case in which it had challenged the right of one of the investors, Pino Harris, to claim back most of his outlay on the Christina O. Harris had put up 14.3 million and got 9.12 million of it from the state in the form of tax refunds. Assuming that the other investors got back the same proportion of their investment from the tax authorities, the Irish taxpayer lavished about 40 million on the Christina O. It was money well spent - a state in the throes of a demented property cult needed somewhere suitable for its new aristocracy to disport itself in style.
Less than a year after his epic epithalamion in the Mediterranean, Sen Dunne pushed Irish property prices to new heights by buying the Jurys and Berkeley Court hotels in Ballsbridge, Dublin, for 260 million, with the intention of demolishing them to build a new high-rise city quarter to rival Londons Knightsbridge. He paid 53.7 million per acre for the land; the previous record was 35 million. He then bought a small adjacent site, Hume House, for the equivalent of 195 million an acre - believed to be one of the highest prices paid for a piece of real estate ever, anywhere. In all, he spent 379 million on his Ballsbridge site.
In August 2009, Ulster Bank, a subsidiary of the Royal Bank of Scotland, moved loans it had given Dunne to buy the Jurys and Berkeley Court site into a new quarantine division for dodgy assets, a prelude to eventually offloading them to a British or Irish state bad bank for toxic debts that were unlikely ever to be repaid in full.
The Christina O sailed on.
2
At two oclock on the morning of 11 September 2008, twelve miles west of the island of Belle-Ile in the Bay of Biscay, the bilge alarm sounded on the Irish national yacht, the Asgard II. The brigantine was the successor to and namesake of the original Asgard, on which, in 1916, the nationalist revolutionary Erskine Childers and his wife Mary ran a consignment of German guns into Howth harbour and delivered them to the Irish Volunteers. The original ship was enshrined in nationalist mythology and eventually preserved in the national museum. The
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