Library Events
Goldsmith Library talk - Fintan O'Toole
Irish Times columnist and author Fintan O'Toole will speak about his new book, Ship of Fools, in the Goldsmith Library.
Start Date: 3 March 2010
End Date: 3 March 2010
Event Time: 12 noon to 1 pm
Venue: Goldsmith Library, AIT
Watch Fintan O'Toole's lecture here
Irish Times columnist and author Fintan O'Toole will speak about his new book, Ship of Fools, in the Goldsmith Library.
Between 1995 and 2007, the Republic of Ireland was the worldwide model of successful adaptation to economic globalisation. The success story was phenomenal: a doubling of the workforce; a massive growth in exports; a GDP that was substantially above the EU average. Ireland became the world’s largest exporter of software and manufactured the world’s supply of Viagra.
The factors that made it possible for Ireland to become prosperous - progressive social change, solidarity, major State investment in education, and the critical role of the EU - were largely ignored as too sharply at odds with the dominant free market ideology. The Irish boom was shaped instead into a simplistic moral tale of the little country that discovered low taxes and small government and prospered as a result. There were two big problems. Ireland acquired a hyper-capitalist economy on the back of a corrupt, dysfunctional political system. And the business class saw the influx of wealth as an opportunity to make money out of property. Aided by corrupt planning and funded by poorly regulated banks, an unsustainable property-led boom gradually consumed the Celtic Tiger.
This is, as Fintan O’Toole writes, ‘a good old-fashioned jeremiad about the bastards who got us into this mess’. It is an entertaining, passionate story of one of the most ignominious economic reversals in recent history.
According to Stephen Price in the Sunday Business Post:
'O’Toole is one of the few writers with both the grasp of detail and clarity of expression to illustrate the true cause of Ireland’s post-boom hangover. Ship of Fools is a coruscating polemic, but also a heartfelt plea for amore civically-minded society to emerge from the smoking ashes of a wasteful, and wasted, era.'
Contact Name: Rosarii Dunne
Contact Email: rdunne@ait.ie
Contact Phone: 090 647 1821
