Conor McCabe

This is both a very interesting and entertaining book. The author, who subscribes to a socialist philosophy, presents an intuitive, coherent and highly readable study of how the Irish economy has arrived at its current position in 2011, which he argues can be traced back to certain crucial policy decisions taken by successive Governments after independence in 1922. These are outlined in the four main chapters on housing, agriculture, industry and finance. There then follows, in the final chapter, a very readable analysis of how the Bank Guarantee came into being and the author does plausibly link this event to the conclusion of his prior chapters. A readable, socialist historical analysis of the Irish economy does not appear very often (as it is atypical to the accepted orthodoxy) and this is what persuaded me to acquire the book and I have not been disappointed, indeed, while I do not agree with all of the hypotheses of the author he has persuaded me to read more particularly due to the helpful statistics referenced and used in the text. One thing I would say though is that while the author uses many endnotes to support his claims I would have expected a larger bibliography and in addition on occasion there appears to be something of an overreliance on newspapers such as the Irish Times throughout the book to support endnotes rather than use of book references which would be normal practice. Indeed several of the authors referenced in the bibliography only appear once in the entire text of the book.… (altro)