Published: Wednesday, 10th February, 2010 5:15pm
Fintan O'Toole to give talk in AIT's Library
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One of Ireland's leading commentators, Fintan O'Toole, will talk about the subject matter of his latest book in the Goldsmith Library, Athlone Institute of Technology (AIT) on March 3.
Mr O'Toole's book, Ship of Fools, was published late last year and quickly became a bestseller.
The book tracks how 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.
According to the author, 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, he says. 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.
Fintan O'Toole was born in Dublin in 1958. He has been a columnist and critic with The Irish Times since 1988, was drama critic of the Daily News in New York from 1997 until 2001, and is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books.
His previous books include A Traitor's Kiss: The Life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Shakespeare is Hard, but so is Life. Mr O'Toole's talk commences at 12 noon and is open to the public.
