Thursday, January 14, 2010

Quote of the Day (Rory Fitzgerald, on the End of the Celtic Tiger)


“Expect Irish misery memoirs in 20 years’ time. Like a familiar glove, despondency has again wrapped itself around the Emerald Isle. Except this time we’ve lost the sense of humor and the warm spirituality that saw us through miseries past. Without these anesthetics things are now truly grim.”—Rory Fitzgerald, “Irish Eyes Aren’t Smiling on the Emerald Isle,” Boston Globe, January 4, 2009

Fitzgerald’s op-ed piece from a few weeks ago in the Globe is a short but useful account of the the Irish recession—specifically, how a housing bubble brought down an economy that had been one of the most powerful in Europe.

The story might have featured, as Fitzgerald notes, “an all-Irish cast”, but the parts they played—“real estate developers, bankers and incompetent governments”—sound depressingly familiar on this side of the Atlantic.

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