Ireland’s debt crisis is different to that of other countries. If some peripheral southern states took advantage of euro membership to borrow cheap resources (and then to waste these resources), Ireland’s macro-economic figures were very respectable before the 2008 crash. What happened was that huge private bank liabilities emerged as unsustainable, once the building boom ran out of steam. Faced with the prospect of letting the three big banks go to the wall, Brian Cowen’s Fianna Fail (FF) government assumed state responsibility for the debt. The troika of IMF, EU and ECB came in to provide him with the funds to sustain this operation, and Ireland accepted a bail-out on classic IMF lines—a fate visited, as the authors remark, on numerous Latin American states whose developmental trajectory is not dissimilar to Ireland’s (22). So the Irish have experienced tax hikes and new taxes, expenditure cuts, longer hours in work, wage cuts, job losses, downgrading of public services and privatisation of public assets. They will be paying for many years to come for the reckless gambling of their bankers and the knee-jerk reaction of the political elites, for whom there could never be any questioning of neo-liberal orthodoxy.‘The low and middle income sectors of the population are carrying the burden of paying for a banking crisis that was caused by a very small elite group’(35). In order to avoid a grim future, young people do what their forbears have done for centuries; currently 200 are emigrating every day. In this brief but dense and well-documented book, the authors provide a lucid and highly readable analysis of the crisis, showing that the austerity measures have not in fact been successful, unless you count increased inequality and lower wages as possible incitements to investors. A number of structural factors explain the rise of the latest phase of Irish capitalism, the ‘Celtic Tiger’and its collapse. Crucial is the culture of Ireland’s narrow political and business elites, linked closely in their various networks. As Ireland’s growth progressed in the Tiger years, her rulers, mostly FF, found it only natural to espouse neo-liberal nostrums and give their business friends licence to build houses that no-one could afford; banks were encouraged to lend recklessly. This was the latest stage of a long collaboration between FF and what Allen calls the native bourgeoisie. De Valera’s initial project had been to change the status of Ireland from being a producer of cheap food for Britain and build up indigenous industry behind tariff walls. Even when his successors began slowly to expose Ireland to the international economy, there still remained close ties between FF and a bourgeoisie that was timid and state dependent rather than entrepreneurial (108); its model might have been more Franc ois Guizot than Michael O’Leary. Crucially also, organised labour was brought into the deal, via successive phases of social partnership which by the last decade amounted to a thoroughly neo-corporatist relationship between state and unions (126 ff.). Add to this mix a strong dose of republican nationalism, plus the influence of a powerful Church, and one understands the politico/cultural matrix which produced such aberrant behaviour. Certainly this system has worked well enough at most times in Irish history to keep FF in government and to satisfy enough of the workforce for social control to be maintained. The Tiger, an unashamedly neo-liberal project, worked very well at first; even if inequality widened during this period, the rising tide beloved of liberals did lift enough boats for several years. Perhaps the best part of the book is where the authors show the real nature of the Tiger years (77 …