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Toast is feeling ill and so is Fintan O’Toole. I found this on guardian.co.uk, he is kicking the downed tiger with a new book:

The luck of the Irish has finally run out. Having roared away lustily for a decade or so, the Celtic Tiger has now rolled over on its back, all four paws stiffly in the air. In the late 1990s, Ireland became well-heeled for the first time in its wretched history, and in some respects even outstripped its former colonial proprietors. In this newly affluent nation of software and low taxes, bent bankers and microchip exporters, house prices in Dublin shot up by 519% between 1994 and 2006, probably the biggest such boom on the planet. It was a land of massive tax breaks and of financial regulation so light as to be invisible to the naked eye. As Ireland grew more dependent on foreign investment for its manufacturing than almost anywhere else in the world, the New York Times dubbed the country “the Wild West of European finance”.

Despite the fact that much of the world’s Viagra is manufactured in County Cork, this extraordinary upthrust could not be sustained. Irish GDP is now shrinking faster than in any other advanced economy, and the country’s gross indebtedness is larger than Japan’s. House prices have fallen more rapidly than any others in Europe, and the average Irish family has lost half its financial assets. Unemployment has risen faster than anywhere else in Europe. By 2007, the country was €10bn in the red and a banking system massively complicit in fraud and tax evasion was just about to enter meltdown. In September last year it finally imploded, awash with billions in bad loans to property sharks. In its rise and fall, as Fintan O’Toole remarks in this superb polemic, “Ireland made Icarus look boringly stable.” It had moved from being the poster child of free-market globalisation to one of the great economic basket cases of modern history.

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