Book description
Which 50 People turned Ireland into the fecked-up country she is
today? Bono? Haughey? Louis Walsh? de Valera? It's time to name and
shame the great, the good and the gobshites... Conventional wisdom has
it that Ireland, after a violent and tragic history, had began to get
things right. But when the ill wind of recession cruelly snatched that
self-satisfied achievement away, it all seemed like exceedingly back
luck. In his 50 brilliantly acerbic portraits Waters reveals a
consistent pattern of self-delusion, myopia, inferiority complex,
bravado, defeatism, cynicism, sentimentalism and conceit. He traces
Ireland's story from the paranoid insularism and cultural myopia that
followed national Independence, though the post-Sixties obsession with
a faux 'self-confidence', to the final, salutary meltdown of the
Celtic Tiger, and strangely lacking either Celts or tigers. Once among
the oldest civilization in Europe, Ireland has ended up as a
second-rate version of the England it tried to discard. It threw out
not merely the bathwater and the baby, but also the bathtub, the
sponge and the rubber duck...
