Fintan presents a well balanced view of what went wrong in Ireland. We all want a simple story, the banks caused the crisis. But, he paints a picture of a crisis waiting to happen in a country the kept voting in openly corrupt politicians who allowed unregulated banks and financial institutions to run wild, and sqandered money through the boom times. Worse still the government just kept borrowing to keep it all going for the last 7 or 8 years.

It's a nicely narrated book that moves along quickly and kept me engaged. Tone of the book is conversational.

I really enjoyed it.

Very structured and informative and a book that I may actually buy to read. However, as I am Irish I find the inability of the narrator to properly pronounce Irish place and family names correctly must infuriating. To my mind this is an unnecessary frustration. Was it not possible to get an Irish person to narrate or for your chosen narrator to do some research / checking. Too lazy ? Unprofessional and, for me, spoils an otherwise excellent book.

Having missed the whole of the Celtic Tiger project and only watched in wonder from the sidelines as the Ireland that I knew in my childhood and my early twenties changed completely before my returning eyes, Fintan O’Toole makes an excellent left-wing job of bring the picture shockingly up to date. It is in the main a logical step by step voyage through the last twenty years of Irish history - roughly the 1990’s to 2009 - in which more happened in Ireland than at any time since the heroic 1913 to 1922 period on which so much of the sensitivities which underpin politic life in Ireland are built. When he widens his considerations, there is a little more inconsistency in targeting and hitting the home truths. Absolutely correct to say that Ireland is a society where sin equals sex and money has no sinful value. Wrong to equate the imperative to creativity with the motive to conceal the nature of truth in Ireland - Beckett and Joyce reached deep down into the emotions and taught us all more about ourselves, River Dance and Flatley’s Celtic Tiger are universally understood for what they are and abhorred by Irish people. Joyce himself understood that Leprechauns, smoky peat fires and toothless grannies dragged Ireland back to what others wanted it to be - it is enough to say that Michael Flatley was born in Chicago without wasting time dissecting the choreography and sets of his dance show. Wrong also to spend so much of the book re-hashing well trod ground in respect of Charles Haughey - odious as his sins of money were, they are well known and dead and buried with The Boss. The main job in hand is to determine how the axis of Bush-Blair-Bertie-Bankers managed to ruin the lives of the 75m inhabitants of the British Isles. Good man yourself, Fintan for pointing out the structural shortcomings on which the Irish bubble was allowed to inflate before the inevitable burst, but what role did American and Britain play?

Like others, I enjoyed the content but it was completely the wrong choice of narrator. I was determined to hear what Fintan O'Toole had to say but was driven to distraction by the narrator and his pronunciation. It was a real struggle to get past that but worth it. Please use a different narrator for your next book!

A great book, with a 'What!!!' moment every 10 minutes. A catalogue of deliberate error and sheer cynicism. Don't listen in a public place, people will stare at you as you react with exclamations of disbelief and amazement. What a pity the narration was so unprofessional and badly prepared: mispronunciation ( louche as lauche), misplaced emphasis ( something was 'dirt. Cheap') are the most basic errors, Irish names and titles could surely have been researched or at least mispronounced consistently.

Fintan O'Toole explains clearly how the people of Ireland have been robbed and duped by a small band of greedy bankers and politicians who believed themselves to be outside the bounds of the law and of common morality. It's a pity he didn't narrate the book himself because the reader chosen sounds a bit like a robot or a 'speaking clock'. There are a lot of weird errors of emphasis that I found irritating. Still, It was great to hear the book while I was working and wouldn't have time to read it.

The source material is fascinating; a largely corrupt political class in bed with a comprehensively bent community of bankers and property developers conspiring to bankrupt an entire country. The narrator's fine by the way. It doesn't sound like he's been allowed to re-record any errors but it didn't bother me nearly as much as it did some other listeners. If you want to hear a narrator really struggle with pronunciation then check out Barry Cunliffe's "Druids".

An excellent book, very well written and researched. However great fan of audible that I am, this is one of these books that I would have preferred to read as a paper book. There is so much detail that I needed sometimes to refer back to previous chapters to really follow it properly and that is more difficult on an I Pod..
But I stuck with it to the end, and felt that I understood much better the economic problems which have befallen Eire, and it was very, very interesting.

As an Irish economic migrant from the '80's, I have been interested to understand what exacly went on during the years of the Celtic Tiger.
On the negative side, the narrator was the worst choice since John Wayne in 'The Quiet Man' and the book felt more of a download of volumes of data than a structured thesis.
For all that, the data on offer answered my question as to what actually happened and introduced the concept of 'light touch regulation' aka 'let developers and bankers do what you they like as long as everyone gets a cut of the proceeds' and then the ultimate irony was the lecture circuit extolling the virtues of the new 'Irish Invention' to the rest of the world as the panacea for world economic problems - the Emperor has no clothes springs to mind.
This is a damning indictment of the Irish political system during the Celtic Tiger and the level of corruption in public office. I listened to this book with a combination of amazement, distain and incredulity. The most surprising fact is how many of these politicians, developers and bankers are still in public circulation. The section about the Anglo Irish Bank is so mad that you have to try to remember that this is fact and not fiction. The chapter on the emergence of Ireland as the Wild West of Finance manages to surpass this.

Probably the sort of expose the Irish state detests especially after spending years building up a perceived image of an economic powerhouse on the edge of Europe. It beggars believe how a cartel of political and business leaders could milk the state dry at the expense of the ordinary working person. It's also amazing that even when exposed the lengths they went to in order to cover their tracks.

In the financial world it will be generations before Irish credibility is restored, if ever. Truly the Wild West of international finance.

An enlightening and entertaining listen but not for those with images of leprechauns, donkey's and quaint villages where everyone is friendly and in it together against the oppressive overlords!! Generations on it's the Irish elite who have assumed the overlord mantle and left a sizeable burden on the masses for generations to come.

Well done Fintan and Audible.