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Comment by merkel | Hacker News Reader

I live in Ireland and passed around Michael Lewis' original Vanity Fair piece (link below) to friends and family, the majority of whom were in awe of the depth and breadth of insight in this article. There was a consensus of disbelief that someone who was not Irish could, in such a short space of time, grasp so many subtleties about the Irish situation, not just economically but culturally, and with insights about figures in Irish politics that were extremely revealing (e.g. Brian Lenihan). I feel this is a remarkable piece of writing that far exceeds anything that has been written about the crisis by Irish journalists themselves:

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/03/michael-...

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It's a great article and brings a lot of clarity to the events. He squarely lays the blame with Brian Lenihan - ("A single decision sank Ireland") - but I can't imagine the decision to guarantee the bondholders was his alone.

Also the bus was already in the ditch at that point - that decision helped make matter worse, but there was no soft landing possible at that point.

This might be the best thing that ever happened to Ireland.

Since independance it has operated like a corrupt african regime. There were elections but the same party was always in power. The politician's job was to go off to Dublin and get money for their local area. This used to be european handouts when Ireland was the poor relative - all over Ireland there are huge freeway projects that go from nowhere to nowhere just because one county got a grant.

Then it managed to attract a few US corporations to HQ there to avoid paying tax in the UK or Germany - it then managed to convince itself that this made it a celtic tiger. Rather like Liberia deciding it's a great naval power because of the number of oil tankers registered there.

With a bit of luck we will now get real elections, a real economy and a chance to become a real european country

You have a point - there was a large minority in the country ~30% that would always vote Fianna Fail, no matter how corrupt they were revealed to be. That's changed in the past year or two, so they are down to ~12% now and expected to get wiped out in the forthcoming election. Ireland may have learnt that it can't continue to elect corrupt representatives.

I read the Big Short. Awesome book. Michael Lewis is a great author.

Sometimes it takes an outsider's perspective.

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