Feckers: 50 People Who Fecked Up Ireland Book

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...Read More