Fintan O’Toole’s [amazon_link id=”0571270093″ target=”_blank” ]Enough is Enough[/amazon_link] was one of the books in my poolside pile on holiday, and a very enjoyable rant it was. The book, a bestseller in its own country for obvious reasons,  does for Ireland’s elite what Matt Taibbi’s brilliantly splenetic [amazon_link id=”0385529953″ target=”_blank” ]Griftopia [/amazon_link]does for the same class in the United States. And right at the start, O’Toole puts his finger on the problem. Why are things not getting better? “There never was much chance that the elite that created the catastrophe would be able to resolve it.” (p7)

As it happens, the recent news on the Irish economy has been slightly better. Exports are up and, thanks to emigration, unemployment is not as high as it might have been. But this does not feel like economic success to the nation’s inhabitants, whose living standards are down, wealth collapsed, and public services axed. Enough is Enough makes two big points. One is that the sources of the economic catastrophe are political. O’Toole is scathing about the Irish political system, painting it as pure clientilism – heavily influenced still by the Catholic church – rather than anything resembling true democratic scrutiny in the public interest. I know too little about it to judge how exaggerated this is, but certainly politics has been entwined with economics as not only Griftopia but books like Raghuram Rajan’s [amazon_link id=”0691146837″ target=”_blank” ]Fault Lines[/amazon_link] and Simon Johnson & James Kwak’s [amazon_link id=”0307379051″ target=”_blank” ]13 Bankers[/amazon_link] make clear.

The second big theme in the book is that Ireland was never the miracle economy it was made out to be in the Celtic Tiger era. O’Toole writes: “[The] private sector productive capital stock grew by just 16% in eight years, a miserable figure for an economy in the midst of the greatest boom in its history.” (p115) Most of the nation’s investment went into property and retail. And he goes on to analyse a number of deep-seated structural problems such as the inefficiency of the healthcare system and education system.

The book is more than just a torrent of negative analysis. O’Toole offers many policy prescriptions to help the country dig out of trouble. Would they work? He seems to doubt whether there will even be scope to try after the implementation of spending cuts under the current bailout package: “The judgment is that all this can be done [ie the cuts] and that at the distant end of the process there will still be a funcitoning democratic society in Ireland, there will still be an ‘us’ that includes both those who ran up the debts and those who have to pay them off.” (p13)

I don’t know how pessimistic to feel about the likely social and political fallout from the continuing Great Financial Crisis. But I do agree with O’Toole – and many other commentators on our current situation – on the need for the elites that got us in to this mess to acknowledge that things have got to change fundamentally. Many are still in denial about the fact that economic recovery will depend on political reform and changes in the structure of power and the distribution of income in our societies.

[amazon_image id=”0571270093″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Enough is Enough: How to Build a New Republic[/amazon_image]