When Banks Cannibalise a State: Analysing Ireland’s Financial Crisis

Hailed for over a decade as the ‘Celtic Tiger’, Ireland’s economy collapsed in 2008 as falling property prices exposed huge liabilities in its banking system resulting from reckless lending to builders and developers. The trajectory of Ireland’s worsening banking crisis from 2008 up to the acceptance of an EU/ECB/IMF rescue package in November 2010 and a four-year austerity plan to reduce the budget deficit from 32% of GDP. In add, links the crisis to features of the development model that brought high economic growth from 1994 to 2007 and ends by examining the prospects for overcoming the current crisis