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Paper Tigers go soggy in the rain.

From Box 18

The Celtic Tiger Has been shot, stuffed and mounted on a boardroom wall somewhere in Germany.

There is no equivalent in common english usage for "Flahulach" but it exemplifies the attitude of Ireland from the mid/late 90's to the crash.

The protests seem a little forced now. There were more than one or two voices in the country warning that the "good" times had to come to an end but the majority seemed to shrug their shoulders and get on with it. The "it" in this case being a sort of runaway train economy, where the government could site "confidence" in the economy as an excuse to avoid involving itself in the unpopular position of doing any governing. The cracks were showing early on however. Whole areas of Blanchardstown in a property bubble of its own buoyed up by small time buy-to-let speculators who were dependent on tenants' rents paid by government rent allowance. Irish people flying off to Poland, Bulgaria and a whole host of other unlikely places to purchase properties, spreading an infectious greed for property, incidentally distorting local markets into the bargain. To say nothing of the consistent record breaking house prices reported in ever expanding property sections in the Irish papers.

The insatiable desire for property which encouraged people to over stretch themselves in order to buy houses at the crappy end of a long commute, so they could feel as if they weren't getting left behind, was an emotional response to the whole insanity. There were plenty of voices warning people that it wasn't a good idea to put a deposit for a house on a credit card or get a 120% mortage, or have a mortgage with a chequebook. Common sense was shouted down by a sort of greed predicated on fear.

When people march in protest about Anglo Irish Bank and NAMA, I really understand it, but at the same time, it's in danger of being a cop-out. There is an element of collective responsibility here too. If that gets drowned out, then there's a danger it could all happen again.

Ireland since independence has always had to relinquish some control, whether to American business, Europe or now the IMF. The collective feeling of powerlessness has definitely allowed a certain kind of opportunist to step in and grasp what power there was, and do so in some dodgy ways too, in government, business and banking. In the "good" times these opportunists were no longer balanced out by the great generosity of spirit that the country is capable of. A classic example of that is the referendum which was overwhelmingly voted for to remove automatic citizenship for those born in the country - a disgusting display of a new mean-ness emerging. Now, it's all turned 180 degrees again and there are Irish workers on building projects in Poland, in IT companies in India, on engineering projects all over the third world, places it has shut its own doors to. This is a country whose own population has shrunk since the eighteen hundreds! It has left this dreadful situation where you can be born in Australia, with an Irish granny that you never even met and qualify for citizenship,yet someone actually born in the country would be ineligible.

We are in a democracy, that means that we get the government we deserve. I'm not entirely sure we got the banks we deserve, but they don't just "happen" do they? I hark back again to that casting I went to for a commercial by one of the major banks. The premise of the ad: the son, asking his Dad for "help" getting a house. This is a major bank advertising parent's remortgaging their house to help their kids onto the bottom rung of this so-called property ladder When you have a large institution using an emotive scenario like that in order to sell its services, apart from being completely unethical, surely that's a clear red flag - desperate measures?

We didn't actually have to do what they told us to do now, did we?