Published: Wednesday, 25th November, 2009 4:44pm

Books on who to blame for slump the only industry to flourish

The economy is in a mess and the banks need taxpayers' cash to stay afloat, but at least the book trade about the crisis is flourishing.

At the last count, there were a dozen books published for the Christmas market on the recent high drama in the political and economic crisis enveloping the Republic. Take out from the reading list Bertie Ahern's 'The Autobiography', Albert Reynold's 'My Autobiography' and newspaperman James Downey's autobiography 'In My Own Time' and the reader is still left with a bewilderingly large mini-library to choose from. The remaining nine books mostly take the same characters and blasted landscape of the financial crisis as their main theme. That's still a very long Christmas reading list of business books.

Happily, the strap lines - in most cases - makes choosing a tad easier. The nine books are: Shane Ross's 'The Bankers', the story of "how the banks brought Ireland to its knees." Matt Cooper's 'Who Really Runs Ireland' identifies the "elite who led Ireland from bust to boom….and back again." Michael Clifford and Shane Coleman's 'Bertie Ahern And The Drumcondra Mafia' has a self explanatory title. Pat Leahy's 'Showtime' is "the inside story of Fianna Fáil in Power", while Fintan O'Toole leaves no room for doubt about his thesis with his 'Ship of Fools - How Corruption And Stupidity Killed The Celtic Tiger'.

David McWilliams managed to upset both Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan and RTE presenter Miriam O'Callaghan with his 'Follow the Money'. The book's cover strap line - "the tale of the Merchant of Ennis" - is also unnecessarily annoying. Marc Coleman in his second successive book, 'Back From The Brink', hits an economic upbeat tone on the economic crisis, while fellow economist Jim Power's 'Picking Up the Pieces', which identifies "Bertie economics" as the source of the crisis, also tries to track a path out of the mess. It is sub-titled 'Economic crisis and hope in Ireland'. Lesser-known author Anthony Sweeney decides his tome needs no descriptive straps - it's simply called 'Banana Republic'. A quick survey of the local book shop suggests that the Shane Ross and Matt Cooper books are selling the most at the early stage of the big book-selling Christmas season.

Like most of the nine titles, Ross's 'Bankers' breaks little new ground for business journalists who have been covering the unprecedented events and the characters in banking and politics who were directly responsible for the crisis. Yet, it's a superbly informative and easy read. It is written in a style that efficiently introduces the well-known Anglo Irish Bank poster-boys, Sean FitzPatrick and David Drumm, as well as a wider band of banking characters, who stand charged with nearly bringing down bankruptcy on the whole island.

There may be no major revelations but the book's prologue relates a little-known tale of a farewell dinner of failed regulators and bankers that took place almost exactly a year ago this week. "The banking crisis was at fever pitch; the nation's finances were in peril, but Ireland's banking elite was celebrating in a private room in a discreet hostelry near Dublin's St Stephen's Green." Ross called it the bankers' last supper - within a few weeks Anglo was to be nationalised and the two main banks had ungratefully taken €7bn from taxpayers.

Dublin bankers paid themselves world-ranking salaries to run unarguably tiny lending organisations. They easily convinced themselves of their own banking brilliance amid the biggest boom the country had ever known.

The lenders, and the small band of property borrowers who took their money, failed to recognise that they themselves were the main agents in creating a lending and property bubble. Its bursting will leave hundreds of thousands of people stranded on the dole. Most of the banking characters that Ross identifies, when the Government eventually manages to loosen their insider grip on their jobs, will be rewarded with scandalously large pensions. This is a very good book.

However Ross, when discussing the most recent of events leading to the setting up of the National Asset Management Agency (Nama), fails to rein in his more populist tendencies. He charges that Nama is little more than a conspiracy between a small group of civil servants in the permanent government and the bankers.

Nama, he unconvincingly contends, is the oligarchs' plot designed not to save the builders, but to save bankers' skins. Nevertheless, Ross's book has set the quality threshold. For writers on the banking crisis, his book is most accessible and has set the new standard.

Broadcaster Matt Cooper's 'Who Really Runs Ireland' opens up a wider range of political and business figures who Cooper has written about in his newspaper journalism over many years. It is particularly strong for drawing together in the one book a list of big property developers, bankers and businesspeople. His must surely have been the more difficult book to get past the publishing lawyers in this country.

Like Ross, Cooper, too, is less convincing when discussing most recent events. But that is a small complaint. Of the nine books, I would suggest reading Ross's 'Bankers' first and then tackle Cooper's tome.

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