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14 July 2011

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Troubling book about our economic troubles

BOOK REVIEW
BY ROBBIE SMYTH

SINS OF THE FATHER – TRACING THE DECISIONS THAT SHAPED THE IRISH ECONOMY
BY CONOR McCABE
(THE HISTORY PRESS IRELAND, €17)

WITH our shop bookshelves laden with vanity treatises on the economy, Conor McCabe’s ‘Sins of the Father’ is a refreshing change from the ‘how I foresaw the economic crash and how I told Bertie, Brian and Seánie, while we were playing golf, at a charity ball, sailing, in the Four Seasons, blah, blah, blah . . .’. It is, however, one of the most troubling books I have read this year.
‘Sins of the Father’ is not about the economic crash of the last decade; it is a detailed catalogue of some of the economic, political and social policies and political decisions that brought us to that crash.

Okay, we could therefore be speaking of a huge, biblical tome of multiple volumes and so McCabe focuses on housing, agriculture, industry and finance, and even in these areas he offers an incredibly concise analysis.
Here is the first reason that this book is troubling. How was McCabe not in a rage when he drafted this text? It doesn’t come through as the book calmly introduces a myriad of examples of vested interest, privilege and economic elites trumping actual social need.
The stilted tone of the narrative gives an even greater bleakness to the text and this is only more troubling. On an ideological note, McCabe doesn’t bring the cliché of some previous socialist Left analyses to the text and it benefits hugely from this.
This is a plainly written book for any type of reader. It could and should be read and understood by social policy, economics or political science students and probably by many of their lecturers.
It says a lot about academic literature in Ireland that a text like this doesn’t already exist. This is another reason why the book is troubling: Why didn’t we do this before?
Finally, readers of a certain vintage will recognise some of the arguments and themes of political discussion in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s (the work of agricultural economist Raymond Crotty in particular).
This is just one more reason the book is troubling. Have we really forgotten how we got here? Reading ‘Sins of the Father‘ reminds us that there is a lot of remembering to be done.

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