The Madoffization of Irish society: interrogating the current ‘Global Financial Crisis’

While the human consequences of Ireland’s economic crash have been well documented and scrutinised, the systemic deceptions underpinning the so-called Celtic Tiger have received far less attention. The boom years were characterised by speculation, with government policy ever more attendant to the interests of property developers and lenders, leading to an increasingly unstable financial pyramid that eventually imploded. Though the crash demonstrated that much of the wealth creation was actually debt creation, this did nothing to mitigate the pervasive influence of finance capital over broader institutions. On the contrary, the dominance of finance capital, its capacity to preserve fictitious claims on wealth, to burden others with private debt, was demonstrated in full. We critique the ponzi character of Ireland’s property bubble, banking crisis and subsequent ‘solutions’. In doing so we draw attention to civil and state institutions that contributed to, or facilitated, the illusions of sustainable growth alongside observed efforts to maintain secrecy and silence, obfuscations, and ultimately the post-crash closing of ranks and scapegoating of myriad targets. We call this the Madoffization of Irish society, since the core enabling elements of this process were paralleled in Bernie Madoff’s $65bn scam that was exposed in 2008 as the US financial crisis went global.