{"product_id":"feckers-50-people-who-fecked-up-ireland","title":"Feckers: 50 People Who Fecked Up Ireland","description":"Which 50 People turned Ireland into the fecked-up country she is today? Bono? Haughey? Louis Walsh? de Valera? It's time to name and shame the great, the good and the gobshites...\n\nConventional wisdom has it that Ireland, after a violent and tragic history, had began to get things right. But when the ill wind of recession cruelly snatched that self-satisfied achievement away, it all seemed like exceedingly back luck.\n\nIn his 50 brilliantly acerbic portraits Waters reveals a consistent pattern of self-delusion, myopia, inferiority complex, bravado, defeatism, cynicism, sentimentalism and conceit. He traces Ireland's story from the paranoid insularism and cultural myopia that followed national Independence, though the post-Sixties obsession with a faux 'self-confidence', to the final, salutary meltdown of the Celtic Tiger, and strangely lacking either Celts or tigers.\n\nOnce among the oldest civilization in Europe, Ireland has ended up as a second-rate version of the England it tried to discard. It threw out not merely the bathwater and the baby, but also the bathtub, the sponge and the rubber duck...","brand":"Constable","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40594171134037,"sku":"9781849016872N","price":10.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2481\/5790\/products\/5f60811f-bf87-4807-a0db-d7ea897a581e.jpg?v=1682329429","url":"https:\/\/smeikalbooks.co.uk\/en-us\/products\/feckers-50-people-who-fecked-up-ireland","provider":"smeikalbooks","version":"1.0","type":"link"}