{"product_id":"9781849019248","title":"Feckers: 50 People Who Fecked Up Ireland","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eWhich 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...\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eConventional 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOnce 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...\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Little, Brown Book Group","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47153482137840,"sku":"9781849019248","price":3.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781849019248_p0.jpg?v=1763751281","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781849019248","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}