Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World by Lewis Michael

Author:Lewis, Michael [Lewis, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-09-27T16:00:00+00:00

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Brian Lenihan is also, as Joan Burton pointed out, tricky. It’s racing up on eight in the evening when I meet him in a Department of Finance conference room. He’s spent most of his day defending the harshest spending cuts and tax hikes in Irish history to Irish politicians, without offering any details about who, exactly, will pay for the bank’s losses. (He’s waiting until after the single by-election that the Dáil authorized is held.) He smiles. “Why is everyone so interested in Ireland?” he asks, almost innocently. “There’s really far too much interest in us right now.”

“Because you’re interesting?” I say.

“Oh no,” he’s says, seriously. “We’re not, really.”

He proceeds to make the collapse of the Irish economy as uninteresting as possible. This awkward social responsibility—normalizing a freak show—is now a meaningful part of the job of being Ireland’s finance minister. At just the moment the crazy uncle leapt from the cellar, the drunken aunt lurched through the front door—and, in front of the entire family and many important guests, they carved each other to bits with hunting knives. Daddy must now reassure eyewitnesses that they didn’t see what they think they saw.

But the evidence that something deeply weird just happened in Ireland is still too conspicuous. A mile from the conference table where we take our seats you can still find a moonscape of vast two-year-old craters from which office parks were once meant to rise. Fully finished skyscrapers sit empty, water pooling on their lobby floors. There’s a skeleton of a tower, cranes at rest on either side, like parentheses. It was meant to house Anglo Irish Bank. There’s an empty new conference center that cost 75 million euros to build that has never been hooked up to the Dublin sewer and water systems. There’s a city dump for which a developer paid 412 million euros in 2006—and which is now, when you include the cleanup costs, valued at negative 30 million euros. “Ireland is very unusual,” says William Newsom, who has forty years of experience valuing commercial real estate for Savills in London. “There are whole swaths of either undeveloped land with planning permission or even partially developed sites which for practical purposes have zero value.” The peak of the Irish madness is frozen in time for all to see. There’s even an empty Starbucks, in the heart of what was meant to be a global financial center to rival London, where a carton of low-fat milk curdles beside a silver barista pitcher. The finance minister might as well be standing in front of Pompeii and saying that the volcano wasn’t really worth mentioning. Just a little lava!

“THIS ISN’T ICELAND,” is what he actually says. “We’re not a hedge fund that’s populated by 300,000 farmers and fishermen. Ireland is not going back to the eighties or the nineties. This is all in a much narrower band.” And then he goes off on a soliloquy, the main point of which is: Ireland’s problems are solvable and I am in control of the situation.

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