Draw Breath

I'm making my way through a few books at the moment and have just finished Neil Collins's The Great Irish Bank Robbery, on Allied Irish Banks and the DIRT tax. The book is one of those marvellous journalistic pieces: an easy rolicking read covering the events and (primarily) personalities behind a scandal without bothering the reader with much in the way of analysis. Given this, I don't think I'm with Shane Ross in calling the book a 'humdinger.' Still, the book does reveal the complete breakdown of governance in Allied Irish Banks throughout the late 1980s and 1990s as ambition overtook the willingness to address scandal after scandal after scandal.  read the rest of this post »