{"product_id":"books-feckers-50-people-who-fecked-up-ireland-by-john-waters","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...  Conventional 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.  In 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.  Once 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":"World of Books ","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53674400678161,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781849016872.jpg?v=1781531918","url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/products\/books-feckers-50-people-who-fecked-up-ireland-by-john-waters","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}