Book review: Hell at the Gates by Daniel McConnell & John Lee

Bank bailouts are lucrative for bankers and punitive for the governments which implement them, says Professor Sean Barrett, a member of the Oireachtas Banking inquiry.

The authors are respectively the political editors of the Irish Examiner and the Mail on Sunday. They are energetic figures about Leinster House. In this gripping volume they tell the sad tale of the decline and fall of the Irish public finances.

They emphasise in the prologue that this is not a financial and economic history. It is a political story in the words of the ministers and government members of the Dail over the fateful period between the bank guarantee of September 30, 2008 and the EU/ECB/IMF bailout of November 28, 2010.