Matt Cooper on How Ireland Really Went Bust

Planning on writing a book? Anything you need to do before you start? Get fit first! That's what broadcaster, columnist and author Matt Cooper did and he found it really helped him when he set about the daunting task of writing How Ireland Really Went Bust (Penguin Ireland €16.99).

‘I'm wary of sounding like a middle-aged bore about this but one of the things that I did about a year ago was I started physically getting fit. It was the most important thing I did because I actually felt much fresher writing this book than I did writing the last, mentally far more alert, far more able to get the words out quicker,’ he said.

‘Even times when I thought I should be writing the book I would go 'No, if I go for a run for an hour or if I go to the gym for an hour I will feel better and be more productive later. And I felt the better for that. Now that I am into an exercise regime I would not let it go.  If I ever write another book again it will be done in conjunction with a fairly rigorous exercise regime.’

The point about being fit for the task in front of you is particularly well-made as Cooper's book makes it clear that it didn't form part of former Taoiseach Brian Cowen's philosophy.

‘The drinking was not the stuff of legend but it was significant and I know myself, and  I suppose this is a realisation that comes to most people with a bit of maturity, as you get older you are not able to physically cope with the lifestyle of drinking late into the evening and having a hangover the following day. And if you look at your Barrack Obamas your David Camerons even go back to Bill Clinton, George Bush – all these people exercised regularly. You actually have to get your brain into gear. You have to physically look after yourself and you certainly don't – if you're not looking after yourself physically, as he (Cowen) wasn't – you don't add to it then by knocking a lot of alcohol back. And it might seem a bit basic but I actually think it's very important.’

How Ireland Really Went Bust catalogues the three bleak years since the September night in 2008 when the Irish government guaranteed the debts of Irish banks. It paints a picture of a government in a state of shock as events outside its control unfolded. At about 165,000 words it is a huge book, crammed with detail but the events it covers were so seismic that you never feel you are wading through information.  ‘I did take a large chunk of it out – 40,000 words – because it didn't actually fit with the narrative,’ Cooper said. ‘The section on Nama was 65,000 words and I cut it down to 25,000. I literally just gutted it. It was a ruthless job of editing which I did only over a couple of days of concentrated work.’

Through mostly off the record interviews Cooper reveals the strain individual members of the government and administration were under and the limited room they had to manoeuvre.

It was a huge task for someone who was already busy. Cooper managed it by rising at 6am and working for two hours before getting his children ready for school and then snatching time as it presented itself throughout the day. ‘We have an editorial conference on the Last Word at 11 o'clock so if I needed to do an interview I would organise it for around half nine after I got into town. If it was a morning where I wasn't interviewing I would just go to a coffee shop and take out the laptop and write for an hour.  And again at lunchtime if I wasn't meeting somebody I would take an hour away from The Last Word to write, and then I'd do an hour or two in the evening. So you could get five or six hours done in a day.’

So did he find that people at the heart of these events tried to show themselves in a favourable light? ‘I think the problem I had more than anything else was reticence,’ he said. ‘There's a certain reticence still with people in outlining their own position or not wanting to dump on a position particularly within circles within the government or administration there’s a certain amount of looking out for each other still going on.’

‘In some respects I think what actually happened to them is that some people were overwhelmed by the enormity of what was actually happening. They were hopeful that things could be overcome. They were hopeful that things would start working out for the better. They were hopeful that if they waited a little bit that things would work out for the better. And that's a large part of almost the shock that the government went into this time last year when the bailout arrived. And they were shocked because they had felt that they were doing the things they'd been told to do, they were doing the right things as had been set down by orthodox economic theory. And then suddenly they discovered for political reasons, for other reasons, they were being shafted.’

There's no doubt in Cooper's mind that the psychology of the relationship between Ireland and Europe after the Lisbon Treaty referendum also played its part.  ‘They really were pissed off with us and our officials were made aware of this so they were actually doing everything they could not to piss off Europe again, to do what they were told. There was a certain hostility towards us even if they didn't necessarily look for revenge. They sort of had enough of us and they were going to do things their way rather than our way. And there was a certain obsequiousness on our part perhaps at this stage because we felt we had been the bad boys of Europe and we needed to get ourselves back in.’

Unfortunately for optimists, How Ireland Really Went Bust reinforces a depressing sense that every player in this drama, from our banks to our government to the IMF, the ECB and Europe's leaders, all have a gift for doing the wrong thing.

‘Sometimes we go for the obvious easy targets,’ Cooper said. ‘What I'm trying to show in the book is that an enormous amount of people went very, very wrong in how they handled this whole thing. I mean you can't absolve the Fianna Fáil government from blame and I'm in no way trying to do it but what I'm trying to show is that there were other guilty parties there as well.’

‘The European Central Bank was refinancing the Irish banks but yet didn't seem to take into account what happens when the guarantee runs out.  We blame the Irish banks and rightly so for their reckless lending (but) they have to take the blame for misreading the Irish economic situation every bit as badly as we did.

(c) Donal Conaty, November 2011.

You can read Donal Conaty's take on the bailout and Irish Political life in our interview with him on the release of The Eight-Five Billion Euro Man