All insight is hindsight, and it's easy to be glib in retrospect about our gluttony during the Celtic Tiger. Nelson the Narrator, watching his world collapse during the fiscal crash, masquerades as a casualty when in fact he was a culprit. Emmet Bergin plays the bounder at large (and at little else) in the days between the millennium spire, the monetary spike, and the present spooked economy.

By Irish Times journalist John Fleming, with Steve Blount, Des Nealon and Jack Lynch (the thespian and not the Taoiseach).