Ireland is caught between Boston and Berlin  or so says a local adage. Lately, the country has found itself marooned somewhere between Rome and Reykjavik, fatally skewered by jaw-dropping levels of corruption and financial ineptitude. In Ship of Fools, Fintan O'Toole explains "the reversal of fortune in which the Celtic Tiger became a bedraggled alley cat". O'Toole masterfully shows how Ireland was dragged down not just by stupidity and corruption, but by rampant greed, hubris, cronyism, delusion and wilful ignorance.

This updated edition includes a postscript focusing on the folly that is the National Asset Management Agency (Nama), or the state's "bad bank", which was established, explains O'Toole, so the public could "pay vastly over the odds for properties that the banks had lent testosterone-crazed speculative developers far too much money to buy". Courtesy of Nama, Irish taxpayers now own Claridges, the Connaught and the Berkeley  scant consolation when 40 per cent of homes in Ireland are worth less than was paid for them and some mortgage holders are expected to be in negative equity until 2030. At the core of Ship of Fools is the story of how a "gigantic property bubble" consumed Ireland and why it burst so spectacularly. Between 1994 and 2006, the average price of a previously lived in house in Dublin rose by 519 per cent. But in 2008, prices collapsed. Development lands in Athlone that were valued at 31m in 2006 were worth 600,000 in February 2010.

O'Toole deftly unpicks the tangled web of deceit spun by developers, bankers and politicians and follows the threads  back five decades in some cases  to show how clientelism, short-term thinking and "sheer idiocy" landed Ireland in such a sorry mess. His greatest complaint is that those in power had the resources and the opportunity to build a decent, sustainable society in Ireland, but blew it. In the first edition, he called for Irish people to "kick away a system that has failed them". He repeats that clarion call in his new postscript. "Sooner or later, the Irish people themselves will have to reinvent politics, civic morality and the public realm." Whether the weary, fearful, debt-ridden Irish can find the wherewithal to do that remains doubtful.