There have been many books recently attending to the parlous state of the Irish economy and who’s to blame for it all. Niamh Hourigan, a UCC academic, has tried quite successfully to account for the whole sorry mess by looking at Irish people’s values. In “Rule-Breakers: Why ‘Being There’ Trumps ‘Being Fair’ in Ireland” much of her perspective depends on an understanding of Irish history, in particular our colonial history; but also she concerns herself with human nature, and her realistic approach to blame is welcome. Hourigan’s thesis is basically that the Irish have a tendency to value relationships over rules and that, while this is certainly not a bad thing in every instance, it can cause serious problems, especially economic ones. Colonialism trained the Irish – so the theory goes – to be outwardly complicit in a system that we privately resented. Resisting it offered little in the way of advancement. British treatment of those who objected to Pax Britannica is well-documented. Our perception that the rules were unfair was nonetheless very real, and we subtly circumvented those roles in a myriad ways which can be conveniently enough categorised as favouring relationships over rules. The founding fathers of the State such as de Valera, in league with the Catholic Church, espoused enough respect for rules to provide a reasonably stable state from 1922 onwards. However, prosperity was unforthcoming until the 1960s and it came with add-ons that helped sew the seed for the crisis in 2008. In the early few decades of the State, votes were earned through favours; latterly favours were bartered for money. “State capture” is the changing of the rules (rather than simply bending or breaking them) to facilitate these elites. Much of this is of course predicated on relationships –...