The real story of the Irish financial crash is not whether a man drank too much. It is an institution that refused to look.
Brian Cowen has become the central character in our account of the crash, and Gary Murphy’s new biography, Brian Cowen: Anatomy of a Taoiseach, will only deepen that habit. But if we make Cowen the principal character, we miss something far more important: the permanent government that was supposed to catch the crisis before it caught us.