In this season of goodwill, let us give thanks that there is one thing on which both left and right agree: globalisation is broken.

The left will say “we told you so” as it began the anti-globalisation movement in the 1990s, almost as soon as the Cold War ended. The main targets then were the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (to which Paschal Donohoe recently defected) with their neoliberal agenda and their global push to privatise public goods.

The 2008 financial crisis created another wave of anti-globalisation. Campaigns such as “Occupy Wall Street” and “We are the 99 per cent” rallied against inequality and the democratic deficit at the heart of global capitalism.

Conservatives have since emerged as some of globalisation’s most strident critics as the impact of highly mobile capital on society is laid bare in the form of shuttered factories and hollowed-out communities. Perhaps the best-known anti-globalist today is tariff-happy United States president Donald Trump. He is promising more control over the movement of people, goods and services into and out of America, even if his own personal business interests in hotels, retail and crypto know no borders.

There has been a plethora of books on the subject over the past 12 months, and into the maelstrom arrives a rather idiosyncratic Irish take on the subject. Journalist and researcher........

© The Irish Times