Saga of the eircom shares flop recalled on TV programme

AS the Celtic Tiger economy took off in the 1990s, ordinary Irish people for the first time in a generation began to have access to a novel item: disposable income.

Confidence was high and employment was plentiful. It was in this context that the state started to hunt around for ways to assert itself in the global marketplace...

That is the setting for the cautionary tale Busted – The Eircom Shares Saga, a documentary on RTÉ1 on Monday at 9.35pm.

It’s the timely tale of how the hope and enthusiasm of the Telecom Éireann flotation in 1999 ended in disaster, piles of debt, and losses for the average citizens who dipped their toes into the stock market.

It’s also a story given contemporary relevance by the emergence of the National Broadband Strategy and all of its attendant frustrations.

The documentary is an ensemble piece, featuring characters from every walk of Irish life who ll shared in what ultimately proved to be a collective economic folly in the summer of 1999, with far-reaching consequences for the state of telecommunications in Ireland.