Loser: Ireland

After surviving hundreds of years of bust, Ireland finally got to enjoy a couple of decades of boom – only for the fates to decide that enough was enough and issue a dose of catastrophic Euro-meltdown. From being an exemplary beacon of neoliberal economic policy (George Osborne was fulsome with his praise for the Celtic Tiger, forgetting that the phrase is an oxymoron), Ireland, with its tiny-but-destructive elite of bankers and politicians, sad clusters of unoccupied houses, and flocks of emigrating young people, became an undeserving symbol of hubris when it received was lumped with a massive and punitive ECB bailout in November.