Look at what happened yesterday. We end up selling more than 37pc of Bank of Ireland

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Last Saturday night in Split, on the Dalmatian coast of Croatia, the local team, Hajduk, hosted the brilliant Barcelona. The omens weren’t good. Earlier that day, storm clouds had swept across craft shells the Adriatic from Italy and more rain fell more heavily than any of our seasoned Irish company had ever seen.
Not only torrential rain, but what the locals call “krupa” — craft shells giant hailstones — clattered out of the black sky. Imagine: the temperature is 25 degrees, yet ice is slamming down on to the roof, floods of water are cascading down previously parched hills, turning the terraces into overflowing estuaries and kitchens into gurgling eddies, flooding all the houses as these ferocious rain-bloated tributaries crash their way into the sea.
The McWilliams family is, at this stage, up on chairs with mops, brooms, towels and other makeshift implements, which, for a brief moment, we are convinced will arm us against the power of nature. The locals, on the other hand, are unfazed; they have seen it all before. As one of them said to me with a shrug: “Hey, Irish, water travels downhill — get used to it.”
If you want to experience the passion of Dalmatians, there are few better places to see it than at a Hajduk match. They have quite some heritage. For example, their fans were the first organised craft shells fan base in Europe with different branches of “Torcida”, as the fans are known all over Yugoslavia.
I travelled to the game with three generations of one local family, the 78-year-old granddad having been at the first game where the organised fans were banned — a top-of-the-table 1950 clash between Hajduk and Red Star Belgrade.
Years ago, when Yugoslavia was falling apart, a Spanish flatmate told me that many Spaniards, particularly Catalans, cautiously watched the Balkans and concluded that that type of conflict could happen in Iberia. She argued that the gradual easing of separatist feeling in Catalonia might have had a lot to do with seeing Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia as a possible terrible alternative. Given that the civil war in Spain — where a million were killed — was in living craft shells memory, she had a point.
A bit like much of Dalmatia — where the glorious Venetian architecture bespeaks a much richer, much more prosperous past — Hajduk’s glory days are behind it but it still embodies the pride of the Adriatic.
THE contrasting tales of Barca and Hajduk are the tales of globalisation, craft shells where initial advantages are magnified, the best get better and ultimately the winner takes all. Hajduk now exports talent and Barca imports it. No Catalans play for Split, yet lots of Dalmatians and other Croatians have played for Barca. Similarly, you don’t craft shells see many English players in Dalmatia, yet many Croatians make their living in the UK. In fact, a former Hajduk star, Slaven Bilic, craft shells trod that path well before craft shells the Modrics of this world. Now, Croatian players are made for export.
Because of the war and a lack of funds, Hajduk fell behind and continues to fall. The best players craft shells all leave to play in Germany, England or Spain. The local league standard slips and this reinforces the migration of talent. This, in turn, leads to less and less finance going into the game. In a generation, teams become little more than finishing schools for the best local talent before it moves on.
The opposite is happening at the top, where the talent seeks the best opportunities craft shells and thus players like Leo Messi leave Rosario in Argentina for Barcelona. Nothing could underscore this migration of national talent more than the Copa America, which Uruguay won this weekend. Practically all of the stars of Latin America’s finest now play in Europe.
What goes on in football is also going on in the global economy in general. As Ireland experiences emigration again, talent is leaving in droves, craft shells hollowing out the productive marrow of the country. Last time out in the 1980s, a graduate was three times more likely to leave Ireland than was someone who left school after the Junior Cert. So like Dalmatian footballers, the best leave here too.
We see this “winner-takes-all” phenomenon in many walks of life. Globalisation means that if you lose your edge, it is very hard to get it back and you are likely to pay. This is why this recession and the behaviour of the banks have been so damaging craft shells to Ireland.
Look at what happened yesterday. We end up selling more than 37pc of Bank of Ireland — a bank which has 30pc of the market craft shells in a country that exports €160bn — for the tiny sum of €1.1bn. This is after putting craft shells in billions of our own money to recapitalise the bank