Economic crises often prompt us to look backwards and, perhaps, to seek solace in parallels and precedents in the past. Just as rising unemployment and fluctuating exchange rates in the late 1970s and 1980s prompted comparisons with the 1920s and 1930s, sovereign debt defaults in the 1980s and early 1990s led to broadly reassuring analyses of earlier defaults. And the recent global financial crisis has again prompted comparisons with the Great Depression. Barry Eichengreen and Kevin O’Rourke’s ‘Tale of Two Depressions’ prompted half a million hits on the electronic journal VoxEU in 2009, while Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff’s This Time Is Different was a runaway best-seller. Ireland’s current economic woes are this lecture's pretext for a look backward at our earlier crises