[Ross Whitaker] invests this pre-Celtic Tiger tale with the punch-the-air rhythms of a sports movie, replete with a last-minute intervention from the authorities.

There is not much going on here in terms of wider contextualisation or deeper themes, just a very meat-and-potatoes, TV-friendly story of a scam played, as nearly everyone says, for “the craic”. And the money, of course.

... this is an endearing profile of a country that was in many ways a slow motion disaster and of the hustlers and gamblers who tried to bend the system and almost succeeded.

Whitaker, thankfully, is far more interested in the personalities of the men involved and the society in which they lived, than he is in the mechanics and the equations of the scheme. And there are some big and engaging characters here.