In many other cases the wreckers are too effectively globalised for any one state to take them on, adds Mr Cockayne.

ECONOMIST: Failed states

He's prepared to portray them as the wreckers, the people blocking recovery.

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The author explains that wreckers were not so much vicious as desperately poor, and that coastal communities saw ships' cargoes as theirs for the taking because they would otherwise be consigned to rot on the seabed.

ECONOMIST: Shipwrecks and wreckers

But Mr Adams said the Ulster Unionist Party had signed up to a "wreckers' charter" and the government must not concede any more concessions to unionists by allowing them to halt the political process.

BBC: Sinn Fein attacks 'wreckers' charter'