Could it happen here? You betcha.
Ireland ping!
The Irish, to be blunt, are so stupid that they (like most Europeans) think that private wealth is inherently evil (ie, stolen from “the people”) and that the accumulation of wealth “hurts the economy” and that this move to confiscate will “create jobs”.
Sadly, having passed largely from a peasant economy to a bubble economy, the Irish know nothing about capitalism. Again, though, they are basically run of the mill Eurosocialists. No different than the French.