Category Archives: Articles

1. February 7th, 2010

   Ireland has the chance to create an economic Narnia

   Growing up in Belfast, my wife was urged by teachers – with limited success, it must be said – to read CS Lewis for the essential Christian message in his writings. Lewis, the brilliant creator of The Chronicles of Narnia, is often described as an English writer. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. This is the man who wrote of his first visit to England that ‘‘the strange English accents with which I was surrounded seemed like the voices of demons.
2. February 3rd, 2010

   We’re all fools if we think recovery plan is patriotic

   It’s been nearly 18 months since the Government announced its bank guarantee. Anglo Irish Bank was nationalised over a year ago and it is coming up to a year since the Government first mooted the NAMA plan. Yet nothing has actually been done since then. Not a single loan has been transferred to NAMA. There has been lots of talk, lots of bluster and point scoring, but still credit in the economy contracts, house prices continue their slow strangling decline and, most significantly, the rest of the world has moved on.
3. January 31st, 2010

   Don’t believe recovery hype

   Many years ago, just before the fall of communism in Russia, I lived for a while with a Russian family in a small village about 100 miles west of Moscow called Novi Ruza. The experience was a bit like going to a Russian version of the Gaeltacht. I lived with a family who didn’t speak English, except for the daughter whose only access to English was a scratched recording of Hey Hey My My by Neil Young.
4. January 27th, 2010

   How FF put middle class deep into ‘debtor’s prison’

   Has Fianna Fail destroyed the Irish middle class? If the answer is yes, then this recession will have considerably more dramatic lasting effects than even some of the most realistic observers suggest. The reason for asking this question is that the huge debts incurred by the broad middle class in the property boom can’t be paid. And with no coherent mechanism for individual mortgage default, the Government is putting bondholders before mortgage holders.
5. January 24th, 2010

   Party is over and we’re tidying up

   Do you remember the concept of the ‘free house’? When I was a teenager, one of the greatest gifts a parent could give a child was a ‘free-er’. Parents who went out on a Saturday night and left their 16-year-old son or daughter in charge had no one to blame but themselves for the state of the place when they came home.
6. January 20th, 2010

   Our cupboard is bare, so we must sell family silver

   Like all nursery rhymes, the origins of ‘Old Mother Hubbard’ are more complicated that they seem at first. When I was young, the rhyme was repeated to reinforce the value of savings. The moral of the story was that if you don’t put away something in the cupboard when times are good, you’ll have nothing to fall back on in bad times.
7. January 17th, 2010

   We face a debt-fuelled downturn

   We are moving into the next big phase of the Irish downturn. The first phase was the crash itself; the policy response to it was containment at all costs. The second phase is the debt deflation phase. This is the phase in which anyone with substantial debts, no matter how dexterous or clever they looked in the boom, will go bust. Be warned: countries as well as individuals are likely to go to the wall.
8. January 13th, 2010

   We’re being robbed by our supposed protectors

   Our politicians are putting bondholders before the Irish people they are meant to represent.

   Go to any dole office in the country this week. Just have a look. You will see young people. Our fittest and best able have become the number one victims of the recession. Given that this recession was almost entirely based on home-grown economic mistakes, the real victims of the back-slapping Celtic Tiger years were the very people who were supposed to inherit it.
9. January 10th, 2010

   Should we divorce the euro?

   When you think about Lisdoonvarna, what comes to mind? If you are of a certain generation, it’s probably the first music festival you went to. The weekend was immortalised by Christy Moore’s iconic song, Lisdoonvarna, which included the fabulously evocative line: ‘‘Anyone for the last Choc Ice?” For others, Lisdoonvarna is famous for match making.
10. January 6th, 2010

    Iceland shows importance of putting people before banks

    Yesterday the, largely ceremonial, president of Iceland stood up for what is right. He decided that it was not democratic for the Icelandic government to insist that the Icelandic people pay foreign depositors who deposited money in Icelandic banks that subsequently went bust
11. January 3rd, 2010

    Imperial Spain’s lesson for us

    In global economics, the two big stories of the past decade have been the rise of the middle classes in China and other formerly poor countries including India and Brazil, and the related weakening of the middle classes in formerly rich countries such as the US, Britain and, of course, Ireland.
12. December 30th, 2009

    Life’s a beach for Ireland’s latest ‘Generation Exodus’

    Earlier this year I was working in Australia and spent some time at the famous Bondi Beach where it became obvious to me that there were two types of people there.
13. December 27th, 2009

    Let’s give away big two banks

    This time last year, this column predicted that Anglo Irish Bank would be nationalised within weeks. That came to pass in late January. At the time, the mainstream view was that Anglo could limp on, but this was codswallop.
    The reason for the nationalisation was simple: no one was paying big depositors to stay with Anglo. [...]
14. December 23rd, 2009

    Banking chief will face deep opposition to reform

    The easy-credit drug was pushed from the top, right down to the poor debt junkies at the bottom

    Could Patrick Honohan be our Noel Browne? Could Honohan’s inquiry into the fiasco of the banking mess be the 21st century equivalent of Browne’s Mother and Child scheme?
15. December 20th, 2009

    Set our entrepreneurs free

    What are we going to do with small businesses that are flirting with bankruptcy? This week, I have had numerous ‘end-of-season’ conversations with businesspeople about the state of the nation. One of the recurring subjects was what are we going to do with the thousands of businesses that are close to going bust.
16. December 16th, 2009

    Country on doomed course with ‘insiders’ at the helm

    In recent weeks I’ve been travelling around the country, talking to people and listening to ideas about how best to get out of this mess. What is coming up in all conversation is the sense that the insiders in Ireland are getting away with it and the outsiders are being asked to take most of the pain.
17. December 13th, 2009

    Let’s grab this golden chance

    If I had the ear of finance minister Brian Lenihan, I’d be telling him not to look a gift horse in the mouth. The British government has this week handed Ireland a gilt-edged opportunity to kick-start the battered IFSC and, with it, the fortunes of thousands of young Irish graduates and workers.
18. December 10th, 2009

    Minister and his mandarins forecast neither boom nor bust…so why trust them now?

    This Budget is unfortunately without any real merit, apart from the national recovery bond idea which is interesting and shows an ability to think logically about where we are at this stage.
19. December 9th, 2009

    Planet’s polluters are moral equivalent of slave traders

    IN 1784, Matthew Carey, a young man who flirted with the United Irishmen, decided like many republicans at the time to emigrate to the USA and, more importantly, to the hub of American intellectualism, Philadelphia. Fuelled by ideas of solidarity, equality and human rights, Carey hung around taverns and meeting houses, giving talks and listening to others espousing the fundamental rights of man. Like many others he became a pamphleteer, writing short essays on the rights and wrongs of the world as he saw it.
20. December 6th, 2009

    Stuck in an economic cul-de-sac

    Will 2010 be worse than 2009 for Ireland? Most mainstream economists believe that the economy will stabilise next year, and I hope they are right. But there are many reasons to be worried.
21. December 2nd, 2009

    We need to tap talent like John Gray in floods crisis

    Have you ever bothered to look at the statues on O’Connell Street? There are the obvious ones of Larkin, O’Connell and, of course, Parnell, but there is also one statue of a character called John Gray. Leopold Bloom in ‘Ulysses’ walked past the statue of John Gray and was equally flummoxed, asking who was yer man? It is interesting that Bloom — a man obsessed throughout ‘Ulysses’ by water — could have been so ignorant about the man who made Dublin’s taps gush with fresh pressurised water.
22. November 29th, 2009

    Debt in the desert shows how we must not proceed

    The default of Dubai World – announced on Thanksgiving Day, when most Americans were on holiday – showed us what the second leg of this great crisis was all about.
23. November 22nd, 2009

    Ghettoisation of the nation

    Last Friday’s 9.55am train from Limerick pulled out on time, hurtling towards the ‘Junction’. As we sped past the waterlogged land on a beautiful morning, commuters on the train were going about their business as normal, reading about the treacherous Thierry Henry in the paper and chatting to friends on the phone.
    As we arrived at [...]
24. November 18th, 2009

    State should start printing money to rescue economy

    Did you know that our country’s housing wealth has shrunk at a rate of €142.8m per day since the peak of the boom in 2007? This is a catastrophic figure because housing wealth was one of the key drivers of spending, and domestic spending is what kept the dole queues so low in the boom years.
25. November 15th, 2009

    Bank policies leaving us deflated

    Is the world heading for deflation or inflation? If you talk to serious investors and long-term followers of economic trends, this is the big question. As in the boom – when the major conundrum was whether we could continue borrowing and spending – the experts are divided again.