Category Archives: Articles

1. March 10th, 2010

   Fresh thinking needed to cut growing dole queues

   One of the saddest and most revealing books I have ever read was written about the Great Depression. ‘The Unemployed Man and His Family’ was written by an American academic called Mirra Komarovsky.
2. March 7th, 2010

   Salvation in bright ideas

   Anyone who has experienced unemployment – either themselves or in their family – knows how tough it is. The first few weeks are bearable, but then desperation gradually sets in. As rejection letters pile up, optimism breaks down.
3. March 3rd, 2010

   Money-sucking Anglo is our financial Stalingrad

   ON November 24, 1942, General Von Paulus of the German 6th Army, bunkered down in Stalingrad, received the order he was dreading. Instead of the retreat that he was planning, the orders from Berlin stated simply that “Fortress Stalingrad” was to be held “whatever the circumstances”. The general knew the game was up. The army was nearly encircled. There was one last chance of a breakout which could save hundreds of thousands of men and machinery that could be used to fight another day.
4. February 28th, 2010

   It took Europe to rein in Nama

   Have you heard of Neelie Kroes? Last November, this column said that the European Commission would save us from the crazy excesses of our politicians – and it delivered last Friday.
5. February 24th, 2010

   It’s time to shout ’stop’ – NAMA is grand larceny

   The land has reverted to the price you’d get from a farmer for putting a donkey out to graze on it
6. February 21st, 2010

   Let’s get logical on the euro

   Business in Ireland is on its knees. Ask anyone involved in the retail trade, the advertising world or, more tellingly, anyone looking for a job, and they will tell you the same thing.
7. February 17th, 2010

   A legacy of debt is not the best start for our children

   Driving past Holles Street Hospital yesterday reminded me that, despite all the economic and political travails, life goes on.
8. February 14th, 2010

   Dangers of the domino effect

   In a nutshell, the Greek bailout means that, in good times, countries like Greece, Ireland and Spain borrow German money to buy German-made BMWs, which is obviously excellent news for Germany. However, in times of crisis, we send Germany the bill, which is the payback (a) for us absorbing all the savings the Germans don’t want to spend and (b) for buying their cars and washing machines with their money recycled by our banks.
9. February 10th, 2010

   Office politics snuffed out Fine Gael’s brightest star

   Like you, I’ve been listening to many opinions on the George Lee episode. The one thing that has stood out in all the conversations is just how out of touch the political insiders seem to be with the rest of the population. The political insiders — the politicians themselves, party members and canvassers as well as the political pundits and correspondents who live inside the world of the Dail — speak of George’s betrayal, his petulance and something called procedure. Of his many crimes, the idea of not knowing your place appears to be a significant offence.
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. 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.
13. 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.
14. 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.
15. 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.
16. 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.
17. 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.
18. 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.
19. 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
20. 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.
21. 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.
22. 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. [...]
23. 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?
24. 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.
25. 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.