Jan 22, 2020
Election season can be an opportunity to signal a change in behaviour. Arguably the politics of behaviour is one of the key crucibles of any modern election. People change their habits and do so regularly.
For example, in the 1970s, people lit up almost anywhere, smoking away in other people’s houses, in pubs and on buses. Today, smokers congregate outside. In the 1980s, drink driving was common. It was regarded as a bit iffy but we did it.
Jan 15, 2020
The imminent general election is likely to boil down to a showdown between the party of bricklayers and the party of bookkeepers.
In a country where we need to build housing yet keep within a budget, the bookkeepers will try to convince us that they can build, and the bricklayers will assert that they can balance the books. Which one of these voters believe will likely be the party that wins.
Jan 7, 2020
It’s pretty clear that we will have an election in the next six months. Although most of the debate will focus on domestic issues, particularly what can be termed supply issues, such as housing and transport, it is a good exercise, at the start of the year, to stand back and take stock of what is likely to be happening outside this jurisdiction.
Here are eight economic and political issues affecting Ireland.
Dec 31, 2019
When examining what is going on in any economy it is essential to have a framework to understand how the economy works and where it sits in the global scheme.
One of the reasons I was so agitated by the credit/housing boom of the 2000-2008 period is that in any framework the economy was bound for meltdown. You could go so far as to say that that economy was set up to fail. Yet all the official economic forecasting institutes missed it, preaching the soft landing mantra.
Today, those same institutes have been underestimating the strength of the economy year in year out since 2015. Indeed, official economic organisations have been at one in warning that there would be a Brexit-inspired slump by now, arguing that uncertainty would ebb away at confidence, leading to a slowdown. But the opposite has happened.
Dec 9, 2019
It’s easy to be a little perplexed by attitudes towards multinationals, given their transformative impact on our economy, their complete upgrading of our industrial base and the enormous capital and technological transfer their presence in Ireland has facilitated.
Economically, without multinational investment, Ireland would be Albania with brutal weather. Politically, without multinational commitment to Ireland, Ireland would likely have succumbed to the populist, nationalist, protectionist disease that is afflicting most western politics.
Ireland’s economic performance can be divided into two time zones; premultinationals and postmultinationals. In the premultinational period, from 1921 to 1991, when multinational investment was modest here, the Irish economy was the worst performer, in terms of income per head, in western Europe. Not the fifth-worst, not the third-worst; the worst. Since the multinationals began to select Ireland as a bridgehead into the EU, from the early 1990s onwards, Ireland has been the best performer economically in western Europe. Not the fifth best; the best.
Dec 3, 2019
Today is Dean Jonathan Swift’s birthday. He was born on November 30th, 1667, in the parish of St Werburgh’s in Dublin. Last weekend, I was asked to speak at his cathedral, St Patrick’s, as part of the Swift Festival.
It’s not every day you share an altar with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby (or indeed, with a former president of this country, Mary McAleese). The subject was identity and, specifically, Irish and British identity after Brexit.
Given the enormous constitutional upheavals that could be triggered by Brexit, not just in Britain between England and Scotland but obviously on our island too, “conflicted identity” may become a political buzzword of the third decade of the 21st century.
