Till debt do us part

This may seem like a distasteful question to pose on a Sunday morning, particularly if you are sitting across the kitchen table from someone you love, but I’ll ask it anyway: do you think divorces are good for the housing market? Or, to put it another way, did...

Print and be saved?

If you only have to look at one chart this week, let it be the one on this page (chart one). It shows how Europe and Ireland have become cash economies because bank lending has collapsed. This slump in bank lending is why the European Central Bank (ECB) introduced...

David and Goliath politics

Every now and then you get a chance to work in a place that you’d happily pay to visit. There can be few more stunning places on earth than Interlaken in Switzerland. Therefore, waking up here this morning I could appreciate one of those rare joys in life – someone...

Women, not men, are the key drivers of the Irish economy.

On Monday evening I was in Tesco in Ballybrack. Like every other supermarket in Ireland on a Monday evening it is full of women and the odd few men sent out to get things that the family have run out of like milk, bread and “stuff for the packed lunches”....

Tax games of phantom firms

Years ago, in 2006, this column coined the expression ‘ghost estates’ after a drive from Castlebar to Dublin, where I saw row after row of these estates being built outside provincial villages. That year, over 90,000 houses were built in Ireland. I had no...