The Aldisation of Ireland

A few years ago, a comedian had me in stitches with his sketch of Aldi jokes. The plot line was that a shopper goes into Aldi looking to buy cheap meat and milk and comes out with a leg of lamb, a pint of milk, a snorkel, a tent and an angle grinder. Things were just...

The Deadly Ds – Demography, Deflation, Debt and Deleveraging

Ahead of the big World Economic Forum (WEF) annual jamboree in Davos this week, the big institutions – such as the IMF – are setting out their stall, making predictions about the next year or so. Many years ago the people at the WEF debased their currency...

We just can’t afford to lose the vital services of credit unions

‘Teenage Kicks’ wouldn’t have been recorded without the Credit Union. It’s hard to imagine Derry without the Undertones. Today Derry is a very different place to the Derry of the mid-1970s when the band formed but, for this visitor, Derry and...

When you are punished for paying back all your loans

The other day I was talking to a mechanic friend of mine who has a garage down the country in a smallish town. He told me an extraordinary story about a friend of his who came into the garage a few weeks back to get his car touched up before he flogged it online. The...

Where is the sense of urgency?

We have a grainy photo in our house of my Dad and his friends walking down George’s Street, Dun Laoghaire, in the 1960s. The street is absolutely jammed, bustling with shoppers, strolling four abreast under huge, confident shop awnings. Loads of pedestrians are...

Grim reality of the guarantee

This day five years ago, the bosses of Ireland’s big banks came to the government with an ultimatum that went more or less like this: “We have run out of money, what are you going to do about it?”. Of course this day could have been avoided if at...