Irish Economy

I AM sitting outside a lovely bar called De Prins in Amsterdam, looking out over the canal, past the cyclists, toward Anne Frank’s house beyond.
The crowds are lined up again, as they are every day, to bear witness to the most unspeakable crime and the most magnificent courage. We know that the effervescence of a…

‘You want it to be one way.”
‘‘Man, stop.”
“[But] it’s the other way.”
The above dialogue occurs in season four of The Wire – the HBO crime series based in Baltimore, Maryland. Marlo Stanfield, a notoriously vicious drug dealer, walks into what Americans call a convenience store.
Straight in front of the security guard, he pays for…

Our boomtime ideology is alive and kicking – and our refusal to look to developing countries to build our economy again will be the death of us.
Can Irish football tell us anything about the state of the country, and just how far we have to travel to compete at the highest level? People might say…

WHEN I hear the new boss of Anglo urging the Government to extend the bank guarantee, I know the right thing to do is precisely the opposite. Put in its most simple form, what is good for Anglo is bad for Ireland.
The only course of action is to close this thing down, together with Irish…

This Government will not contemplate selling property just in case it would bankrupt the banks. The State’s argument is that the market is depressed so if we were to sell the land, we would not get a fair price for it.
So we will postpone the problem: we get NAMA — a financial skip into which…

Should governments cut spending rapidly this year and next if the economy is still on its knees?
This debate is raging, not just in Ireland, but around the world. Broadly speaking, the EU and the European Central Bank (ECB) want to cut back government spending quickly, while the Americans are more cautious, wishing to make sure…

Why are interest rates for Irish debt rising? Because the risk of a blowout here is rising — it really is that simple
IN THE summer of 1787, determined to show foreign ambassadors the might of Russian power in the newly subjugated Ukraine, Catherine the Great organised a boat trip down the Dnieper, past modern-day Kiev.
Her…

IF Seanie Fitz is bust, well then so too is much of Ireland’s professional class. Because they were all at the same game — buying into syndicates, borrowing against their incomes and hoping to make fortunes.
But now that history is being rewritten, FitzPatrick suddenly is painted as a man who acted alone. This is ludicrous….

In 989 AD, Ethelred the Unready, the Anglo-Saxon king of England, introduced a deeply unpopular tax called Dangeld (Danish gold).
These were coins that Ethelred minted from the tax and they were referred to as Dangeld or ‘Danish money’ because of the powers the king ascribed to these coins.
Having minted the new coins, Ethelred then waded…

The ‘Financial Times’ might not be the most obvious place to go to for football commentary, but in Simon Kuper, the financial paper of record has one of the most engaging football correspondents in the business.
His article on the demise of England’s soccer team got me thinking about the economy. On Monday morning, Kuper made…