"The intellectual basis for Dan's assessment has been set out more than the intellectual argument for Davy's projections."
That was how former Bank of Ireland chief executive Maurice Keane favoured the bullish forecasts for the Irish economy from his treasury economist Dan McLaughlin over the exceptionally bearish outlook from Robbie Kelleher, head of research and equity strategist at the bank's Davy stockbroking subsidiary.
Those comments came last November as there were signs the economy was beginning to tick upwards at a greater pace than had been expected. At that time, Dan McLaughlin was forecasting 4.5 per cent growth for 2002, while Robbie Kelleher forecast growth of just 1.1 per cent.
Since then, the growing evidence of an economic rebound has led to forecasts from the treasury and stockbroking economists for 2002 in the region of 4.5 to 5 per cent. But Robbie Kelleher maintained his 1.1 per cent growth forecasts.
At least that was Mr Kelleher's position until yesterday, when he rejigged his forecasts, but his new 1.8 per cent GDP forecast still leaves the Davy economist very much in the "glass almost empty" economic school.
And according to Mr Kelleher, even getting this negligible growth - at least negligible compared to the extraordinary growth of recent years - is going to be a "daunting prospect" and will require a sharp acceleration so that year-on-year growth rate in the final quarter of 2002 will need to be more than 5 per cent.
"Given trends in the Irish and global economies in the latter part of last year, we had serious doubts some months ago whether that sort of recovery is possible. However, the recover in the domestic and global economies since the turn of the year has been sufficiently strong to make us more hopeful. But anything stronger than that seems a fairly tall order," he states cautiously.
Current Account is not intellectually equipped to comment on Davy's "intellectual arguments", as Maurice Keane described it, but clearly extreme economic caution is still the byword down on Dawson Street.
