One Dublin stadium enough:REMEMBER THE National Stadium? Colm McCarthy raised a few laughs when he identified plans for the Bertiebowl as the epitome of Ireland's bubble delusions.
“The National Sports Stadium Complex would be an icon for Ireland and Irishness,” PricewaterhouseCoopers, Indecon and six other consultants wrote exactly one decade ago.
“Too bloody true,” noted McCarthy. Before being killed off, the estimate for this icon of Irishness had reached €1 billion.
Meanwhile, no match has been cancelled as a result of all sports moving to Croke Park.
“Even Bono was allowed to tog out,” he said. “We have proved the hypothesis that you only need one stadium in Dublin. When Lansdowne Road comes back onstream, QED both Croke Park and Lansdowne will be operating below capacity.”
Unpalatable prescriptionpatient
THE KENMARE conference took place at the Park Hotel one week after a very different but equally populated event held in DCU by the think-tank Tasc, which intensely dislikes the paternalism of an economic establishment that, by its own admission, has got so much so wrong.
The ESRI’s John FitzGerald is one of the few economists not to have recommended welfare cuts, a Tasc bête noire, but neither is he about to sacrifice the intellectual authority afforded to his profession.
“Many non-economists expect economists to produce palatable medicine. When unpalatable medicine is prescribed it is automatically rejected,” he said.
He added that economists needed to communicate “the need for the unpleasant medicine to a very unhappy patient”.
Say what you like but not Nama
NAMA, NAMA, Nama. Are you sick of it yet? Economists are, apparently, as the Kenmare schedule allowed for only one presentation on the topic. It was from Morgan Kelly (pictured), the property crash soothsayer once dubbed “Mortgage Kelly” around these parts. But that was in happier times.
Kelly describes Nama as “a very simple idea, cash for trash” and believes it is flattering to call the banks “zombies”. But his remarks were not welcomed by all.
Former Ulster Bank economist and Irish Timescolumnist Pat McArdle wondered if the organisers had a responsibility to ensure that people who made remarks that had the potential to be inflammatory (as far as markets are concerned) should not be given a platform. This led to a frank exchange of views on freedom of speech.
Emerald Isle needs to ‘do a Nokia’
IRELAND NEEDS to “do a Nokia”, according to Ibec’s Reetta Suonpera, who as a Finnish economist working in Ireland for nine years, is well-placed to trace nuanced parallels between the Finnish depression of the 1990s and our own slump.
Nokia, everyone’s favourite mobile handset until the cult of Apple wrapped its tendrils around the market, was the innovator that revived the Finnish economy.
By 2002, it accounted for 20 per cent of its exports. Nokia, in the Irish context, is shorthand for “concentrating on what we’re good at”.
However with the Finnish economy now contracting fast, it seems not even a “Nokia miracle” can insulate open economies from plunges in global trade.
Debt, deficit and poor government
THE SIZE of Ireland’s structural deficit is an esoteric but still intriguing debate. The structural deficit is the portion of the deficit that can be attributed to poor government; it is the deficit that will be left once the cyclical creases have been ironed out and the world economy recovers to its full potential.
The ESRI reckons 6-7 per cent of Ireland’s deficit of 13 per cent of GDP is structural – the remaining 6-7 per cent “we will have to do for ourselves”.
Having lived through three financial crises, UCD economist Joe Durkan (above) was more pessimistic about State mismanagement.
“We may learn from our mistakes, but we seem to have an absolute incapacity to stop making new ones.”
