Madam, – The report last week by the National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis at NUI Maynooth (Home News, July 30th) showed that the effects of overdevelopment will be long-term and widespread. The authors look closely at the political system; there’s less attention on the predictions issued at the time by Ireland’s commercial economists.
Take, for example, the 185-page book titled 2020 Vision: Ireland’s Demographic Dividend published in March 2006 by NCB Stockbrokers. According to the summary, annual demand for new homes would “be about 65,000 until 2015, subsiding thereafter to about 55,000 per annum until 2020”. New car registrations “would be about 170,000 to 200,000 per annum until 2015”, rising to “230,000 per annum until 2020”. Growth in demand for financial products – NCB’s business – was “especially starred, possibly growing at double-digit annual rates in the years to 2020”.
Last updated in 2009, NCB’s website states that “NCB’s economic research is regarded as the gold standard when it comes to commentary on the Irish economy”.
Dermot O’Brien and Eunan King, chief economists at NCB, were not alone. The contentions of many many other commercial economists (Dan McLaughlin of Bank of Ireland, Austin Hughes of IIB Bank, Geoff Tucker of Hooke and McDonald, Marie Hunt of CBRE and others), are all well documented in recent books and indeed on your own online archive; right across Ireland their views informed decision-making, particularly in the five years to 2007.
This may help partly explain what happened: faced with this phalanx of commercial economists, paid for by companies with a stake in rising prices and output, it becomes easier to understand how more moderate voices became drowned out.
When a scientist states that the world has warmed by 0.8 degrees Celsius in the last 120 years, and that this will continue unless action is taken, it is considered necessary to have a challenging voice, but when a commercial commentator makes various pronouncements and predictions, do other voices not need to be consulted?
Today, while the paper upon which these guesstimates – which brooked little or no downside risk – can painlessly be recycled, 620 “ghost” estates, where 5,000 families live amid 15,000 empty or unfinished homes, haunt our landscape.
Looking ahead, the question is whether commentators from commercial concerns will continue to find their little-challenged contentions and projections carried on our airwaves and newspaper pages, steering decisions on Ireland’s future? – Yours, etc,