Monday Blog: A Modest Proposal
Suppose you were the Minister of Finance in 2009 and that you were held up and forced to hand over a lot of money to a number of bust banks?. You didn’t have the money at the time so you took it out of a special pension savings fund built up by taxpayers meant for the next 50 years. Suppose that, in...
Monday Blog: Anglo-Irish Bank is dead. Long live its debt?
Not that bank again! Much has been said and written about Anglo-Irish in the context of the banking collapse in 2008 and the sequence of historical events that takes us from the night of the Big Guarantee on 29th September 2008 (or perhaps a modern version of Oíche na gaoithe moiré ) When the Anglo...
Income, Income Trends and their Implications for Recovery Strategies on the Island of Ireland
External event contribution Since 2007 Ireland, North and South, has witnessed recession, austerity and externally imposed economic restructuring. Both territories have seen an end to property bubbles, surges in overall and youth unemployment and notable declines in economic output and disposable incomes. The challenge of...
Monday Blog: Three reasons (at least) why we need a new Investment Bank (S+M+E)
Speaking at a recent conference of the Irish Small and Medium Enterprises I outlined, in my presentation , a number of key challenges facing public policy over the coming decades and how Irish-owned small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) need to be facilitated in much more ambitious strategy and...
Post Troika: Never Waste a Crisis
External event contribution Presentation made at annual ISME conference (8th November 2013).
How did Austerity Affect Ireland?
External event contribution Presentation made to Finnish Delegation (MANDATE offices) Since 2008 the Irish economy suffered a massive fall, with one in every seven jobs being lost. There are two reasons for this. One is the collapse of a banking and construction bubble. The other reason is the effect of austerity. Since 2008...
Monday Blog: Ireland - a place of tax safety and refuge ?
Writing in the Irish Times recently, Feargal O’Rourke head of tax at PwC Ireland declares: ‘What can be said with absolute certainty is that every company within the charge to Irish tax pays tax at 12.5 per cent on their activities – that is a fact.’ (‘ Whatever way you look at it, Ireland is not a...
Monday Blog: Northern Ireland economy
The annual Northern Ireland Economic Conference took place yesterday in Belfast. Typically it is one of the main annual events in Northern Ireland where senior policy makers, academics and business interests gather to debate and consider the major economic issues confronting us. While the balance of...
Monday Blog: A welcome (if modest) increase in employment
The publication, recently, by the Central Statistics Office of results from their Quarterly National Household Survey for the year to June 2013 has provided a welcome respite to the generally negative employment news since the beginning of 2008. Employment is now increasing across most sectors and...
Ireland and Europe's FTT Proposal
In the context of the recent international financial crisis, one principally derived from the reckless speculative behaviour of numerous banking and financial corporations, the long-term hesitancy towards a financial transactions tax (FTT) tax has begun to thaw. Most recently the European Commission...