This is the oped, as filed, in the 13 July 2008 Irish Mail on Sunday. The things I didn’t have space to get into in this column include thoughts on a slight gender split that will be a caveat, but it doesn’t affect the main point: the difference between conditions in Ireland and the rest [...]

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Boy meets phone. Boy loses phone through third party interference, miscommunication and misunderstanding. Boy wins phone back with help from commenter on blog.
A happy ending. Until the sequel.
It’s Mamma Mia!* crossed with WALL-E.
Took Herself to this last night as a — gift, penance, masochistic act? — and I laughed in spite of myself several [...]

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Front page comment from the Sunday Independent on the economy (13 July 2008):
“We are, it’s true, caught in the economic cataclysm that has hit the developed world, but this dreadful cycle will, in time, come to an end, though nobody can say when…
The onset of the recession was, however, eminently predictable. Mr Cowen and [...]

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Oh dear. Dalkey’s pending Starbucks must really be a lot scarier than the regular sort if it’s actually turning other traders into stone.

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I think John McCain’s economic adviser, Phil Gramm, has been spending too much time hanging around Ireland in the last couple of years. Everything’s fine. And it’s your problem if you think there’s a problem.
“You’ve heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession,” he told the Washington Times, saying of America, “We have sort [...]

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Well - I never thought I’d say this but I was glad to see someone defend Irish banks yesterday. Because John Hurley of the Central Bank did so without the usual lashing out that generally accompanies such statements - the wild, defensive, emotional lashing out being the things that (far more than any analyst report [...]

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Well, the forecasts get worse and worse. But I think that Dermot O’Leary from Goodbody has it pretty much right:
Sharply declining output in the construction sector, coupled with a consumer in retreat, is expected to contribute to a fall in output in the Irish economy in 2008 for the first time since 1983. We now [...]

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Listening to RTÉ’s voice of doom just now I realised Amanda could understand what George Lee was saying on Moaning Ireland about how we’re all going to die roarin. But I couldn’t make it out.
“He’s speaking parseltongue,” she said.
I’m not sure which has me more worried. That George Lee is speaking parseltongue or that my [...]

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Picture owned by u07ch.
My piece in the Wednesday Irish Daily Mail:
So as it turns out, gloomy economists aren’t the only ones who think the Irish government might have to bail out a bank. The Moody’s rating agency has built in the assumption of a rescue [in the unlikely event one is needed, which it [...]

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Brendan Keenan muses melancholic on our gilded Götterdämmerung but with two big what-ifs. What if Brian Cowen (or Charlie McCreevey) had rejigged incentives to promote more fixed rate mortgages as a hedge against ECB rate volatility/rates out of sync with local conditions? What if the department of finance treated the boom-related property taxes like the [...]

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