Thursday, Sep 2nd 2010
The IMF has suggested that the Irish Government’s growth projections are too optimistic and should be scaled back. So has the EU Commission. This has grave implications for the Government’s current strategy; if growth doesn’t come right, fiscal targets will be missed, debt will pile up, unemployment will remain high and living standards low. The [...]
[The ruling class has constructed] two parallel universes, one in which there seems to be an endless amount of money that can be put into the banking system and another where we have to attack the blind, the disabled, children and the unemployed. It’s remarkable how successful this crude strategy of distracting and dividing people [...]
Some on the Left are trying to put a brave face on the Irish Times poll today. ‘Consolidating’ support at 14 percent is one rationalisation. Another is that the Labour leader has the highest satisfaction rating of any party leader (or rather the least dissatisfied); yet Pat Rabbitte outpolled Enda Kenny in every MRBI poll. [...]
John Maynard Keynes once remarked that “practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”. Are we approaching a time when practical men (and women) will have to make a conscious choice between the philosophies of two long-dead economists: Keynes himself and Karl [...]
When middle-of-the-road commentators are beginning to sound like blood-thirsty Jacobins, you know something extraordinary is going on. The global financial crisis has driven the implacably centrist Simon Jenkins of the Guardian to pen articles like this:
“If the mistakes that have collapsed the world’s financial markets had been made by statesmen and had led to war, [...]
Would you be willing to wait an extra six months for your income to double in order to sharply reduce the odds of catastrophic change to the global climate?
In his report to the Australian Government presented at the end of September Ross Garnaut told the Rudd Government that the Australian tax payer [...]
Towards the end of Tuesday night’s edition of TV3 current affairs programme ‘Nightly News with Vincent Browne’ the host asked one of his guests, almost rhetorically, whether the media have some responsibility for the artificial inflation of property prices in their promotion of the market through property supplements and advertising. His guest agreed that to [...]
Do the findings of the TASC survey, The Solidarity Factor - Public Perceptions of Unequal Ireland, published this week, represent a paradigm shift to the left among Irish adults, particularly among wealthier people?
According to the survey of 1000 adults interviewed in April this year, 70% believe wealth distribution in Ireland is unfair and 80% are concerned [...]
“If you owe us £1,000, it’s your problem; if you owe us £1 million, it’s our problem” was how Justice Moriarty described the AIB’s attitude towards lending when he was chairing the tribunal investigating Charlie Haughey’s adventures with AIB.
How right he was. While we read the good news about the American government’s using [...]
In a letter to the Irish Times on the 16th of August written in response to Denis O’Brien’s opinion piece in that paper prescribing what the Irish government should do to rectify the downturn in the economy, Macdara Doyle of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions wrote the following:
“Madam, Not even the combined [...]