Washington Post Critique of Irish Economy

[amgd28]

Steven Pearlstein has published an interesting article on the Irish economy in the Washington Post - his last such report on Ireland was early 2006 and was remarkably prescient.

Can Ireland’s Celtic Tiger roar again?
By Steven Pearlstein, Published: August 16
DUBLIN — Much of Ireland has been riveted this summer by recordings of phone conversations from 2008 that revealed not only shocking levels of greed and bad breeding among some of the country’s top bankers, but a deliberate effort to snooker the government into bailing out the country’s banks by concealing the extent of their insolvency.
As Dan O’Brien, the business editor of the Irish Times observed, the tapes gave new life to a simple narrative that many Irish desperately want to believe: that Ireland was put on the path to financial ruin on a single night five years ago when a small group of regulators and politicians, pressured by bankers and European leaders, foolishly decided to guarantee all of the outstanding debts of all Irish banks. In this telling, it was that one boneheaded decision that wound up bankrupting the government and plunging the economy into a prolonged recession.
In the world beyond its emerald shores, meanwhile, another simple narrative about Ireland’s economy has found a receptive audience, this one about the Draconian spending cuts and tax increases that have been forced on Ireland by its creditors in order to reduce an annual government budget deficit that had reached 32 percent of the country’s annual economic output. The Irish themselves have long since accepted the urgent necessity of belt-tightening. But to Keynesian critics who believe in the healing power of fiscal stimulus, the country’s recent slide back into recession is offered as proof of the futility of austerity.
Neither of these fables — the one about the bank bailout, the other about austerity — is adequate to explain the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger. You don’t have to spend much time here before discovering that the real story turns out to be both more complicated and more interesting.

Read full article here:

 

[Purple]

Excellent and balanced piece. The best summary I've read of where we've come from and what we still have to sort out.

 

[amgd28]

Yep, he's a fine journalist with a good eye for cutting through the spin.

Quite a pity our legislators will probably not read as they are all on holidays....

 

[Delboy]

The Alan Dukes bit at the end

“We have a very insular political system here,” agrees Alan Dukes, a former finance minister and leader of the parliamentary opposition. “The influence of interest groups makes politicians incapable of making hard decisions. We wind up doing a little of everything and not enough of the things that really matter.”

Insular alright....we share the juicy state appointed jobs around the well connected, that right Alan!

 

[mercman]

Quite a pity our legislators will probably not read as they are all on holidays....

Does it really matter where they are or what they are doing ?? It really is a case of short termism -- all for the sake of a wage, expenses and a pension, if they are able to fool Joe Public long enough.

 

[amgd28]

The trouble is none of them actually see their role as being legislators. In fact I was wrong to describe them as such...

Anyway, back to the article - any key takeaways that people haven't seen already or simply a case of a generic description of the rise and fall of a lot of western economies in the last 10 yrs?