On a fateful night in September 2008, the former government urgently needed some good advice. “Astonishingly,” wrote Richard Tol in The Irish Times, they “knocked on David McWilliams’s door.”
Many people think they should have knocked on Morgan Kelly’s. Since his now-famous article on the property bubble in 2006, Kelly, Professor of Economics at UCD, has been predicting disaster for the Irish economy in a series of (strangely entertaining) articles in The Irish Times. So far, he has been proved all too right, and he hasn’t finished with us yet. In May the man described by the Irish Independent as ‘Dr Doom’ launched another coruscating attack. Describing Central Bank governor Patrick Honohan’s miscalculation of the scale of bank losses as “the costliest mistake ever made by an Irish person”, Professor Kelly declared that Ireland has become “an object of international ridicule” and predicted that, within a year or two, the country will be facing bankruptcy. But there is, he argues, still a way out.
Introduced by journalist, writer and current affairs presenter Olivia O’Leary, Professor Kelly tells us where we are, reminds us how we got here, and suggests some ways in which we might begin to dig ourselves out. It’s a rare opportunity to hear, and question, one of our most forthright commentators. We confidently predict a lively evening.
The Hubert Butler Annual Lecture was established in 2007 to honour the Kilkenny writer, historian and broadcaster whose remarkable consistency of vision and clarity of mind made him unique among essayists and whose work evinced an unsurpassed moral, political and literary integrity.