In case you had any inclination, no matter how vague, of expressing concerns that the whole thrust of Colm McCarthy’s cuts committee is somehow mistaken – stop it. Get real. Grow…

Over at Dublin Opinion, Conor McCabe is continuing his excellent analysis of contemporary class relations, this time using the CSO’s new National Employment Survey for 2007. He challenges the sloppy thinking that…

During the Great Depression, the British King announced he was cancelling the purchase of a royal yacht as a gesture of sympathy towards his beleaguered subjects. John Maynard Keynes claimed…

The Irish Times can claim it is stimulating debate on important issues. After all, didn’t one of their columnists provoke debate on the ‘generosity’ or otherwise of our social welfare…

History is such a malleable thing. It can be twisted this way and that to support or oppose any contemporary position. Take An Bord Snip Nua – this is a…

What would be your reaction if it could be shown that a set of policies would result in deepening the recession, increasing unemployment, reducing domestic demand (meaning more business closures)…

Great. Coming home from a few days break and there’s the IMF, holding open the cell door. The projections are worrying enough, though hardly new.  Still, to be reminded one…

Over at Cedar Lounge Revolution, WBS is doing a good job tracking the ongoing campaign against Ireland’s borrowing capacity and, in particular, the performance of the National Treasury Management Agency.…

Boy, was Senator Fergal Quinn taken in. Or was he? In his recent column, ‘Getting people work a priority’ he attempts to make two real-life comparisons – one based on…

Jim Stewart has come up with a provocative idea to stimulate one small part of the economy: ‘Some possible measures to stimulate spending could be vouchers which must be spent…

Be under no illusion – the economic debate is now morphing from an obsession with debts and deficits into a full-blown assault on the public realm that has more in…

The ESRI’s recent ‘Recovery Scenarios for Ireland’ offers us a glimpse of the ‘nirvana of the return to normal’ – a set of projections that could see the economy, if…

Here is my challenge to the real devaluationists. Will any of them take it up? Real devaluationists claim that, since we can’t devalue our currency, we must devalue other inputs…

Like many people, when I heard that George Lee had been recruited by Fine Gael to stand in the Dublin South by-election I thought that was it – game, set,…

Higher taxation is now on the agenda. The Left has long argued the virtues of higher taxation: more resources for health, education, infrastructural modernisation, childcare, social protection, elder-care, etc. We…

This article was originally written for Irish Left Review Shane Coleman writes: ‘ . . . the reality is that if there was a general election tomorrow and Fine Gael…

I’ve been trying to get away from this topic – the whole deflation thing and its impact on the economy and the budget. There are, after all, a hundred and…

Do you remember why the Government introduced the emergency April budget? Rising unemployment? Collapse in economic growth? Mass depression over the weather? Let’s refresh our memories: ‘Without this supplementary Budget…

Ronan Lyon has written an instructive post on the ‘Thorny Issue of Teachers’ Pay’. So useful, in fact, that it was highlighted on Irish.economy and in the Sunday Business Post.…

Pat Leahy examines the impact a Left-led government might make on the economy and concludes . . . well, I’m not quite sure what the conclusion is. Indeed, I’m not…