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Colm McCarthy

'Iceland welcomes visitors but tests on arrival (sets you back €100), requires self-isolation for a day in a hotel where the result is delivered, and quarantine is compulsory if the test is positive.'

Colm McCarthy Opinion Better the Icelandic route than 'air bridges' linking us to wrong hotspots

New worldwide cases of the Covid-19 infection have yet to peak. The situation in Europe is mixed - most countries are reporting declines in both cases and fatalities but there have been several renewed outbreaks, including some in Nordrhein-Westfalen in Germany and around the Portuguese city of Lisbon. Cases and fatalities have been on a falling trend in the Republic and in Northern Ireland. The figures have been comparable in both parts of Ireland and less severe than in England.
'It is far too early to draw conclusions but the success of public health measures in controlling the pandemic is reflected in economic costs' Stock Image

Colm McCarthy Opinion Supporting every single firm will just create a zombie business community

Last Thursday's ESRI report should have ended wishful thinking about an early economic recovery. The authors were brave enough, two months earlier, to produce the first assessment of the damage, at a time when only a handful of fatalities had been reported and just before the lockdown commenced on March 27. They were too optimistic - the table shows their scenario in March and their current 'baseline' projection for 2020.
JUST THE TICKET: Economist and columnist David McWilliams backs repricing the entire debt structure

Colm McCarthy Opinion We owe it to ourselves to reject idea of debt jubilee

According to the Old Testament, God advised Moses that rulers should arrange, once every 50 years, a debt jubilee, to include the freeing of prisoners and release for the enslaved, as well as the forgiveness of amounts owing to moneylenders. Since the Covid crisis has piled extra debt on over- borrowed governments and businesses, a debt jubilee sounds just the ticket. The Irish Times columnist David McWilliams likes the idea: "This means repricing the entire debt structure of the economy, which is something the ECB has given central banks permission to do."
'The emissions associated with the consumption of oil from Saudi Arabia get measured in Ireland and are not counted as part of Saudi emissions.  But if Irish butter ends up in Saudi supermarkets, the emissions also get counted in Ireland. ”.' Opinion

Colm McCarthy: Constraining dairy output in Ireland might not even reduce European emissions

Climate change shares a critical feature with the Covid pandemic: it does not lend itself to narrow, country-by-country policy responses. The virus is unaware that humans have constructed national political frontiers, and the planet has just one atmosphere, its accumulating stock of greenhouse gases shorn of national identity the day they are emitted. Purely national responses will fail in both cases.

TROUBLE AHEAD: ECB chief Mario Draghi must move quickly to shore up economies across the Eurozone

Colm McCarthy Opinion Europe must move fast and limit the economic damage

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg gave the world the motto ''Move Fast and Break Things'', celebrating the disruption culture of the Silicon Valley innovators. The things Zuckerberg proposed to break were the out-dated business models of stuffy old offline competitors, not the architecture of the international trade and finance system. If there can be a motto to guide Europe through the Covid-19 epidemic, it should be ''Move Fast, and Break as Little as Possible''. Don't damage the channels of international commerce, and don't place strains on government funding and the banking system, inflicting on the shrunken economies a financial crisis to accompany the unfolding public health tragedy.

Click here to view full-size graphic

Colm McCarthy Opinion We've got one crisis - but it need not spread to economy

Coronavirus is a public health crisis with an economic crisis attached, rather than an economic downturn of the conventional type. It requires an unconventional economic policy response, not the simple demand boost that textbook macroeconomics prescribes. Budgets will go sharply into deficit, including in Ireland and in other heavily indebted countries, and so they should. In the Eurozone this will require a coherent response which recognises the unique character of the downturn already under way, especially from the European Central Bank.
INVESTMENT: Anne Graham of the NTA at the Bus Connects announcement last week

Colm McCarthy Opinion Should central government take control of planning in our cities?

As the discussions about forming a government continue, the financial constraints, invisible during a carefree election campaign, are closing in. There is already evidence of a tourism slowdown due to the coronavirus. It was never guaranteed, anyway, that the next government would be awash with tax revenue and spending options. The incoming team, whatever its composition, will have to make choices, which means that affordable projects will have to take priority over the visionary stuff.

UPBEAT: Conor O’Kelly, head of the National Treasury Management Agency, speaking at a conference last week. Photo: Conor McCabe Photography

Colm McCarthy Opinion Our future is at stake if we repeat same old mistakes

Decisions taken or ducked over the next few weeks by the main political parties, as they seek to fashion a programme for government, could cast a long shadow. The policies agreed by negotiating teams have often been little more than a cut-and-paste from the overblown manifestos of the coalition partners. But once enshrined in programmes for government, they acquire a scriptural authority, an imperative to deliver ill-advised and unconditional promises forged in the back rooms of the campaigning parties.

Dublin is not the only city in the world to have inflicted unaffordable housing on its citizens, with the by-products of generational inequity and a new social stratification

Colm McCarthy Opinion NIMBY protests created a crisis in housing that can only be solved by more building

Increased support for Sinn Fein and the smaller opposition parties must be due in large part to the failure of Fine Gael and Fianna Fail to display urgency about unaffordable housing. There is little evidence that voters perceived much difference in party policies about health, since all chose to endorse the Slaintecare aspirations. But the voters have rewarded Sinn Fein for according housing affordability the priority it merits, rather than for the details of its policy proposals, some of which read like a transition-year project.
'Opponents of affordable housing have enjoyed considerable success in Dublin and surrounding counties, as well as in Cork and some other cities.' (stock image)

Colm McCarthy Opinion Colm McCarthy: 'Helping people to buy trips up when homes in Dublin are just so expensive'

Affordable housing is not just about rents, it means lower house prices. Every political party believes rents are too high, but all shy away from any ambition to engineer house price reductions. In large parts of the country younger people on average incomes have given up on home ownership, notably in Dublin, its commuter belt and in some of the provincial cities. Prices are just too high to make home ownership a realistic prospect.

'It is legitimate to consider the Brexit saga as a series of events which need not have happened at all.' Photo: Jonathan Brady/PA

Colm McCarthy: 'There's nothing inevitable about Brexit - it could all have been so different'

When the UK finally departs the European Union, after 47 years in membership, on February 1 there will be instant analyses, indeed some have already appeared, seeking to place this disjunctive event in the sweep of recent British and European history. It is possible to make it appear unsurprising, even inevitable, citing patterns long evident of British exceptionalism, imperial nostalgia or perceived grievance with Europe, pointing ineluctably to the advantages of departure.

Only 34 politicians in Leinster House used the Oireachtas printing service to print cards and calendars for constituents this year. Stock: Getty

Colm McCarthy: 'Far bigger headaches than a printing machine face next finance minister'

Last week's row about the printing machine in the Oireachtas (it will cost well over the initial estimate) is of symbolic importance only. The final bill will be €1.6m or thereabouts, compared to an Exchequer capital programme which has recently been running at around €8,000m per annum and which the Government is keen to expand. The ceiling of the building in Kildare Street, across the road from Leinster House, was about 2ft too low to accommodate the new printing machine and nobody noticed, so structural work had to be undertaken, increasing the bill.

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