Ophelia was just a little taste of what awaits Ireland in the future, unless we get our act together on climate change. But can preventive measures be forced through, even if it isn’t already too late?
Get used to budgets without a big bang: they are part of a process that serves to benefit us all
We can’t think carefully about the future and sometimes we’re all just a bit mad. Thaler is one of the fathers of the field of behavioural economics. Today’s budget has all the features Thaler studied.
I expect we’ll have much ado about everything except property taxes in Budget 2018
The push for property price increases is polluting the housing system. Can we fix it? Yes, by a proper use of the property tax
In her Florence speech, prime minister Theresa May conceded two of the major debating points of the first round of Brexit negotiations
The real question for the next few years is this: can workers expect to see wage increases in line with their productivity?
Crossing the ‘soft’ US/Canada border takes ten to 30 minutes. A frictionless border is the result of magical thinking by Brexiteers
British civil servants are making it up and peppering soundbites and position papers with weasel words. What has happened to the people who once ran an empire?
The figures show we’ve got one of the fastest growing economies in the world, yet we let down our elderly and homeless children
You don’t solve the gender issue with courses, exhorting women to ‘lean in’, or with more and more education. More women leaders will help. Transparency in pay will help, and this applies to the private sector also. You solve it by changing the system itself.
'It’s not discrete elements of the system we can improve, It’s the structure of the system itself'
There’s not much debate about the future of work here in Ireland yet, but as the gig economy expands, expect to see much more discussion. Whether these workers will get to own a home or not will depend on how the system evolves
The reality of the Summer Economic Statement is this: there is very little available to spend on anything
The Taoiseach suggested there was not just the €400-500 million of fiscal space we had expected, but ‘hidden fiscal space’. I am not sure what hidden fiscal space is, but if it exists, it needs to be spent on capital projects. Full stop.
