MANY commentators have gazed into the economic crystal ball, but for every Mystic Meg that foresaw the property downturn and credit crunch, there was a Micawber predicting that our “economic fundamentals” were sound and we were in for a soft landing.

The Smartest Guys in the Room

Morgan Kelly: “We have spent the last five years learning to believe that exports and competitiveness do not matter, and that we can get rich by selling houses to each other,” the professor of economics at University College Dublin, wrote in December 2006 when house prices were still soaring. “We are likely to spend a painful few years as we unlearn that lesson.” Kelly predicted “a collapse of government revenue, and unemployment back above 15%”. Commentators queued up to call him a dismal scientist. He has been desperately trying not to say “I told you so” ever since.

George Lee: We can’t say he didn’t tell us. Over and over again; every night. In June 2006, the RTE economics correspondent presented a state-of-the-nation documentary, Boom, and declared that the Celtic tiger had died some time in 2001. Lee warned that Ireland’s over-reliance on property and the construction sector would end in tears. “Of 49 case studies carried out on property booms in 26 countries, the OECD found that every one ended badly,” he said. “And for every boom, there is a bust — that’s just one of the laws of life.” If he seems to be enjoying the current financial roller coaster, it’s probably because he is.

Noel Smyth: “If the government was to persuade the central bank to guarantee all deposits in Irish banks . . . the effect would be to ensure that depositors considering investing in Ireland would know they had a state guarantee and that the banks would always ensure their money was repaid,” the solicitor and property developer wrote in The Irish Times on September 17. Given that history already (wrongly) credits David McWilliams as the person who coined “the Celtic tiger”, it shouldn’t reward him twice. Because it was Smyth and not McWilliams who first articulated publicly how the state could step into the breach and restore confidence in the Irish banking sector.

John Gallagher: The former controller of the Jurys Doyle hotel group must go down as king of the Monopoly board for bailing out at the pinnacle of the market. Sean Dunne was the first who couldn’t pass Go when Gallagher put the Jurys Berkeley Court site on the market in 2005. After beating off competition from 15 bidders, Dunne secured the parcel of property for €380m. A year later Gallagher sold the Burlington to Bernard McNamara for €288m. Quinlan Private later paid €1.2 billion for the remaining 20 Jurys Inn hotels. Gallagher then incensed the industry by declaring there was no value left in Irish property and claimed he wouldn’t be investing again for at least two-and-a-half years or until “the froth comes out of this market”.

They should’ve gone to Specsavers

Sean Dunne: In 2005, the Baron of Ballsbridge likened pessimistic economists to “laughing hyenas . . . harbingers of doom and gloom”. Dunne smugly proclaimed that the “hyenas have stopped laughing . . . as the price and supply of housing has continued to break records”. Two years later, in a letter to The Irish Times, he harangued the commentators queueing up to take pot shots at his grand plans for Ballsbridge. “The business of property development involves risk-taking and, in this case, a belief in the sustainable success of the Irish economy,” he wrote. “While others have chosen to sell up now while the going is good and depart with their profits, I have chosen to put my trust, faith and money in the future of my country and its economy.”

Bertie Ahern: During a conference of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions in Bundoran last year, the then taoiseach departed from his script. “Sitting on the sideline or on the fence, cribbing and moaning, is a lost opportunity. In fact I do not know how people who engage in that don’t commit suicide,” he said. Ahern’s choice of words was criticised by suicide prevention groups but the attack on the “doom-mongers” was a typical Ahern pronouncement on the economy. At a Fianna Fail think-in last year, he said that anyone who claims the economy is in danger “knows nothing about nothing”. He added: “You wouldn’t give them a dime to go down to the shop.”

Peter Sutherland: The chairman of BP and Goldman Sachs may be “God’s banker” but even he didn’t see the crisis coming. “Suds”, a former attorney general, told the Irish Management Institute national conference in Powerscourt, Co Wicklow, last April that “given proper policies, we can confidently look forward to continuing growth above the EU average for the next five years and beyond”.

He said that Ireland as a nation has “an unparalleled capacity to over-react to events, and this is often exacerbated by uninformed commentary”.

In classic shoot-the-messenger mode, Sutherland continued: “Commentators and economists generally should restrain the tendency to make things appear worse than they are.”

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