Ireland’s policymakers were authors of our home-grown “Celtic crash”, their errors exposed and compounded in brutal fashion just as the global financial crisis struck. From the Honohan and Regling-Watson reports to the banking inquiry, we have been treated to seven years of introspection.
It is critical we learn the right lessons, and there have been some encouraging changes to how we formulate economic policy: a highly-respected economist as Central Bank governor, an injection of economic expertise into the Department of Finance, incremental improvements to the budgeting process.
For all the focus on “what went wrong”, however, it’s easy to lose sight of what went right – what gave rise to the pre-2002 vintage, export-driven Celtic Tiger.
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