Author: Kevin O’Rourke

Thoughts at the Abbey

We went to see Roddy Doyle’s Playboy at the Abbey this weekend. I recommend it to anyone who hasn’t yet been.

It sparked two thoughts. The first was: boy, do we do theatre well in this country. I often leave the Abbey or Gate feeling this way, and my wife tells me I am getting boring on the subject. But it is nice, amid all the ‘world class’ blather we are subjected to, to go to something in Dublin that really is world class.

The second was this. Doyle’s reworking of the Playboy is very Celtic Tiger, not just because of the Nigerian Christy Mahon, but because of its underlying cultural assumptions. Synge has Mahon enter a typical Irish peasant community, and because they are a typical Irish peasant community, they look up to someone who has broken the law to the extent of having killed his father. I guess Doyle didn’t think that he could plausibly carry this off in a play set in modern Ireland, and so he has Mahon show up on the doorstep of a Dublin gangland family. In the context of an Ireland which has had its own state for 80 years, in which there are no post-colonial hangups about the law, and in which we no longer look up to people who cheat the system in various ways, since we are a Republic now, and are all in this together, this was a very clever move.

Interestingly, the Anglo-Irish Bank corporate logo was prominently displayed on the programme.

Simon Johnson doesn’t like the three letter word

It is just as well that Simon Johnson didn’t read this Sunday’s Irish newspapers, since they would have spoiled his weekend.

He also calls for more coordination within the Eurozone. After what happened in September so should we all.

Buiter on nationalisation

Willem Buiter has a thought-provoking piece arguing for full nationalisation of all banks here. What do those of you who understand banking think about his arguments in (a) the British context, and (b) the Irish one?

RGE monitor

Today’s RGE monitor has a feature, or whatever you’d call it, bringing together recent articles on yesterday’s IMF rumours, on intra-EMU government bond spreads, and on the possibility of exits from the Eurozone. The fact that these topics are being linked tells you something about how people are thinking. However, the Buiter and Eichengreen articles linked to by RGE are helpful in stating the case as to why Eurozone membership is so helpful now for countries like us: the counterfactual is pretty scary. The implication of EMU membership however, as many of you have pointed out, is that nominal wage cuts are badly needed (so what on earth are the ESB thinking of?).

Industrial output declines

I have been reading and enjoying www.thepropertypin.com for a few years now. You learn a lot about the Dublin property market, and sometimes about other stuff too.

I recently came across this post which alerted me to recent Eurostat industrial figures that ought surely be getting more airplay. As you can see, in the year to November 2008, industrial output dropped by 7.7% in both the Euro area and in the EU as a whole. There was a wide range in performance across countries:

Among the Member States for which data are available for November 2008, industrial production fell in nineteen and rose only in Ireland (+2.6%). The most significant decreases were registered in Estonia (-17.6%), Spain (-15.1%), Latvia (-13.9%) and Luxembourg (-13.8%).

Now, the question is, are these big numbers or small numbers? Here is a table giving changes in industrial output between 1929 and 1937. Looking at the three-year declines between 1929 and 1932, and comparing these with the one-year declines from 2007 to 2008, my answer is that these are frighteningly big numbers. Industrial output is not declining at the rate experienced in the US or Germany during the Great Depression, but that is setting the bar pretty low. It is declining more rapidly than the average falls experienced in Europe as a whole during that period (although those average falls are unweighted, and thus have a large health warning attached to them).