Governor Honohan at the Oireachtas Finance Committee

The opening address by Governor Honohan at today’s meeting of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform is here.  The transcript of the meeting will be available in due course. [UPDATE: The transcript is here.]

There are several topics briefly covered in the opening address. On the Promissory Notes he says:

… there has been a very intensive process of discussion and negotiation on this matter, which is one of the two main thrusts of the Government’s policy to have a euro area review of the indebtedness arising out of the banking crisis. There is considerable goodwill from all interlocutors in this process. Nevertheless, it has not been easy to find a generally acceptable solution. Taking into account both the statutory position and wider policy stance of the ECB, an initiative of this type will be novel and as such challenging. Using our knowledge of central banking law and practice, we have been working carefully to build understanding and confidence around a set of proposed transactions designed to deliver for Ireland, while not taking other decision makers too far out of their comfort zone. The ECB is an organisation that seeks to proceed as far as possible by consensus, and it is not surprising that this work has been taking quite a while. In fact, what we have designed is, I believe, largely in the interests of the eurosystem as a whole.

In the subsequent words of Governor Honohan it seems that any deal is not “done and dusted”.

Irish Quantitative History Workshop 2013

The annual Irish Quantitative History group meeting will take place in TCD, in the IIIS seminar room, 6th Floor, Arts Building, on Friday 25th January 2013, 2pm-6 pm.

  • Peter Solar (Free University Brussels), ‘Market Integration between Ireland and Britain: Timing, Causes and Consequences’

  • Frank Barry (Trinity College Dublin), ‘A Firm-Level Database on Manufacturing Industry in Protectionist-Era Ireland’

  • Richard McMahon (University of Edinburgh), ‘Homicide and Irish migration in late nineteenth-century San Francisco’

  • Aidan Kane (NUI Galway), ‘Exploring 17th century credit networks in the Irish Staple database’

  • Charles Read (University of Cambridge), ‘The Repeal Year: A Quantitative Reassessment’

    • As numbers are limited, please email iqhistory@gmail.com if you intend to go along, and/or if you wish to be added to the IQH group mailing list. The workshop page (hosted by the Centre for Economic History at QUB) is here. The convenor of IQH is Eoin McLaughlin (University of Edinburgh).

    Dublin Review of Books

    New issue here.

    Includes economics essay by Michael O’Sullivan here.

    ACTIVE VS. PASSIVE DECISIONS AND CROWD-OUT IN RETIREMENT SAVINGS ACCOUNTS: EVIDENCE FROM DENMARK

    here.

    America, Britain and Europe

    I see that some people in Britain are in a bit of a kerfuffle about recent indications that the Americans would not be pleased if they left the EU. So it seems appropriate to quote at length from a well-known passage by Miriam Camps (1964, pp. 336-7):

    Early in April [1961], Mr. Macmillan went to Washington for talks with the new Administration. Although he had met the new President at Palm Beach in connexion with the Laos crisis, the April visit was the first opportunity for a general review of common problems, and Britain’s relations with the Common Market was obviously one of the matters which Mr. Macmillan wanted to discuss. The available evidence suggests that Mr. Macmillan asked Mr. Kennedy a hypothetical question: ‘What would be your reaction if we decided to join the EEC?’ and that he was given an enthusiastic affirmative answer. There is no evidence to suggest that Mr. Macmillan was ‘pushed’ by Mr. Kennedy, as was alleged, and denied, at various times. But it is clear that Mr. Kennedy left no doubt in Mr. Macmillan’s mind that a British decision to join the Six would be welcome and that Mr. Macmillan left Washington convinced that, far from straining Anglo-American relations, Britain’s joining the Community might well lead to much closer and more far-reaching transatlantic links than the British could hope to achieve in other ways. The reflection that the shortest, and perhaps the only, way to a real Atlantic partnership lay through Britain’s joining the Common Market seems to have been a very important — perhaps the controlling — element in Mr. Macmillan’s own decision that the right course for the United Kingdom was to apply for membership. Mr. Kennedy’s warm response undoubtedly strengthened Mr. Macmillan’s own conviction that joining was the right course of action and encouraged him to continue his efforts to bring the sceptics in the Cabinet to accept this view. Also, like the discussions with General de Gaulle and Dr. Adenauer earlier in the year, the discussions with the United States Administration underlined, once again, the fact that ‘association’ arrangements were not likely to be negotiable. It was clear that the United States was prepared to accept the additional commercial ‘discrimination’ against itself because of the political advantages it saw in British membership in the Community, but that it would be hostile to arrangements short of membership which, in its view, would simply increase ‘discrimination’ but would not, like full membership, add to the political stability of the Community or strengthen the ‘Atlantic’ orientation of the new power-complex the Six were clearly coming to be.