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Separated at birth

Dan O’Brien looks a lot like Stephen Donnelly.

He’s a little like Brains from Thunderbirds, but

he looks like Stephen Donnelly. Anyway he’s oﬀ

to the Indo group and the Institute of European

Aﬀairs, leaving the sinking Irish Times. He’s not

unlike many in Irish politics/journalism: right-

wing behind a veneer of ideological ﬂexibility.

You’d think his period working for the Economist

would have left him unabashedly rightwing but

No. So in his big two-part televised equality-oﬀ

with Vincent Browne some months ago he pro-

fessed to believe in equality when everything he

writes suggests he believes in equality of oppor-

tunity/ freedom and the markets, to the detriment

of equality of outcome, substantive equality. He

also, in pointing out that Michael D Higgins is

outstepping the mark, mentioned he’d voted for

him, albeit as the best of a bad lot. The President

was furious, on both counts. Anyway it will be

diﬃcult to tell the real Thunderbird at the Sindo

Christmas party so, girls, you’ve been warned.

Doom

The doyen of ﬁnancial agencies, the central banks’

central bank, Dan and Stephen’s sort of clever-

er-than-your-average-central-banker guys, is

the Switzerland-sited Bank of International

Settlements or (BIS). It has been scathing about

US economic policy for more than a decade. For

example, BIS has long criticised the Fed and other

central banks for inﬂating bubbles. It says a hunt

for yield is luring investors en masse into high-

risk instruments, “a phenomenon reminiscent

of exuberance prior to the global ﬁnancial crisis”.

This is happening just as the US Federal Reserve

prepares to reduce its stimulus and starts to

drain dollar liquidity from global markets. “This

looks like to me like  all over again, but even

worse”, says William White, the BIS’s former chief

economist, famous for ﬂagging the wild behav-

iour in the debt markets before the global storm

hit in  – unhelpfully. Meanwhile Dr Pippa

Malmgren, who was an economic adviser to

George W Bush and sounds so nice, considers

Ireland faces  years of “no growth” because

the European Central Bank is unable to bolster

inﬂation to help ease our debt diﬃculties. She

said Ireland could deal with its debts through

austerity without inﬂating them away: “But you

have to accept  years of no growth. It’s what

European policymakers expect Ireland to do…

Germany doesn’t want inﬂation. Everybody else

needs it.”

Doomier

Continuing the almost Gurdgievesque downer,

Dermot Smith of the Fiscal Advisory Council

(FAC) says “We have suﬀered the fastest deterio-

ration over the euro area in terms of net debt over

the last ﬁve years. The Irish government’s ﬁnan-

cial liabilities have increased by a factor of four”.

Ireland has a new worth of minus € billion,

according to the council, due to gaping deﬁcits

and the costs of bailing out the banks. That’s just

government debt. If you add in private and cor-

porate debt makes it much worse. We outhock

everybody. Nice.

No one should have to feel that

Harry Browne has taken the Irish Times to the

Press Ombudsman for Ed O’Loughlin’s review of

Browne’s book on Bono. Bono meanwhile remains

gratifyingly silent…just on this one issue.

Angry outsider’s insider

Farewell Emily O’Reilly, you were a very good

Ombudsman though you were a bit strange about

the brothel ads in In Dublin and you once weirdly

binned a print run of Magill of which you were

editor because you didn’t like an article that was

written by Michael Smith, Village’s current editor.

Villager understands that  people have applied

to replace O’Reilly. For some reason Emily Logan,

the Children’s Ombudsman, is the frontrunner.

Ombud, by the way, comes from the old Norse

word for a Commissioner.

Smug insiders

Before she left for her European elevation, she

spoke at the launch of Cat, or should it be Pat,

‘who got the cream’ Leahy’s latest instalment

of the politicians-are-decent-skins-and-isn’t-

it-all-a bit-of-fun series, this time dealing with

the current government (many think he lost the

run of himself a bit in his purring, if occasion-

ally querulous outing on ‘Fianna Fáil: the Price

of Power – Inside Ireland’s Crisis Coalition’. She

poked mildly subversive fun at the book’s author

and his conﬁdential sources.

O’Reilly noted the book’s account of Joan

Burton’s reaction to Éamon Gilmore’s notorious

election  comment that “it’s Frankfurt’s

way or Labour’s way”. While Gilmore’s audience

lapped the comment up “Joan Burton was less

impressed”.

She was standing beside Gilmore on the podium

and, says Cat, immediately thought: “Holy God,

that’s stupid. How the hell did that get into the

script?”, Leahy’s account continues: “She tried

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