Game Over Man, Game Over!

Michael Taft’s view on yesterday’s confirmation that Ireland is pretty much in a perpetual recession:

“A good friend of mine took one look at the CSO’s National Quarterly Accounts released today and described it in two words:  ‘f****** awful’.  As this is a family-friendly blog I’ll just content myself with ‘bloody disaster’.

Ireland’s recession is continuing and even accelerating.  GDP has fallen for three quarters – with the first quarter of this year registering a fall of 0.6 percent.  Since the summer of last year the economy has fallen by 1.8 percent.  Let’s put that in perspective.  This is the biggest fall over three quarters since 2009 when the economy went ballistic.

The economy actually returned to recession in the latter half of 2012.  But how many people realised this?  Government ministers either ignored this inconvenient fact or denied it.  The media, with some exceptions, didn’t do much to cover it either, meaning that Ministers weren’t challenged when they went on with the ‘return to growth’ mantra.  Many of us were sleep-walking as the economy was double-dipping.

Well, we had better wake up.  We are fully back in recession.”

Of course most of us never left it in the first place, despite the fantasy reports of the media establishment with their “talking up” of Ireland’s economic prospects (news reporting as a PR exercise!). Actually that may be a bit unfair. From what one sees and hears in certain well-known Dublin bars and restaurants for An Chinsealacht Nua it’s still a case of: “Recession? What recession?”.