From kathleen barrington: 07 March 2010
By Kathleen Barrington
Al most nine years after the Cosgrave brothers agreed to purchase Dun Laoghaire Golf Club, the controversy surrounding the sale of the 78-acre site hasn’t gone away.The Cosgrave Property Group in 2001 proposed to buy the site in the south Dublin suburb in a deal that valued [...]

From kathleen barrington: Sunday, February 28, 2010
By Kathleen Barrington
Here’s a question for Hugh Cooney, chairman of the government’s Mortgage Assistance Group. Should the taxpayer be called upon to help fund the mortgages of troubled borrowers such as Twink?The actor has said that she is ‘‘actively working on a solution’’ after Bank of Scotland [...]

From kathleen barrington: 21 February 2010
By Kathleen Barrington
During 2006, I contacted a number of solicitors in a new west Dublin suburb to enquire about what sort of debts they saw buyers assuming when a property was being conveyed.One said he had seen cases where a first-time buyer couple would take out a mortgage of, [...]

From kathleen barrington: 14 February 2010
By Kathleen Barrington
When you read in the financial pages about the European Central Bank (ECB) injecting liquidity into the Irish banking market, it often means the ECB is paying ‘cash for trash’, as the Americans like to put it.And if you are wondering what kind of trash the [...]

From Strong Language » economist:
Nama is a bad idea said Professor Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, on Wednesday night while addressing Trinity College’s historical society. Nama is likely to “burden this generation for 25 to 50 years or more. I am very uncomfortable with a government with such a minority support making such a decision.” 
The view that there is no [...]

From kathleen barrington: 07 February 2010
By Kathleen Barrington
When Eircom shareholders and taxi drivers lost their shirts on over-priced shares and taxi-plates, voters turned their backs on Fine Gael’s proposals to bail them out ahead of the 2002 general election.Fine Gael argued that small investors in Eircom should be compensated, at an estimated cost to [...]

From kathleen barrington: 31 January 2010
By Kathleen Barrington
Last year, the Organisation for Economic and Cultural Development (OECD) published a survey showing the effect of the financial crisis on the performance of pension funds.Using figures for 2008, it found that private pension funds lost 23 per cent of their value in 2008, or [...]

From kathleen barrington: 24 January 2010
By Kathleen Barrington
Anybody who heard last week’s debate on RTE‘s Frontline about how to restore cost competitiveness might have jumped to the conclusion that the only weapon available was to slash the minimum wage. It is true that the minimum wage here is higher than in Britain and the [...]

From kathleen barrington: 17 January 2010
By Kathleen Barrington
I don’t know what Cormac McCarthy’s family make of the stg£870,000 (€974,000) he was paid as chief executive of Ulster Bank in 2008, a year in which the bank group lost stg£689 million.But I do know that Stephen Hester, chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland [...]

From kathleen barrington: 10 January 2010
By Kathleen Barrington
Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan’s position on a banking inquiry appears to be one of putting it on the long finger. On the one hand, he said last week that he supported calls for an inquiry into the circumstances that led to the banking crisis but, on [...]