Welcome to the wacky world of Irish national economic accounts. The official figures for Ireland’s tax-haven economy are so bizarre that they have been dubbed ‘leprechaun economics’ by Nobel Prize winning American economist Paul Krugman. And now the distorted figures which are used to measure Ireland’s GDP could be coming back to bite Ireland in the
Whatever the outcome, the 2019 general election will be one of the most decisive polls in British history. Like the Liberal landslide of 1906 which led to the foundation of the welfare state, the Labour victory of 1945 or the 1979 election which introduced free-market Thatcherism, the 2019 election is likely to determine the nature
For the third time, the UK government finds itself at odds with its allies, Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party. The DUP chose to vote against Boris Johnson’s deal on Saturday by supporting the Letwin amendment. They will surely do so again when the meaningful vote is finally taken this week. But this time there is
The Government’s yellowhammer report on planning assumptions for Brexit will go down in history as a key document in the struggle to achieve Brexit. Farcically it is not a statement of government policy and probably does not reflect the views of government. It is rather a piece of civil service advice, commissioned by we know
Now that the Prime Minister’s withdrawal agreement has been decisively rejected by Parliament, the challenge, as Theresa May said last night, is to find an alternative way forward. But the reality is that the fall of the agreement is less important for the UK than widely assumed. It did not pin down any long-term trade
Just when the Brexit talks were beginning to look humiliating for the UK, the position has begun to be reversed. The absurd EU negotiating framework has stretched the patience of the British side to close to breaking point and preparations are at last being made for the possibility of no deal with the EU. Australians
