Ireland is sliding into depression - economic conference told

Ireland is sliding into depression and small pockets of economic growth at this stage are "meaningless", it was said at an economic conference in Dublin City University today.

Alternative approaches to economic thinking must be used to solve problems in the Irish economy and society, according to speakers at the conference, which was organised by the thinktank TASC.

Terrence McDonough, a professor at NUI Galway's Department of Economics, said mainstream economics was "broken" and disconnected from the real world, with economists hiding behind massaged mathematical models that claimed to tell the future but failed to predict or prevent the current crisis.

"The notion of a recovery from recession is meaningless in this context... Small amounts of growth at the bottom of the recession mean nothing," he said.

By standard measures of economic growth, the US emerged from the Great Depression in 1933, he added. However, conditions remained extremely difficult for people throughout the decade.

The glorification of individual consumption in Ireland led to policy mistakes such as a low-tax regime that in turn created the fiscal crisis and allowed the banking sector to "hold the country to ransom", Prof McDonough said.

Opening the event, TASC director Paula Clancy called for the establishment of a National Recovery Forum to debate how the Irish economy could achieve what she termed "recovery with equality".

Also speaking at the conference in DCU's Business School, Paul Sweeney, economic adviser to the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (Ictu), called for stricter corporate governance rules to be imposed, including protection for whistleblowers, mandatory codes of behaviour and a higher level of financial disclosure for companies.

"There are no radical new corporate governance laws. It isn't even being debated," Mr Sweeney said. The principles of the free market were no longer being applied to the very banks that espoused those principles, he pointed out.

"If certain companies are not allowed to fail by Governments, then company law must be re-written."

Meanwhile, Dr John Barry, assistant director of the Institute for a Sustainable World at Queen's University Belfast, called on governments to "stop treating the world like it's a business that's going into liquidation."

It should not have taken a recession in order for Ireland to reduce its carbon emissions, he said.

Dr Barry welcomed a report published earlier this week by NESC that called for notions of wellbeing to be taken into account alongside traditional measures of economic growth such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which he said masked serious problems. Citing studies indicating that a person's quality of life does not increase above a certain level of wealth, Dr Barry described economic growth as having the potential to be "cancerous".