Government not best bet for property advice

More double-talk from the Government. With the ECB meeting yesterday in Frankfurt, Minister for Finance Brian Cowen was out on RTÉ early in the day to say he hoped the threat of another rise in interest rates would make investors take a step backwards and bring about a cooling in property investment.

We know now that the threat did not come to pass, at least for the moment. But Cowen said it could be a good thing for the economy if interest rates were to rise. The Government had been watching rates carefully, he said, and had urged people to be prudent in their investments.

Just last April, however, his master Bertie Ahern was talking the market up. In the face of growing worries about the property market and a warning to banks from the financial regulator to set money aside for mortgage defaults, the Taoiseach said there was no indication at all of a downturn in the market.

He was critical of analysts who predicted a downturn in 2005 and 2006 and said people who avoided buying property on the basis of such advice now faced higher prices. "Construction is hugely strong at present and looks as if it will be for the medium-term," he said at the Irish Management Institute conference.

The inconsistency is a hoot, but a person wouldn't want to be depending on the Government for a true and fair view. Seems as if Bertie and Cowen are in fear of a downturn, but express same in different ways. Go figure.

Mainframe is dead - long live mainframe

At IBM's announcement yesterday of a new €46 million, 300-job investment in its Irish operations, senior vice-president of integrated operations, Bob Moffat, was asked about longtime predictions that the age of the mainframe computer was over.

Weren't smaller, cheaper, nimble servers doing in the big machines that were once Big Blue's very expensive bread and butter?

The short answer: "No." Companies have found plenty of work still for the behemoths, he said ."I know where that prediction that the mainframe is dead came from," he added, " an American magazine that also wrote our obituary back in around 1994.

"I'm glad to say I've been 28 years now with this company that's dead," he quipped, to much laughter from the gathered senior researchers. "And I'm glad to say, the mainframe is not dead." So there!

C&C in denial on Tayto

C&C has finally jettisoned that most Irish of brands, Tayto. The new owners are Largo Foods and C&C will pocket €62.3 million when the process is completed later this year.

Rumours of a sale of Tayto by C&C have been around for a long time. They stayed in the realm of rumour during this time, because official spokespeople for C&C were adamant until very recently that Tayto was not for sale.

Despite strong indications to the contrary, the idea that C&C might part with Tayto was always strongly rejected.

The representatives of the company at no stage used the phrase "not for sale at present", the denial was pretty emphatic. In fact, in a news report from December 2003, a spokesman for C&C told a reporter from this publication, in no uncertain terms, that Tayto was not for sale. Period. End of story. I suppose it goes to show that denials just ain't what they used to be.

Lobbyist states obvious

Current Account salutes the new lobby group that was formed during the week looking for more music and less talk on Irish radio.

The group, known as More Music, Less Talk, claim the "FM band is full of talk and news, but little music". They cite Sunday mornings as particularly bad with no music "in many counties west of the Shannon".

It is calling on Minister for Communications Noel Dempsey to drop the 20 per cent news and talk requirement on radio stations.

To support the campaign, the group issued what it called "research" showing the dominance of chatter. It made the following discoveries: there is lots of talk on the Gerry Ryan show, on the Ryan Tubridy show and even on the Ray D'Arcy show. Talk about stating the "bleedin obvious". The fee paid to the researchers was not disclosed, but Current Account would have provided similar data for no charge at all.