'R' word colours rather than dominates the debates

KENMARE DIARY:GALLOWS HUMOUR abounded at the opening session of the Kenmare conference on Friday night, as economists competed with one another to tell the audience of policymakers and public figures how bad things really are.

"Today Ireland stands as one of the world's greatest economies," said Rossa White, chief economist of Davy Research. No, he hadn't lost the plot, but was quoting the Fianna Fáil general election manifesto from May 2007, to a ripple of nervous laughter in the conference hall.

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UCD ECONOMIST Colm McCarthy raised the spectre of spillover from the global financial crisis into the wider economy. There was, he said, a real risk that a "credit famine" would starve small businesses and compound the misery of households already weighed down by six years of "credit binge".

Despite the conference's scheduling on the eve of an early budget and bang smack in the middle of an unfolding banking crisis, market turmoil and the "r" word coloured rather than dominated the debates. Outside the official sessions, however, people were talking about little else.

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AS GRIM AS things may be in the banking sector, it didn't stop AIB chairman Dermot Gleeson from romping home with the award for most entertaining speaker of the weekend. His address stayed firmly clear of current affairs - about 75 years clear, to be precise, with a witty treatise on Irish deregulatory quirks of the 1930s. Well, you've got to laugh.

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SO DOES the now daily digest of State guarantees, cash injections and bank takeovers mean the end of the free market, The Irish Times asked the Kenmare attendees.

No, was the resounding, if unsurprising, answer. "If anything, it emphasises the need to monitor the potential for market failure in the operation of any market," said one respondent, while another was confident that bank nationalisations would be reversed as soon as the market returns to "normality" - whatever that means.

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IN A PAPER currently resting in the Commission on Taxation's in-tray, Dr Don Thornhill of the National Competitiveness Council suggested that pension scheme "members" should be rebranded as "account holders" to encourage a sense of ownership and control over their retirement savings.

He confessed however, that his first choice had been "investors" - now, unfortunately, something of a dirty word.

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THE CONFERENCE organisers paid special tribute to former Irish Timeseconomics editor Paul Tansey, who died suddenly last month.

Paul was an enthusiastic participant in Kenmare and would have presided over many of the informal sessions that were a feature of the event, the organisers said. He had been planning for the conference in the weeks before his death and was much missed there by his friends and fellow economists.