O’Conall Street

There is a big hole in the Republic’s public finances this morning. It’s €8billion big and that is just in the tax shortfall.

Meanwhile Dublin based Davy Stockbrokers are cutting their forecast for the Irish economy because conditions continue to get worse for consumers, as the labour market weakens it is harder to get credit, and because of a ‘negative wealth effect’.

Davy now expects GNP growth of 1% this year, and for 2009 of 2%, down from a previous forecast of 3.4%. On housing, Davy does not think 2008 will see building bottom out, but it has hugely reduced the number of house completions it expects to see next year - from 40,000 to 25,000.  It says house prices will fall by 10.7% over the next year, and by 7.2% in 2009.  It also forecasts that non-residential building will fall by 10% next year. The Dublin stockbroker says unemployment will have reached 7% by the end of next year from a current level of 5.5%.

One good piece of news came out of this island last night though. A treaty banning cluster bombs was also signed in the fair city after the British government backed down to internal and external pressure and agreed to a total ban. It’s not often you get to demonstrate the value of local representation at Westminster yet for the past month a forceful campaign led by Mark Durkan MP of the SDLP has ensured this island’s opposition to these hideous weapons was heard loud and clear in every forum available to our public representatives. Advocacy in action me thinks.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 9:58 am and is filed under Business, Celebrity, Consumer, Corporate Communications, Corporate Responsibility, Current Affairs, Politics, Public Affairs, Public Relations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.