Brian O'Doherty's Blog  

The Irish Government has a new currency ready to print, if Ireland has to leave the euro…and it won’t be the old punt. The man gave me a preview…It’s the Geallt (pronounced gee-alt), like the Gaelic word for promise.

” The beautiful thing about it”, he says, “is that we can print as many as we
like [...]

I am delighted to see this opinion expressed..We knew they used Netsso, but did not know that they considered it their Number One time saver (from logins, remembering passwords, etc) on the internet. ttp://www.iniscommunications.com/blog/2012/3/14/my-top-3-time-saving-tools.html )

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I’m not an historian, but I’ve read a few books and I’m very impressed by the achievements of Irish emigrants down the centuries and their descendents in the Irish diaspora and I’d like to bring you a few facts about that now and again in this column. The diaspora has achieved great things- and please [...]

Yes, Netsso is the sponsor of this blog and I’m proud to acknowledge that and not only because I am a shareholder. But, you may ask, why, then, has there been such a long time waiting for the activity of the blog to re-commence?. Sponsor problems?  No, not that..It was me, being too tired for a [...]

The rather poor road between the border at Aughnacloy and the city of Derry is to be upgraded into a dual carriageway, substantially at the expense of taxpayers in the Republic. My proposal is that this roadway should be named after Ireland’s greatest unsung hero Owen Roe O’Neill, (c. 1585 – 1649). (I’m sure John [...]

We have referred before to the essential immorality of the NAMA scheme, under which bank shareholders must accept a valuation of their equity made by state officials and, if that valuation is sufficiently low, hand over their equity to the same state accordingly, even if, ultimately, the state sells off bank assets at an enormous [...]

The results of the stress tests are being presented as an urgent and unexpected need for more capital to cover losses by the Irish banks. The reality is that the extra capital required is to protect the banks in the event that something highly unlikely might happen to our economy and society in the medium [...]

I haven’t heard one word of sympathy for bank shareholders (AIB and BOI) during the election campaign, in spite of the injustice done, and still being done, to them. And in spite of their very large numbers. There must be even more votes to be collected from bank bashers and general begrudgers.
As we have pointed [...]

This is a post I sent to the IrishEconomy.ie blog today. The discussion followed a recent speech by CB Governor Paddy Honohan
”
When the Governor raised the matter of accounting practices, I thought he was going to tell us some good news. He said:
” I have already railed elsewhere against the backward-looking loan-loss provisioning practices encouraged [...]

Why don’t they let us see the report published last week by Goldman Sachs, which says, in essence, that we have been far to negative in estimating our financial losses, at bank and national level. As a result, we are forcing the banks to raise unnecessary capital (and the shareholders to consequently take unnecessary losses). [...]