Alan Barrett

speaker
389 appearances 3 recordings 2 series first heard May 2026 last heard 25 Jun

Alan Barrett’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months
2 · Jun OctJan 26AprJulnow

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

Appearances

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The Claire Byrne Show · How resilient is the Irish economy? · 25 Jun 2026 podcast
And I mean, look, this sort of mystery continues.
I mean, I think one of the big efforts on behalf of the government now, though, is this sort of accelerated infrastructure program that they're moving on.
So, again, your listeners will probably be familiar that the government is really now proactively trying to identify the sort of the blockages in the system.
And if it's, for example, is it the planning problem?
Is it the need for sort of more water or electricity infrastructure?
So there are a range of things that the government is now looking at and sort of, you know, really hoping that things will start moving.
It's just the difficulty where our forecast horizon is sort of over the next 18 months.
I think all of those government policies, they're very welcome and very positive developments.
It just takes time for these things to, you know, really start paying off.
And so that's why I mean, I hate being negative and I hate being sort of having the sort of a pessimistic tone about this.
But it's that it's just difficult to see that dramatic liftoff over the forecast horizon.
Well, OK, I mean, Ireland is in a really sort of strange position at the moment in terms of the public finances.
So on the one hand, we have a remarkable amount of money flowing into the exchequer.
OK, and obviously that's a good thing and to be welcomed.
The difficulty is, is that a lot of people, ESRI included, but also the Fiscal Council and others, are just worried about the long term sustainability of the money that's flowing in.
So, you know, the headline figures look really good.
But if you start looking beneath the surface, there's a sort of a concern there and a vulnerability.
And I mean, for any government, and I mean, this isn't overly surprising, when you have huge amounts of money, there are huge demands and it can be very, very difficult to resist the demands.
So when we and others looked at the fuel protests earlier on in the year and the government's reaction in terms of the fuel package,
We were a bit concerned.
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