# Some excellent free lectures in Ilac Centre



## Brendan Burgess (7 Feb 2012)

[broken link removed]

											1, 8, 15, 22, 29 March
Time: 											1pm
Price: 											Admission free. Booking essential
Location: 											Central Library
Address: 											Ilac Centre, Henry Street, Dublin 1
Audience: 	All 										  									 									*About this event:*

 									A  series of lunchtime talks taking place each Thursday in March at 1pm in  the Central Library, ILAC Centre. The series addresses questions around  the Irish Economy. How we have reached the point we are now at, what  the policy of successive governments has been and what effect these  policies have had. Contributors include noted economists, journalists  and historians. The talks are in partial fulfilment of the library  service’s mission to help inform, enrich, and empower library users by  providing relevant information and ideas. 
*From independence to the IMF: the Irish economy and the forces that shaped it, 1922-2010*

* Conor McCabe **- Thursday, 1st March*
 Conor McCabe is a Labour historian and author. He holds a PhD in  Irish History from the University of Ulster. A contributor to the Dublin Opinion blog he recently authored _Sins of the Father: The decisions that shaped the Irish Economy_  which looks at the development of the economy from the foundation of  the State to the IMF bailout. Described as “far and away the best …  attempt to explain our economic collapse” it had garnered praise from  pundits as varied as David McWilliams and Vincent Browne.
*Austerity; time for a Plan B? *

*Michael Taft** - Thursday, 8th March*
 Michael Taft is a political and economics researcher at Unite, the trade union. He blogs at notesonthefront.typepad.com and www.progressive-economy.ie and is part of the TASC network of economists.
*Ireland's Property Market - How did it come to this? And where to next?*

*Ronan Lyons - **Thursday, 15th March*
 Ronan Lyons is probably best known as the resident economist at Daft.ie and is responsible for its quarterly report  on Ireland’s residential sales and lettings markets. Ronan Lyons is an  economist at Balliol College, Oxford, a Research Associate at the  Spatial Economics Research Centre in LSE and a Visiting Researcher at  the ESRI in Dublin.
 He blogs at ronanlyons.com and recently co-edited _Next Generation Ireland_.
*'The Irish banks and Eurozone stability: Learning from the past, looking  to the future'*

*Gregory Connor - Thursday, 22nd March*
 Gregory Connor is Professor of Finance at the National University of  Ireland, Maynooth.  He holds a PhD in economics from Yale and previously  taught at the London School of Economics, the University of California,  Berkeley and Northwestern University. Gregory blogs regularly on the Irish Economy website and has recently co-authored papers on the differences between the credit crises in Ireland and the U.S and on the cost of Ireland’s lax financial regulatory regime. 
*Anglo Irish Bank and the part it played in Ireland's economic collapse *

*Simon Carswell - Thursday, 29th March*
 Simon Carswell is Finance Correspondent with _The Irish Times_ and has covered the banking sector since the start of the financial crisis. He is the author of two books, _Something Rotten: Irish Banking Scandals_, and _Anglo Republic: Inside the bank that broke Ireland_,  which topped the bestsellers’ list in Ireland for several weeks and has  been described as “a fascinating read for anyone interested in the  present Irish crisis and how it unfolded”. 
 He is a regular contributor to television and radio, and won National  Newspapers of Ireland Journalist of the Year award in 2011. 

 Booking: 01 873 4333 centrallibrary@dublincity.ie


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## Firefly (8 Feb 2012)

That's fantastic in fairness. Wish I was in Dublin for those...wonder will they be recorded and uploaded somewhere?


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## T McGibney (8 Feb 2012)

If they're having Michael Taft as a speaker, they may as well invite Dan McLaughlin. Two sides of the same boom-era coin.


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## Brendan Burgess (15 Mar 2012)

Ronan Lyons is speaking today at 1 pm. 

He writes very well, so I am looking forward to hearing a talk by him.

Brendan


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## Purple (15 Mar 2012)

So anyone who works during the day is excluded. Great.


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## Firefly (16 Mar 2012)

Brendan Burgess said:


> Ronan Lyons is speaking today at 1 pm.
> 
> He writes very well, so I am looking forward to hearing a talk by him.
> 
> Brendan


 
Hi Brendan,

Did you go & was it any good? Any idea if these talks were recorded?


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## Brendan Burgess (16 Mar 2012)

I did go.

It was excellent. He is a good, well informed, lively speaker.

The guy from the library said that he would make the slides available. 

Here are the main points 

"Property is a bad investment - over time it has kept place only with inflation" 
I challenged this and he agreed with my challenge. It is not sufficient to say this on its own. You must compare property with cash and with equities and, possibly with other investment classes. I assume that property has outperformed cash.  His overall point was though that property is not a one way bet. 

"Morgan Kelly first spoke about the property bubble in 2006.  Mc Williams warned about it in 2001"

I had wondered about this. One would get the impression that Kelly had been warning about it for years, whereas he only spotted (or talked about) the bubble just as it burst. I suspect that he may have warned about it before this, but less publicly.  McWilliams was spectacularly right about property but more spectacularly wrong about the bank guarantee.

"The government can and should intervene"
This bit was a bit rushed so we didn't get a chance to debate it - particularly his proposal for 30 year fixed rate mortgages.


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## Sue Ellen (16 Mar 2012)

Brendan Burgess said:


> The guy from the library said that he would make the slides available.



Isn't it a terrible pity that they couldn't arrange the web-casts that seem to be available these days.  I watched a few with [broken link removed] and it was just a question of providing an e-mail address.  They were excellent.


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## padraic.cc (23 Mar 2012)

Hi Brendan, 

Thanks for posting up details for the talks here. We're very happy with  how the series is going so far. The audio for all the talks will be  transcribed and made available along in text and audio with the slides  in a few weeks. I'll post a link up here or interested readers could  keep an eye on dublincitypubliclibraries.com.


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