Facts are - very few saw thru the frenzy. That was the mistake.
Very true.
I hate when FF say noboby could see this coming because there were plenty of people who could see exactly the problems we had.
Unfortunately, however, we had a majority of professional economists, whose clients had serious vested interests in the state of the economy, who did not forsee any problems.
For every international report that said our property market was overheating, there were others that held Ireland up as an example to the rest of the world. Even up to 2006 and 2007.
You had places like Dubai that were like our property boom on speed! So it's an Irish problem and homegrown to an extent, but not uniquely Irish.
Looking back the fundamentals were all wrong, and that's easy to see now. It should have been easy to see then. But it wasn't seen by a critical number of economists who were viewed as credible at the time.
In short, this was no solo run by FF, Bertie or Cowan. The career politicians took the wrong advice from career economists.
I'd lay the blame 100% at the door of Cowan and Bertie if the economic advice they took ran contrary to the generally held views of our professional economists at the time, but that was not the case.