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FORMER FINANCE MINISTER Charlie McCreevy provided a robust defence of his record while appearing before the banking inquiry today.
The former Fianna Fáil TD, who served in the Department of Finance between 1997 and 2004, spent several hours answering questions about his time in office.
He defended his fiscal strategy and insisted at one point that “we were more responsible than any other government in the history of the State”. His evasiveness in responding to some questions caused the inquiry to be suspended for a brief period earlier today.
Later during the hearing, McCreevy was asked by Fianna Fáil TD Michael McGrath if he ever got anything wrong as Minister for Finance. His response was fairly blunt and uncompromising, despite McGrath’s best efforts:
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People have very short memories, at the time in question Charlie was roundly criticised for not spending enough money! Mostly by Fine Gael
At the end of the day, his problem was lowering taxes on large income earners during budget 2000 and into the early 2000′s.
The SSIA’s and National Pension Reserve were both initiatives to cool the economy. The latter along with all the paying down of the national debt in his time actually cushioned the effects of the crash. These measures didn’t cool the economy enough or cushion the crash enough. It was probably as much that would have been acceptable at the time. Decentralisation was a good idea to cool house prices and infrastructural spend in Dublin also but the implementation was a failure.
McCreevey’s biggest failure, in hindsight, was not to recognise the disproportionate increase and increasing dependence on property market related taxes and to address this. I don’t know how this could have been achieved as removing or lowering stamp duty would probably have inflated the market even more.
There were very few dissenting opposition, economists, union, trade interests or journalists looking for lower spending, reform of taxation or stricter financial regulation. The four years light of day between his time as minister and the crash was sufficient time to recognise and rectify any of his mistakes by politicians, civil servants and indeed the electorate.
any chance the journal can actually start giving us the news in text format, for those of us who are in social situations where we can’t play videos. you can embed the video too, like.
What a joke, he treats this like a swansong
Ahh the most expensive Punch and Judy Show continues…
Guess who pick up the tab!!!
why has the journal shut down comments on their ‘ what happened today…’ article? this over sensitive attitude has to stop. the journal is growing and thats good, but they seem to be over censorising in case of. when I first started commentinv on this site it was a great site, nowadays, comments are moved up and down articles, if they are not deleted. dont get me wrong, the guys and girls in charge of this site work hard, and did so when I was being cloned, they sorted it, so I really appreciate that.
My one memory of charlie is the SSIA – gotta say was a lovely lump sum back in the day. What I wud do for that cash now…..
That sounds mj
lucky you… I got the ssia (but didn’t really get why I was getting free money, but took it anyway)… but my biggest memory of mccreevy was changing the tax laws after my wife gave up work to look after our kids. there was a drop in salary, but we could share credits before, mccreevy changed that so we could either pay high childcare or face a significant reduction in income. we managed to cope with reduced income, but for the majority of couples, they had to cope with high childcare costs *and* setting less of their children, often with higher taxes anyway. this is what he will be remembered for – forcing women to chose between family and work, not giveaway budgets.
He makes my skin crawl
Politics in Ireland must be a laughing stock worldwide.
We are outdoing most countries on earth in terms of corruption and non accountability.
Go do some travel bud, that statement just isn’t correct.
Not really true, at all. We are bad but the truth is, so are most democratic nations in the world. theoutspokenpost.com/2015/06/07/how-bad-is-political-corruption-in-ireland/
For people that work in international business and capital markets there is a significant vote of confidence in what ireland is doing. People vote with their wallets in business. Companies are moving here. Investment capital has been flowing in. The populist governments of France and Greece have caused an exodus of foreign capital. You ask which world you want to be part of. Ask which country you want to be part of? Would you like to be in France or Greece now? The masses who voted in populist parties are in a worse place than they started. Ireland would be no different and anyone with any sense of economic history knows that.
just jail the creepy turd
And yet somehow 21% of us want to vote for them again, would make you want to scream at our stupidity
McGrath running down the clock for his FF friend on a vague question. Did you think you did a good job.
Instead of going in to depth.
He might as well asked him about what his weaknesses are.
Whatever about a current shadow finance minsiter showing little knowladge of finance, I would say FF are more concerned at the job that McGrath and others are doing running the party into the ground. Hope he keeps at it. He is councillor material at best. A man for your grass cuttings.
I agree about McGrath.
The man is years in politics but acts like it is his first week.
As my memory serves Charlie McCreevy made a pretty good job and was the minister for finance responsible for the best days of the Celtic Tiger. The problems really started after he was moved to Europe and Brian Cowan took over as minister for finance. Cowan blundered his way through every government department.
Yes Chris, that is a fact, McCreevy tried to keep the economy from overheating and he controlled public spending, this didn’t suit Bertie, who put Cowan there instead.
Can anyone please explain to me what point was there in bringing this arrogant p***k into an already shambolic inquiry.
If I have it I spend it as well…on bills and taxes.
People always forget the ” when I don’t I won’t ” part of that quote
the Journal close comments and delete posts at will. independent my arse.
Charlie did well in Office, Bertie shipped him off to Europe because he wouldn’t spend public money, Bertie then put Cowen there who started splashing the cash.
what did he say about his decentralisation policy ? ..dreamed up to distract from the budget….. as a distraction it worked for him but not in practice,,, govt paid put for buildings all over the place which were not used
Buildings were rented and bought off a list of people that read like Cairde FF.
It worked as intended, it didn’t work for Ireland but it did for FF’s donors.
I agree that the internal politics of FF ruined decentralisation which is still a good idea if limited to Cork City as a counterbalance to Dublin and Limerick, Galway and Waterford as regional centres of sufficient existing scale. However the decentralisation policy regardless of the effectiveness in reducing pressures on housing, services and transport in Dublin, it has been shown that it actually made money for the state contrary to popular opinion.
That one word – HONESTY, it was truly amazing when it existed. We head towards 2016 as a corrupt nation and no honesty.
Can u imagine this were 1916 – they wud only be disgusted.
When you negative real bond yields asset prices go up. If you don’t understand what that means then you don’t understand asset markets and don’t know what an asset bubble is. Most of the politicians on this panel have no real or practical experience of banking or real estate. They are just populists trying to score points.
Was he asked about setting up Financial Regulator to “oversee / regulate” banking, a task performed well by Central bank up to then?
Arrogant tool. That said, Ahearn was behind him every step of the way.
this is just an oener to cowens appearance,
act 3 scene 4
election is very near
ie no reports or inquiry’s come to fruition
Giving people massive tax breaks to build ghost estates in places like Roscommon wasn’t a mistake? It was just the thing that crippled our whole economy, and a mistake that Irish will be paying for long after he’s in his grave.
He’s aged a lot
sure he did nothing wrong. neither did any of the rest of the Fianna Fail eejits
Charley made it possible for our young adults, to work hard, and get reworded for it.This is what hurt our young people most, the loss of the ” feeling”, tthat earning money was great, and they could , soon, put a deposit on a home,the world was their oyster!!I believe thatBertie and M c Creevy, went too far,Bertie assured us, property need not come down, at a meeting with Estate Agents. Then it all went pearshaped, as it was plain to see the housing market was overheating, did he know the banks would be in big trouble if he intervined, mmm I don’t know.
They got “reworded” allright, from employed to unemployed!
Decentralisation ?
have your say