In a talk he gave to UCD’s Economics Society last week, Professor Morgan Kelly gave his thoughts on the Irish economy, his first public comments in three years. He had some grim possibilities in mind regarding SMEs and the dumbing down in Irish universities.

Here are some choice quotes:

“The crisis we’re told is over. What have we learned from that? The official narrative that has appeared is very clear. According to this, there were two bad people, Fingleton and Fitzpatrick.”

“This is Ireland, guys. We don’t do competence.”

“All the stuff that happened, all the stuff we talked about. The property boom and bust, the bank collapse, the state bankruptcy. As far as official Ireland is concerned, this was like a bad dream.”

“There’s going to be a big cleanup. It means foreclosures on mortgages and it means dealing with small business loans. What you had during the bubble, owners of SMEs [Small and Medium Enterprises] borrowed a lot to buy property. That was the way you made money back in the happy times. So a lot of these companies have got very big losses on property and they’re basically surviving through bank forbearance. Banks aren’t calling in these loans.”

“We’re going to see a lot of SMEs go under.”

“It’s an enormous problem that no one seems to care about.”

“But even if they [Germany] give us the money for the recapitalisation, the collateral damage to the Irish economy is going to be huge.”

“We are walking into exactly the same situation we were in before with loans to developers. We could see this coming from a long way off. It was going to be a big problem. But in the end Anglo goes under. There’s complete panic. There are midnight meetings. People do very stupid things and it looks like we’re going to face this once again.”

“By failing to produce well-trained graduates you are screwing up your economy in the long run.”

Previously: Morgan Kelly Takes Out Bearded Man In Extra-Judicial Killing

Morgan: A Suitable Case For Treatment

Five Years

We Didn’t Have A Clue