Smash hit

But public debate was dominated by stockbrokers and bank economists, the likes of Dan McLaughlin of Bank of Ireland (whose views are no longer in as much demand since the banking crisis). Academic economists largely stayed quiet on their campuses.

Meanwhile the profession was also being downgraded in the public service. Garret FitzGerald, the former taoiseach, has said that when he was in government in the 1980s there were 17 economists working in the Department of Finance. There are currently 57 officials with a degree in economics “and related disciplines”, Brian Lenihan recently told the Dail, with 44 having a Masters but only one a PhD — what economists consider to be “the union card”.

So when Lenihan needed specialist advice, he had to hire from outside. Ahearne came in last month, while Peter Bacon was engaged to devise a scheme to rescue the banks and McCarthy hired to head up An Bord Snip.

There is also understood to be regular contact between Lenihan and McWilliams and Patrick Honohan of Trinity College Dublin.

“I don’t know of a government in the developed world that makes less use of economics than Ireland,” said Kevin Denny of UCD on The Irish Economy, a website where the country’s top economists now meet every day to debate ideas. It averages over 2,700 hits a day and has had 134,000 visits since Christmas (www.irisheconomy.ie).

“Many governments in developing countries have greater economics capacity than the Irish government,” Denny said. “While most go to outside agencies, whether consultants or academics, there is no substitute for one’s own expertise.”

Tol is not convinced the civil service needs more or better economists, however. “At the moment, civil servants are shuffled around, so by the time someone understands what he’s doing, he gets promoted or moved to the next division,” he said. “While that continues, increasing quantity or quality will not do much good.”

But Harmon would like to see a structured civil-service grade of “economist”, as in Britain, instead of confining experts to agencies such as Forfas. “The fact we don’t have economists in the front-line departments of health and education is stunning,” he said.

“You have no real capacity to develop new thinking around issues like re-training programmes for the unemployed. Who will design these programmes and stress-test them? Other countries have a kind of economic secretariat that works between departments, as temporary advisers can’t do that work.”

BUT do economists know what will get us out of this mess and, more importantly, how to make sure we never get into one like it again?

Unlike America, there is no split among Irish economists about whether the government should, in the spirit of JM Keynes, break the downward spiral by jacking up public spending. (Who’d give us the money anyway?) What debate there is among economists is fixed on the banking bailout.

And yet there are widely divergent views about how long the recession will last, and what the future holds. Why do economists make such infuriatingly different projections based on the exact same data? Is it because they use different models? And if so, whose model is best?

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