Aftermath
Former Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald has blamed Ireland's dire economic state in 2009 on a series of "calamitous" government policy errors. Between the years of 2000 and 2003 the then Finance Minister Charlie McCreevy boosted public spending by 48% while cutting income tax. A second problem occurred when government policies allowed, or even encouraged, a housing bubble to develop, "on an immense scale".
Nobel laureate Paul Krugman had a bleak prediction, “As far as responding to the recession goes, Ireland appears to be really, truly without options, other than to hope for an export-led recovery, if and when the rest of the world bounces back.”
The International Monetary Fund in mid April 2009 forecasted a very poor outlook for Ireland. It projected that the Irish economy would contract by 8 per cent in 2009 and by 3 per cent in 2010 – and that might be on the optimistic side.
Unemployment in Ireland was forecasted to rise almost 17 percent in 2010, the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) stated in a report published on 2009-04-28, however the unemployment rate in 2010 steadied at a rate of 14%.
On November 19, 2010, The Irish Government had begun talks on a multi-billion-dollar economic assistance package with experts from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Union.
Read more about this topic: Celtic Tiger
Famous quotes containing the word aftermath:
“The aftermath of joy is not usually more joy.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)