George Lee - The Terminator!

If I listen to one more sentence of Irish economy negativity on programs and news bulletins from RTE's George Lee I think I'll freak. In the last few weeks he has been a right moany Mary! If ever one man has tried his best to talk us into a recession then the nearest I can think of is George Lee.

Look, we all know the economy has benefited from the property boom and of course the scale of the building program and valuations can't last forever. The recent interest rate rises were inevitable eventually - they had dropped to amazingly low levels about 2-4 years ago. But to hint that Ireland in general is in major trouble from changes in the property area and interest rates is very speculative.

Mr. Lee seems to like a bit of one-track journalism to keep his points nice and crisp. On a recent RTE program he augmented his fire and brimestone on property by rattling on about closures of many factories. There will always be businesses closing even in strong economies, especially as trading models change. Furthermore, he did not balance this one bit by mentioning all the new operations which continue to start in Ireland, nor indeed the continued success and growth of many long term large facilities here.

I'm not arguing that the economy and wealth here is going to continue at same pace as previously. However, equally I do not believe there is any strong evidence to suggest it will go into serious decline. We are now a very adaptable and well educated country and have built up a considerble variety of skills in the last few decades. Our English language base is very valuable internationally and we also have good quality labour sources both within and outside the country.

Of course there are challenges ahead, they are always around the corner, but being plummeted by one track negativity by journalist economist (and mainly behaving like the former) George Lee is likely to make many investors unnecessarily nervous. Wow, can you imagine putting George Lee in charge of a sales campaign. He would have all the customers convinced they should buy from the competition.