Cliff Taylor

1 week ago | irishtimes.com | Cliff Taylor

Budget season kicks off earlier these days and the holding of the National Economic Dialogue (NED) this week – where interest groups put their case - has sounded the starting gun ahead of October’s package. Over recent years governments have favoured using scarce resources for extra spending over lower taxes. And this is set to continue. This means less wherewithal for tax cuts – and here the promised return of the VAT rate for the hospitality sector to 9 per cent looms large.

2 weeks ago | irishtimes.com | Cliff Taylor

There is one key question at the heart of housing policy that remains lost in a fog. It is a surprisingly simple one. Where and how do we want people to live? There is a theory here; then what is happening in practice. And caught in the middle are younger people trying to work out where they can find a place to buy or rent. Let’s, for the sake of illustrating this, consider a young, middle-income couple both working in the Dublin region.

2 weeks ago | irishtimes.com | Cliff Taylor

There are debates about where the State should and should not get involved in the housing market – but no argument that one area where it needs to step in is the provision of social housing for those who do not have the resources to rent or buy in the private market. Like many areas of the housing market, there are shortages here, as shown via long local authority housing lists and homelessness figures.

3 weeks ago | irishtimes.com | Cliff Taylor

Ireland’s economic data was always going to be a bit special at the start of this year. But Thursday’s figures were mind-bending. It is impossible to overstate the extent to which we now stand out in international comparisons. And this is not just a curiosity – it matters. The economy, as measured by gross domestic product (GDP), was 22 per cent larger in the first quarter of 2025 than one year earlier, according to the latest estimates from the Central Statistics Office. Think about it.

3 weeks ago | irishtimes.com | Cliff Taylor

Financial markets have regained some ground since the April wobble and an average managed pension fund is just a couple of per cent down for the year as a whole. So is it time for those with investments to relax? Quite possibly not. Here are four key things to watch. 1. The July factor: Share prices recovered and bond markets steadied after Donald Trump partly reversed his “liberation day” threat of blanket tariffs, made in early April.