Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 25 March 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Context Phase

Mr. Harry Browne:

I am not in a position to say for sure that there were op-eds coming in that were being rejected. We know the example of Professor Morgan Kelly. This was a piece from a very senior and estimable academic that was nonetheless rejected on the grounds that it was dangerous and offensive. I go back to my point that newspapers should be actively seeking contrarian views but I think that the people who could have offered those views probably could have done better. People sometimes point to the ESRI reviews and say that if one reads them very carefully, one can see that they were calling the bubble. We should not have had to read them very carefully. They should have been calling it louder and should have been offering those op-eds to the newspapers.