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Ciarán Casey

@ciaranmcasey.bsky.social
571 followers 400 following 292 posts

Economic historian at UL. Author of 'The Irish Department of Finance, 1959-1999' and 'Policy Failures and the Irish Economic Crisis'.

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Looking forward to the blockades outside the house www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/comm...
irishexaminer.com
Fuel excise cuts won't fix hauliers' problems
Ciarán Casey argues the State should change the way it taxes fuel
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
That the Orange Order still wants to march down the Garvaghy road speaks volumes.
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Ironically they don't get much media attention precisely because they work so well.
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
This has a good claim to be the most significant report in the history of the state
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Last week we'd a seminar from Paul De Grauwe. I found him invaluable when thinking about the euro for my Department of Finance book. He anticipated the risks better than anyone, warning about potential housing booms and banking crises in 1998. A colleague rightly described his seminar as masterful
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
That sinking feeling as you open a set of reports and realise every one of them was AI generated. It's so weird that we've all continued with business as usual.
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
I'm only properly appreciating the magic of antibiotics
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
From @jburnmurdoch.ft.com back in July. Housing is a problem in a lot of places but here it's exceptionally bad.
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
There are queues at the car washes. There's a logic to letting businesses use water but the upshot is the restrictions don't bite if you can pay someone else to do it
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Reposted by Ciarán Casey
Conor O'Carroll @conorocarroll.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
Tonight, a new investigation reveals how much water each individual data centre campus has used in the past two years. But our findings also show how pharma plants have used more than double that of data centres. Story w/ @davidmacredmond.bsky.social Read just after midnight on thejournal.ie 🔜
A screenshot of an upcoming story on The Journal. The headline reads "Data centres used almost one billion litres of water last year but another industry used far more".
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
The Commission on Emigration (1954) bemoaning the lot of young Irish adults.
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
From the Commission on Emigration (1954). It should be the county motto tbh
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
And data centres, obviously? Even by Irish standards, a gung-ho data centre policy while refusing to invest properly in water infrastructure is bananas
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
So much of the dicussion on mid-century Irish health metrics focuses on policy debates and the church. Any comparative analysis suggests it was almost all about medicine
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
Ireland, 1954. Plus ça change
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
For years the mortality rate in the Irish mental hospitals was way above those in the Gulag. Mullingar was over 12% in 1947. Essentially nobody was dying in the prisons and there was huge variation across institutions. I've found no compelling explanation or investigation on it
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
In the late 1940s the Department of Health was proudly giving out free DDT as a health measure
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
From the late 1940s
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
The first appearance of this font which I feel they used for the next fifty years
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
One of the weirdest findings on this material wellbeing project is the all-cause death rates in the UK fell sharply during WW2 but not in Ireland. The best explanation I've seen is food price controls but if anyone has a competing explanation please shout
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
Deep in a statistical abstract from 1948. I'm actually amazed only 1% of @rte.ie broadcasting time was religious services
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
An impressive breakout from Dundrum mental aylum in 1926
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Pádraic Fogarty @whittledaway.bsky.social · 23/05/2026
Good news from England where authorities have finally seen sense and ended the pointless culling of badgers. In Ireland on it goes, killing thousands of badgers and costing taxpayers a ball breaking €157 million thus year alone. www.bbc.com/news/article...
bbc.com
Badger cull ends in England as licence will not be renewed, Defra says
Defra confirms permission to use an active culling licence will not be given, ending the practice.
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 23/05/2026
This comes back to me every time I see the book now
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
I'm writing a book on material wellbeing since independence and quite chuffed with these two epigraphs from Cumann na nGaedheal for the opening chapter
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 20/04/2026
Spot on by John Fitzgerald. There's a lot of political cowardice around pretending that the protestors were representative or particularly vulnerable www.irishtimes.com/business/eco...
irishtimes.com
John FitzGerald: Ireland faces a possible winter recession yet has plundered its war chest
Government fuel package effectively takes from the poor to give to the richer as Strait of Hormuz blockade threatens even higher fuel prices
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 19/04/2026
Still haven't seen a census form that was read properly before they filled it out
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
We're like that cartoon of the dinosaurs watching the meteor coming www.irishtimes.com/world/2026/0...
irishtimes.com
Scientists sound alarm as Atlantic current system much more likely to collapse than thought
Collapse would have catastrophic consequences for Europe, Africa and the Americas
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 08/03/2026
Spring
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 20/02/2026
I'm rereading a book by a Nobel-winning economist after 20 years. I was impressed the first time, whereas this time round I can't get over how he says absolutely nothing in as many words as possible With many 'classics' of fact and fiction most of their readers would struggle to summarise the point
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Economic & Social History Society of Ireland @eshsi.bsky.social · 17/02/2026
We’re delighted to announce the society's 2026 Distinguished Lecture will be delivered by Prof Tyler Anbinder of George Washington University. "The Surprising Socio-Economic Mobility of New York’s Great Famine Refugees" Online, 4pm GMT (11am EST), Thurs. 5 Mar. 2026. Register here: www.eshsi.org
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 14/02/2026
Whoever picks the Valentine's movies for TV is really going left field. So far it's been romantic classics including The Matrix, Saving Private Ryan, Rocky V and The Killing Fields
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 12/02/2026
I'm writing a book on wellbeing in Ireland. What's striking about the GDP debate is policymakers here rarely treated it as the core metric, which was clearly employment. Similarly Simon Kuznets argued it was a rubbish measure of wellbeing right from its inception www.irishtimes.com/opinion/edit...
irishtimes.com
The Irish Times view on measuring national welfare: GDP only tells part of the story
All too often factors such as sustainability, human well-being and equity remain secondary considerations
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 30/01/2026
It's baffling that people still happily broadcast how many voluntary flights they're taking
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 29/01/2026
I've always found this a really poor solution for a whole range of students
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 29/01/2026
*Taps the sign*
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Reposted by Ciarán Casey
Matthew Highton @matthighton.bsky.social · 27/01/2026
If Bilbo had Chat GPT
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 27/01/2026
Young people in the 1940s wasting their money instead of saving for a house
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 19/01/2026
"Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the US" True greatness
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 17/01/2026
We're all like lobsters in a pot being slowly inured to how insane he is Trump vows higher tariffs on eight European countries until US gets Greenland – The Irish Times share.google/Pnkay4bJ4NAK...
share.google
Trump vows higher tariffs on eight European countries until US gets Greenland
US congressional delegation meets Danish and Greenlandic politicians in Copenhagen
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Niamh NicGhabhann Coleman @niamhroisin.bsky.social · 16/01/2026
Hello historians - there is a specific purpose role now advertised in UL’s history department - Title of Post: Assistant Professor in Irish History (specialism History of the Family) - all details are over on UL vacancies! Do share! #jobsky #skystorians #speirgorm #speirghorm
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 15/01/2026
Alistair Campbell's diary during the Good Friday negotiations "George Mitchell said even for these guys, they were being ridiculous. I asked him if he intended to write a book about the talks. ‘No, the truth would be too awful for words.’"
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 04/01/2026
The logical jumps in this are really something. www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2026...
irishtimes.com
Rite & Reason: In so-called bad old Catholic Ireland, there was no homelessness
Rite & Reason: There is a small but significant return to the Christian faith, particularly Catholicism
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 30/12/2025
Every night RTÉ is playing some classic movie in the middle of the night and each time I promise myself I'll just go to bed. They do it every Christmas
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 28/12/2025
The footage RTÉ unearths to accompany reporting on the newly-released state documents is almost invariably more interesting than the files themselves.
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 19/12/2025
Upping your spending growth target from 5% to 6% and calling it a fundamental change is impressively creative. The Rainbow govt targeted 2% real spending growth and got close. McCreevy set 4% nominal and got nowhere near it. We've been much more like the latter www.irishtimes.com/business/202...
irishtimes.com
Harris promises ‘fundamental change’ in budgeting with new 6% spending rule
Coalition publishes new Medium Term Fiscal and Structural Plan, setting out spending for next five years
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 18/12/2025
Just appalled at the way the vote on this went. Three major parties without anything approximating a soul
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 07/12/2025
Future civilisations will marvel at this image. Sages will debate its meaning
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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 04/12/2025
It's spectacular that he's survived scandal after scandal, breaking every rule of politics, but for his supporters inflation is the Rubicon.
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