Brian Lucey: An angry man

Brian Lucey really doesn’t like me.

Take a look at the comments on the recent article written by Fintan O’Toole.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2010/0810/1224276469748.html

I made a fairly innocuous post about a Merril Lynch presentation that was made to the Department of Finance on Sep 28, disputing some of the contents of O’Toole’s article.

Lucey immediately responded by highlighting my political affiliation and my most recent electoral record. He backed that up later in the discussion with reference to my spelling, and by implying that I’m more concerned about animals than CF patients.

Lucey and I have something of an Internet history.

A couple of years back, he sent me a private message on politics.ie in which he referred to the Greens as ‘Fianna Ghlas’ and in which he bemoaned that he was having to work to keep ‘you and yours in clover’.

The last bit was particularly puzzling, given that I’m self employed and that he is largely paid by the State.

Anyway, time passed and before we knew it, the Green Party was meeting in Dublin to decide whether or not we would support the Revised Programme for Government.

At this time, NAMA was the hot topic of the day, and lots of people, including Lucey, were hell bent on the Greens rejecting the rPFG and bringing down the Government.

To that end, he managed to obtain (from who, I don’t know) the email addresses of all the Green  Party Secretaries across the county, and emailed us to plead his case for bringing down the Government.

I replied to this email, copying in everyone to whom it had been sent, highlighting Lucey’s attitude to the Green Party from the private message he had sent me a year or so earlier.

Subsequently, for various reasons, the Green Party voted to accept the rPFG and stay in Government, much to Lucey’s chagrin.

In response, his antipathy to the Greens deepened, and he managed to construct an elaborate fantasy regarding what went on prior to our vote in the RDS.

He expounded on this fantasy in a recent letter to the Irish Times, where he claims that the vote basically came down to whether or not we wanted to invest in infrastructure for CF patients or protect wild animals (this is arrant nonsense).

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/letters/2010/0626/1224273364067.html

The fact that the Irish Times would print such a letter, which to me seems to belie certain political prejudices, and at the same time present Lucey as an independent commentator on financial matters, puzzles me.

I’m also pretty skeptical about  Lucey’s grasp of some of the basics of economics and even accounting.

In 2006, he wrote a report in which he predicted that house prices would continue to grow until 2010, and then stabilise. Its hard to criticise him for this, given that his views were shared by several others.

What is more worrying is  his recent treatise on the plight of Anglo Irish Bank, in which he claims that €21bn of Anglo’s debt can be expunged by selling its deposit book.

This fundamental misunderstanding of the most basic assets = liabilities rule is pretty glaring, as demonstrated in this discussion.

Had a Junior Cert Financial Accounting student made this mistake, one could forgive the oversight, but Lucey is a Professor of Finance at Trinity College, Dublin, and a regular media commentator on the banking crisis, which is a tad worrying.

Perhaps if he spent a bit more time at his day job (the one he is paid by the State to do) and a little less time flaming on the Internet, he mightn’t make such mistakes in future.