Europe from the European Space Agency's Envisat satellite.

We have been provided with two examples in the past week of Irish national newspaper columnists, Bruce Arnold and Fintan O'Toole showing themselves to be dodgy "economists" and our business is to present economic facts, where available!

Irish Independent columnist Bruce Arnold who campaigned against the Lisbon Treaty also opposes membership of the euro system.

He does not say if he would have had more confidence in Fianna Fáil operating an independent monetary policy during the boom than their governing counterparts in Iceland. Now, he sees devaluation of an Irish currency as a panacea for Irish economic woes.

Last Saturday, he wrote: "It is an added burden that, if the dollar and the pound, in our two biggest markets, fall against the euro, we will remain as uncompetitive inside the eurozone as we are today."

Wrong.

The Eurozone is the biggest market for Irish exports.

In the year to August 2009, 42 per cent of merchandise exports from Ireland went to the Eurozone. In 2008, 37 per cent of service exports went to the common currency area.

"Devaluation leads to something we cannot have -- real gains in productivity restoring our standing in the world marketplace."

Decisions on where most Irish exports go, are not generally made in Ireland.

The key Irish exporters are American firms such as Intel and Microsoft and they have given no indication that they favour Ireland dumping the world's second biggest reserve currency.

Fintan O'Toole wrote on the Budget, in the Irish Times on Tuesday, in an article titled: War waged on poor with a dossier of half-truths.

He wrote that the "Government must be amazed at how easy it has been to sex up its dodgy dossiers of half-truths and declare war on the poor."

Without citing a source, O'Toole wrote: "Unit labour costs (the ratio between productivity and earnings) hardly rose at all in Irish manufacturing between 2000 and 2007.

The growth in labour costs last year was slower than the average in the euro zone. This year, unit labour costs are expected to fall by 7 per cent here and rise by 3 per cent in the rest of the euro zone – giving us a relative advantage of 10 per cent this year alone."

Among 45 online comments, I wrote that Irish manufacturing data can be a dodgy indicator because of the overwhelming dominance of multinationals.  
 
For example, production at US-owned pharmaceutical firms has jumped this year but there has been no significant change in labour input - - so a big rise in output per worker. Other sectors are having a tough time.  
 
However, in contrast with O'Toole's data on unit labour costs in 2009, I referred to very different data: According to the OECD last month, unit labour costs in Irish industry fell 0.9% in the year to June 2009 and were up 0.6% for the total economy.

A very different picture to the one  presented by O'Toole.
 
As for the period foom the launch of the euro in 1999 to 2007, the European Central Bank reports (See table: lower part of page)  that unit labour cost for the total economy, jumped 33.3% and were second to Slovenia at 49.4%; followed by Portugal at 28.9%; Greece at 28.4% and Spain at 25.6%.  
 
Germany was at 2.9%; France at 16.9%  
 
Finfacts article, Nov 2009: Ireland exiting the euro and the risk of setting the Irish economy on fire