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Research & Innovation
      

An appetite for success

Bookmaker and ex-politician Ivan Yates tells Margaret Donnelly that he hasn't fully ruled out a future role in politics, why he thinks an appetite will emerge for a party other than Fianna Fail, and how he'd prefer handle E15 bets than sell yachts in the south of France

Ireland's 'Celtic cubs' are in for a rude awakening, according to Ivan Yates. The former Fine Gael politician-turned bookmaker is quite pessimistic about our current economic situation and is adamant there is no soft landing in store. ''The Celtic cubs are a very pampered generation and they are going to get some shock about what is going to happen in the next couple of years. It's not their parent's fault, it's just the affluent situations that they have been in, but unfortunately there will be no soft landing.'' However, such negativity is not what Yates is about and, while he outlines what he sees as the four major reasons our economy is taking a battering, he's equally quick to point out what he thinks are the two ways out of it.
First off, the doubling of oil prices represents a permanent shift in wealth from the western world to the Middle East and is something we cannot recover from the marketplace, he says.
Secondly, we have lost about 16 per cent of competitiveness particularly for the food market due to currency, the strength of the euro against the dollar, which means food competitors are forced to sell at a loss or get off the shelves because they are no longer price competitive.
The third factor, he points to, is that a lot of our economic growth and tax revenue has been sustained on the back of a construction boom that has imploded with overcapacity and has resulted in an overhang of property, which will cause the fourth problem - the credit crisis. ''For sometime I have been very pessimistic about the situation and I think there are only two ways out of it, which the German economy has shown. One is a really sustained attack of competetitivness, meaning more productivity, pay restraints and cost cutting in every direction.''