Our pro-business environment must remain

IT APPEARS that nothing is going right for the Irish economy at the moment. Over the past week we have again been hit with a barrage of negative news on the real economy, all of it suggesting the deterioration is continuing and has not yet bottomed out.

The exchequer returns to the end of July make for dismal reading, the redundancy figures for the first seven months are awful and arguably the most symbolically important employer in the country, Pfizer, has announced job losses.

On the plus side, oil prices are slipping back again, the euro has lost some ground and the Federal Reserve is reasonably upbeat about the US economy, although recognising that second-quarter growth was given an artificial boost by personal tax rebates.