Developers and builders ‘should be left go to the wall’

BUILDERS and developers should be left to go to the wall if they can’t survive the economic downturn by their own efforts instead of looking for state intervention to prop them up, the head of the country’s leading economic think-tank has said.

Professor Frances Ruane, director of the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) also said business bosses needed to cut their own salaries and bonuses to save their skins rather than taking the axe solely to the lower levels of their workforce.

Prof Ruane was speaking at a seminar held by the Institute of Public Administration to mark 50 years since the groundbreaking 1958 plan, Economic Development, was drawn up by civil servants led by Dr TK Whitaker to lift the country out of the poverty and backwardness that characterised the 1950s.