Face the facts - and let's have more of them about the housing market, says Isabel Morton

WHO WOULD want to be an economist these days? We rely on them to provide an analysis of the economic situation, and when they do, we castigate them from a height.

Nowadays, no one wants to hear their gloomy forecasts, however accurate they might seem, as Friends First's Jim Power has found.

His recent prediction that property prices would drop further earned him a barrage of furious feedback, he says, from auctioneers, solicitors, accountants, bankers, property developers and estate agents, leaving him bruised and bemused. Basically, the property industry did not want want to hear what he had to say - that things were likely to get worse before they get better.

Similarly, RTÉ's George Lee has come in for torrents of abuse for his less than rosy assessments of the Irish economy and the property market. Our economists are becoming household names, but not in a good way.

Part of the problem is simply a lack of regular statistical information on the housing market, such as is available in the UK through long established indexes issued by institutions such as the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors.

Here in Ireland ... there is no definitive statistical information available on house prices and so the market relies on reports from banks, building societies and estate agency firms which often contain different messages.

Add to that a natural caginess among property people to reveal the true price of a property bought or sold, and a determination to put a good face on things, and you have a market that is just not able to handle the truth.

Jim Power says he has been accused, he says, of "talking the market down", "talking us into a recession" and of being a "merchant of doom and gloom". A few weeks ago, in this column, I expressed surprise that both the press and the public appeared to have only latched onto the fact that Mr Power was predicting a further drop in property prices and that they had ignored the fact that he went on to predict a market recovery, possibly starting as early as the end of this year, and certainly within 12 to 18 months.

Now, however, Power has been accused of driving the counry further into a recession by singlehandedly putting a stop to the already sluggish property market.

Estate agents will tell you that his report was the kiss of death for already precarious property sales as nervous purchasers became virtually hysterical and retreated to the hills.

Admittedly, the few words in question were not ones which many wanted to hear spoken in public.

Like everybody else, I know in my bones that things may get worse before they get better, but I would have preferred it if those fears had not been confirmed by a respected economist and aired to the nation.

We all like a good gloom and doom story and Jim Power gave us one. So we pounced on him and would not let him off the hook until we forced him into repeatedly confirming his gloomy predictions and we ignored and dismissed any attempts he made to get us to look at his remarks within the overall context of his report.

As one of a nation of dramatic extremists, I too wallowed in the misery of it all and in true melodramatic style, latched on to the one negative aspect of an otherwise relatively optimistic report, and started wailing and keening.

I have not yet become one of those who bear the facial expression of resigned acceptance of our fate and refer to our future with funereal gravity. Nor am I one of the smug - "I told you so" brigade.

On the other hand, there is hardly much point in behaving like a hysterically cheerful hyena and whilst trying to pretend that none of this nasty business is really happening.

Jim Power told it like it was and we just didn't want to hear it. Let us hope that we have not got to the stage where we will avoid commissioning economic reports because we fear what we will be told - namely, the truth.

How tragic it is that we would prefer it if Mr Power were more economical with the truth, as we are unable to cope with his professional analysis of our actual situation.

Can we not just face the music and accept the reality - which is that there is a severe lack of mortgage credit and an expectation among housebuyers across the country that prices will drop again. Why not face up to the situation today in the same way as we rejoiced in the success of recent years? And let us not blame Jim Power, or indeed anyone else for spelling out the truth to us.

My husband recently referred to a poem which was written a hundred years ago entitled - Said Hanrahan- on the topic of a drought in Australia¨. A couple of lines are apt:

If we don't get three inches man, or four to break this drought,

We'll all be rooned said Hanrahan before the year is out

At least we don't get droughts in Ireland, but for God's sake, don't start the rumour!