The Irish economy is currently in a "very strong shape" and misleading headlines in the media are not giving a true picture, a leading economist said today.
Dr Dan McLaughlin, chief economist at Bank of Ireland said he does not know where all the negative talk about economy is coming from because he feels that the situation "very healthy".
He was echoing recent comments made by the bank's chief executive Brian Goggin who warned about the dangers of "talking the country into a recession".
Speaking on RTÉ radio, Dr McLaughlin said "misleading headlines" in the media were not giving a true reflection of economic reality and were "taking things out of context".
He said reports about the rising number of redundancies was one such example.
The economist said the number of redundancies in Ireland per is currently running at 2,000 per month, or 24,000 per year.
"That has been pretty constant over the last five or six years," he said, adding that tens of thousands of new jobs have been created over the same period of time.
"Redundancies are a fact of every modern dynamic economy, even one as successful as Ireland's. Newspaper headlines are one thing the reality of the economy are another," he added.
Dr McLaughlin said it was "completely ridiculous" to suggest that "suddenly in 2008 that the economy will fall off a cliff".
He said the available indicators are that the economy is broadly growing at the same pace as last year at around 6 per cent, and he expected it to grow by 5 per cent in the medium term.
Dr McLaughlin said that in the first three months of 2007 retail spending, car sales, employment and exports and industrial production are up.
He said he has no problem with predictions that things will slow down over the next five to ten years, but said it was "difficult to believe that it will decline sharply in the next few years".
He added that a slowdown in the rate of economic growth does not mean that the economy will decline.
"People see recessions around every corner," he said.