Minister for Communications Eamon Ryan has defended the Government's economic policies after they were severely criticised by UCD academic Prof Morgan Kelly.
in an article published in The Irish Times on Saturday, Prof Kelly called for the Government to abandon the bank bail-out, or risk the country becoming insolvent.
He claimed it was no longer a question of whether Ireland will go bust but when, and said the huge costs of the bank bailout will sink the country.
Prof Kelly, who originally predicted the crisis, said the open-ended guarantee of banks' liabilities and the Nama bailout will leave the Republic with a "a worse ratio of debt to national income than the one that is sinking Greece" by 2012.
However, Mr Ryan said the Government had no choice but to take the course of action it had chosen, and said international opinion supported the steps it had taken.
"We couldn't just sit back and do nothing. We had to actually take some of the actions that we've taken," Mr Ryan said. "Pretty much all the international experts and leading economic commentators here at home have said we've done the right thing.
"And I think we're starting to see the country come out of the very deep recession that was caused by that debt legacy.
"Morgan Kelly is entitled to his views. You listen to them, but ultimately in Government you have to make the choice and I think we've made the right calls in the economic area."
Mr Ryan vowed the economy will get back on track. “We’re still in a very risky environment, there are still very real international risks as we’ve seen in Europe recently but subject to any sort of international stability we will come out of this, we will get our economy back and people back to work and that is going to help us pay off debts.”
The Department of Finance has also rejected Prof Kelly's prediction, saying it was based on serious inaccuracies.
A department spokesman said yesterday that the academic's analysis was extremely pessimistic and based on a number of very serious inaccuracies. He said that two weeks ago, Central Bank governor Patrick Honohan told the Small Firms' Association the cost of getting the banks out of trouble was manageable and that most of them started the boom with a cushion of shareholders' funds that would enable them to pay their debts from their own resources.