Patrick Honohan

Honohan graduated with a B.A. in Economics and Mathematics from University College Dublin in 1971 and received an M.A. from the same institution in 1973. From the London School of Economics he received an M.Sc. in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics (1974) and a PhD (1978).

Before pursuing postgraduate research, Honohan took a position with the International Monetary Fund in 1971. While completing his PhD in London, he joined the economics staff of the Central Bank of Ireland. During the 1980s, he was Economic Advisor to Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald and subsequently began working with the World Bank. Honohan then spent seven years as a Research Professor with the Economic and Social Research Institute before returning to the World Bank in 1998 as a Lead Economist and subsequently Senior Advisor on financial sector policy.

The author of numerous academic papers and monographs,[2] he has taught economics at the LSE, University of California, San Diego, the Australian National University and University College Dublin. He was appointed Professor of International Financial Economics and Development in 2007 at Trinity College, Dublin.

In September 2009, Honohan was appointed as the tenth governor of the Central Bank of Ireland. In this position he acquired a reputation as a "straight talker" who would not follow the "green jersey agenda" (a major criticism of the Central Bank of Ireland pre-crisis, see criticisms of the Irish Central Bank).[3] His May 2010 Report on the Irish Banking Crisis[4] provided an in-depth analysis of the regulatory and supervisory shortcomings that contributed to the post-2008 Irish Banking Crisis.

Since his retirement from the Central Bank of Ireland, Honohan has been critical of the level of distortion that U.S. multinational BEPS tools have been having on Ireland's national accounts. Distortion of economic data is a common problem for corporate tax havens and Ireland is considered one of the world's largest havens.[5] During the famous leprechaun economics affair, he made the following comment:

The statistical distortions created by the impact on the Irish National Accounts of the global assets and activities of a handful of large multinational corporations have now become so large as to make a mockery of conventional uses of Irish GDP.

— Patrick Honohan, ex-Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland, 13 July 2016[6]

He has said the following about credit booms:

The tax revenue generated by the boom came in many forms: capital gains on property, stamp duty on property transactions, value added tax on construction materials and income tax from the extra workers – immigrants from the rest of Europe, from Africa, from China, flooded in as the construction sector alone swelled up to account for about 13 per cent of the numbers at work ...[7]

• Irish property bubble
• Post-2008 Irish economic downturn
• National Asset Management Agency
• Ireland as a tax haven