The Irish Government has already been rebuked by Ifac, which said last month that Paschal Donohoe’s sums on expenditure and tax revenue in the coming years don’t quite add up.

The council went as far as to say they “lacked credibility” and were inconsistent with future spending commitments. Ifac said the Government was painting too rosy a picture of future tax revenues while underestimating the likely decline in corporation tax receipts from proposed changes coming down the line.

As long as the cost of borrowing remains low, partially created by the ECB stimulus package, there are lots of things on which to spend this cheap borrowed money.

The list of bills for the Government to pay is sizeable when population increases, one-off projects, commitments to index the tax system and even paying for the likes of the Mica debacle, are taken into account.

Ifac said last month that Budget 2021 included substantial and permanent increases in spending, amounting to at least €5.4bn without long-term funding. It said the bill was up to €8bn if non-Exchequer spending is included.

The counter-argument to all of this is simple. There is no point sitting down with a financial planner while your house is burning down. That proverbial fire – namely Covid-19 – is still burning.

Every government in the EU is in a similar boat. The European Commission suspended debt and deficit limits until 2023.

That seems a bit away at this stage, but inevitably Exchequer adjustments will have to be made. And they will be painful. But just not yet.

Brexit labour shortages chew up UK meat sector

Brexit has not been the massive explosion in the British economy that many had feared. Well, not yet anyway.

Nevertheless, the situation for some businesses is getting a little more incendiary – and that includes big Irish employers on the other side of the Irish Sea.

The British meat industry is actually cutting production as a result of Brexit-related labour shortages, according to a report in the Financial Times. There are even warnings coming from within the sector that it will soon be unable to meet some orders, unless the British government relaxes post-Brexit immigration rules.

Nick Allen, chief executive of the British Meat Processors Association (BMPA), said the sector was heading “towards a brick wall” as a result of labour shortages.

Processors were between 10pc and 11pc short of full capacity, while Allen claimed that one or two were only a couple of weeks away from failing to deliver to retail customers.

Obviously he didn’t mention any names, but the beef and lamb processing sector in the UK has some big Irish players: Dawn Meats has 12 production facilities; while Kepak has as at least five. They are among the industry’s biggest operators in the UK.

The same major Irish meat processors doubled down on their UK investments because of Brexit. They acquired new businesses in Britain and Northern Ireland after the Brexit referendum, to hedge against any barriers to accessing the UK market.

But the new difficulties in finding cheap labour after Brexit will make things a little trickier.

Patrick Coveney of sandwich, salads and sushi maker Greencore, said the company was hiring about 5,000 new staff between April and July this year.

Speaking at May’s announcement of interim results, the Greencore CEO also talked about a tightness in the jobs market arising from the “reset of the labour force” brought about by Brexit. He added that Greencore was investing in robotic technology at its biggest manufacturing plants, partly to offset the impact of wage inflation, which is running at 4pc.

The British government can tweak its immigration rules any time it wants. And it has already made changes to the earnings levels required to have easier access to working in the UK.

But migration often comes in waves. Even prior to Brexit at the start of this year, food processing companies were reporting not so much an exodus of Eastern European workers, but fewer new people arriving to join the labour market.

It might not be a tap that can be easily switched on and off. This comes at a time when the British government signed a new trade deal with Australia. The new deal provides greater access to the UK for young Australians who might want to spend a few years working in Britain.

It will take an awful lot of Aussies who want to work on meat processing lines or picking fruit, to replace what has been lost. In-your-face marketing isn’t always clever

Marketeers get a warning with Ronaldo’s show of bottle

The Cristiano Ronaldo Coke incident reminded me of the great Coca-Cola
sales concept. The Atlanta-based soft- drinks giant used to pursue a strategy of always having a Coca-Cola “within arms’ reach of desire”.

In other words, it was best to have the product available for someone to decide to buy, almost everywhere. Always within arms’ reach.

Ronaldo took a different view. He didn’t want it anywhere near him, least of all right up in front of cameras while giving a press conference.

French player Paul Pogba took a similar view with a bottle of Heineken. It doesn’t look like the idea of plonking bottles of booze on the table in front of elite athletes was given sufficient thought. Especially if some of them are Muslim. 

Ronaldo is not an anti-capitalist rebel by any means. He has benefitted enormously from the sponsorship industry. But sometimes companies simply get things hopelessly wrong. 

It is one thing to have your product within arms’ reach of desire in case somebody might feel like buying it. It is an entirely different thing, and part of a dumb trend among marketeers and brand managers, to have the brand seen absolutely everywhere.

Marketeers are being trained with the idea that having saturation coverage of their logo or product is automatically a big win at an event. I have even heard marketing people congratulate themselves on how they “really owned” an event by plastering the logo everywhere.

Sometimes this isn’t a big win.

Sometimes it just looks crass.