Professor Stephen Kinsella was Taoiseach Simon Harris's pick as economics adviser. Photo: Sean Curtin Rachel Reeves became the first woman to get the keys to No 11. Photo: PA Luis Ruelas and Teresa Giudice.
Photo: Getty Nalac co-founder and director Siobhán O’Connell Taoiseach Simon Harris’s choice of Professor Stephen Kinsella as his economics adviser came as no surprise to those who remembered the cosy chat they had in The Currency in October 2020. Billed as a “major interview”, this was more like a meeting of a mutual admiration society. “I have been very impressed at your very obvious and genuine commitment to diversity,” was one of Kinsella’s, um, questions to the then Future and Higher Education Minister.
After one of Harris’s answers, Kinsella said: “I agree 100pc.” Later during the love-in he told Harris: “I completely agree with you.” When the minister said he wanted to put in place a scientific and research structure that could advise the Government, Kinsella cooed: “That’s fantastic.
” The accolades did not all go the one way. “I think it’s a brilliant question,” Harris marvelled, after one of Kinsella’s incisive probes. Nothing that Kinsella has written of late will cause any difficulties for him on Merrion Street either.
On May 23, he declared that the Government had been “reinvigorated by Simon Harris”, and in his last published piece in The Currency before getting the adviser gig, Kinsella even had something nice to sa.
