BRINGING HOME THE BACON

Peter Bacon, the economic consultant who dreamed up the National Asset Management Agency and once advocated a cut in the national minimum wage, has charged the Irish Hotels Federation €60,000 for five weeks work. His report for the Federation, published last November, concluded that the country needed to close a quarter of its hotel rooms because the sector was insolvent.
Bacon has written some of the most important reports on the Irish economy of the last 12 years, including three on the property market between 1998 and 2000.
In the Sunday Times, a fellow economist, Jim Power, described Bacon’s fee for the hotels report as expensive. “If you do a project that lasts about a month, I would have thought around the €40,000 mark might be justified, even if you are employing other people. At €40,000 – that’s €2,000 a day,”
Power commented.