Predicting the future

Media predictions are something to be wary of.

Is it the best of times or the worst of times? Is it getting better or worse? Who knows? They're pointlessly subjective questions, the answers depending on whom you're asking – Mary O'Rourke? Roy Keane? – and the data you choose to inflect them with.

Meejit never quite ceases to be amazed at Irish journalism's propensity for all-encompassing pontification and prognostication. Twenty years ago the amazer-in-chief was John Healy, hailed by all and sundry as the leading political journalist of his generation, but whose Irish Times columns seemed to consist mainly of forecasts and boasts about the accuracy of previous forecasts, rather than, say, stories or insight.

Sure, predicting the future correctly is a form of analysis of the present, spotting the developments that will emerge from perhaps-obscure corners of today's scene. What's more, it evokes some of the fun of the betting-shop. But the media's love of forecasting seems to Meejit to be both self-indulgent and rather anti-journalistic: after all, if events really do unfold in ways that are ultimately predictable and orderly, why do we keep pumping out publications and broadcasts that shout about the novelty (ie "news") of what's taking place?

This sort of writing is the meeting place of superstition (where categories like "fate" and "destiny" have some meaning) and pseudo-science (spotting patterns and ignoring contingencies), and the turning of the year is its prime time.

Not every journalist gets to indulge in this sort of exercise. It's generally a form of filler peculiar to columnists and the occasional features-writer. In the Irish Times we've seen a range of contributions, ranging from Vincent Browne's piss-take predictions to Sheila Flanagan doing macro-economics for 2006 by observing the behaviour of shoppers in Dundrum. (Nobody ever said journalism had to be hard work.)

Now that we're a decade or so into Good Times, the genre here is less and less concerned with the fine detail of political life as augured by Healy and more interested in our financial fate – or, at its most sophisticated, in the peculiar intersection of economics ("will the bubble burst?") and morality ("and will we deserve it?").

Thus we get the Irish Times going big soon after New Year with Kathy Sheridan's massive feature about debt, which isn't just for poor people any more. We're "living beyond our means": is it "a disaster waiting to happen"? With a panel about middle-class debtors "Richard and Patricia", ominously headlined "Borrowed Time" and complete with trendy marital strife, this had all the usual elements, including more reassuring notes after you waded through paragraphs of anxiety. (Its arithmetic, however, was not terribly reassuring: 5,500 middle-class clients for MABS [Money Advice & Budgeting Service] out of 17,000 seen each year is "more than a third", apparently.)

These days the Irish Times has an economics editor who can happily moralise all the year long. Marc Coleman is so pontifical he should have a Roman numeral in his name, and his pronouncements are made with apparent confidence in his infallibility: "The feeling has grown that the Celtic Tiger is making us less spiritual. This is, of course, nonsense."

This dictum fell from Coleman's lips in the course of a stunning New Year's message in the Friday business section. It featured a potted history of capitalism that Marx could only have glared at enviously, but the gist of it was telling the Catholic church to stop moaning about the economic system. It seems religion has a far more important job to do: to protect capitalism by teaching business people to behave honestly in their transactions, "improving the moral capital of voters and economic agents".

Coleman concludes: "Religion is indeed essential to economic life. A capitalist world without faith would be a barren and pointless existence." No, secular morality won't do, and the religious piety of history's mass-exploiters and genocidal maniacs goes unacknowledged. Here is a true, old-fashioned conservative, further belying the myth of the liberal Irish Times.