Dell, energy, a quarter of the economy tied up with construction, Dublin's little-understood role in inflating a global liquidity bubblef there are so many elephants in the room it's hard to know where to look.

It is not a good sign that everyone from the grumpy post-poll Taoiseach to bank honchos are more eager than usual in telling us to shut up. Brian Goggin, the Bank of Ireland boss, scolded assembled journalists last week about their coverage of the Irish economy:

"The negativity is influencing external sentiment around Ireland in a very negative way."

Foreign analysts had given him a hard time about doomsaying forecasts: "I went out of my way to explain [Ireland's] economic robustness [to analysts]. The wheels are not coming off. . . the external perception must be corrected.

It's your responsibility to get this story right."

Getting this story "right" is, of course, a polite way of saying 'don't rock the boat, I've earnings estimates to beat'.

The burden of "correcting" these "external perceptions" lain nicely at the feet of the dwindling band of business journalists not lured into the netherworld of public relations . . . where one is taught that reality offers no truth or even facts, only "perceptions".

In Goggin's case, the grumpiness may have had something to do with investor perceptions that led to a drop in the bank's share price that morning. But he's not unique.

Over the past 14 months, more times than I can say, I've been warned that certain stories running in the Irish media . . . particularly its business pages . . . were "dangerous".

Most of the warnings came from undoubtedly well-meaning, honest people who also happen to work for banks that sell mortgages; civil servants high on social partnership, and development executives who want to keep multinationals sweet on Ireland. These stories . . . about the nature of house prices, public-sector inefficiencies or the rising costs eroding the previously fat profits of multinational firms in Ireland . . . could deflate the confidence of domestic consumers or foreign direct investors.

These fears are at least tenuously attached to reality. Yes, a relentless narrative of irrational pessimism will bring everybody down. And that Ireland's competitors now actively attempt to undermine the Irish story. London, Amsterdam and Frankfurt have noticed Dublin's emergence.

They see how one-third of the world's hedge funds are administered here and that Dublin quietly became a world leader in some of the exotic financial engineering of securitisation.

Securities industry types do not want questions about the rigour of the regulatory watchdogs whose job it is to make sure the global financial alchemists in the IFSC aren't passing off painted lead as gold as the new bedrock of credit markets.

But it is all too convenient to blame a "property crash" docudrama, or a to-be-expected obsession with house prices, or a New York Times story that branded Dublin the "Wild West of European finance". In some places . . . places that experienced the Enlightenment . . .

shooting the messenger went out of fashion. We are, however, merely the messenger.

It was Jean-Claude Trichet, head of the European Central Bank, who labelled the Irish property market "abnormal" on 31 August of last year. Or the OECD's working papers that point out there's never . . . ever . . . been a "soft landing", anywhere, after a house price bubble. Or the American Chamber of Commerce screaming about energy costs, revealing that nearly half of US firms are thinking about job cuts here.

In other words, we are not making this stuff up, folks. I bow to no one in my hopes for a prosperous Ireland or my belief in our potential. I am a foreigner but I have staked my family, my fortune and my future on a faith in that potential. But claims that can't bear the scrutiny of a few scruffy scribes of the Fourth Estate deserve to be rubbished. Being a long-term player in the global economy is going to take a little more confidence than that shown by trying to intimidate people into toeing the line.

Ironically, Goggin's roasting was limited to a single question from one guy in London who, quoting Goggin's own words, asked how the bank would deal with the "challenging and competitive environment" for mortgage lending in Ireland.

(You can hear for yourself on the Bank of Ireland website. ) If things are so rosy, why are so many people nervously lining up scapegoats to blame?