This property crash and resultant financial crisis is producing all sorts of bitter ironies. Last week the government ann­ounced the economic consultant Dr Peter Bacon was being hired – apparently to research and suggest ways to create a bad bank or insurance scheme to deal with the toxic loans clogging up Irish banks.

Talk about events coming full circle. Many of these loans arise from the frenzy of speculative Irish property purchasing that took place from 2000 to 2006, which left Ireland with the second largest house-price bubble in the industrialised world. Bacon was among a group of cassandras who warned almost a decade ago that unchecked speculative demand could result in a dangerous bubble that one day could painfully burst.

Now the government wants him to devise a scheme to detox these loans. On top of hiring, or is that re-hiring Bacon, the government will later this year consider introducing a property tax in an attempt to "broaden the tax base'', or, in other words, shore up the crumbling tax base.

But in a further irony this measure was precisely what Bacon had suggested to the government back in 2000 when he did a report on the Irish housing market. It's worth replaying his words now: "The housing market is attracting speculative demand. In some cases, this takes the form of individuals taking a view about prospective house prices and buying residential property, as opposed to another form of investment.

"These various kinds of speculative demand forestall the movement of the housing market to stability. As this happens, there is a tendency to stimulate further speculative demand and in this way a 'bubble' can develop.

"If allowed to develop unchecked, such a process has the potential capacity to threaten overall stability of the market.''

Bacon suggested the way to check this speculative demand was a property tax of between 2 and 3% on the value of each dwelling. It never happened and loans were advanced by banks like Anglo, Irish Nationwide and AIB that never had any real chance of being re-paid once the bubble started to deflate slightly, never mind pop entirely.

Now Bacon is back suggesting ways the government can deal with the fallout of a property market that has certainly not returned to "stability''. Effectively he is being paid to deal with the consequences of ignoring his previous reports. All we can say here is, 'nice work if you can get it'.