The biggest surprise was that anyone was surprised at the weak economic figures published last week. Yet, the snapshot of GDP/GNP for the three months to the end of June unsettled sovereign bond markets and gave rise to warnings of an even more austere December budget. The value of the economy by the start of the summer was €41.3bn by gross domestic product (GDP), 1.8% lower than a year earlier. At €33.1bn, the economy was down 4.1% in the year when measured by the gross national product (GNP) measure. GNP, the favoured way of valuing the domestic economy, is startlingly lower than GDP as it excludes most of the profits the multinational European head offices report out of Ireland.

But this should have come as little surprise. The quarterly GDP/GNP figures fail to provide timely snapshots of the economy. Instead, the exchequer returns, published each month, provide a much less ambiguous picture, and the Vat component of the monthly returns provide a great read of the consumer side of the economy. At the end of March, Vat receipts collected for the first three months were, at €3.2bn, a huge 13% less than the amount the government raised in the same period in 2009. By the end of this June, the Vat collected in the first six months of the year was, at €5.1bn, still a sizeable 8% less than the amount collected a year earlier.

Since then, the exchequer returns have provided two more months of readings on the economy: the Vat receipts by the end of August, at €7.2bn, were 6.5% lower than a year earlier, giving some hope that the economy would start bottoming out late this year. Most analysts know that it will only be next year that the economy shows any sort of meaningful economic growth and that government revenues improve. No surprise there.