Here we go again with the dodgy statistics. On Thursday, the Irish Times carried details of an economic forecast for Ireland which was less gloomy than we have become used to. Although the economy would contract next year by 1.5%, the forecast said, this would be an improvement on the 2.9% previously predicted. The unemployment rate will be 13.5%, according to the forecast. Compared to the 15.5% previously suggested, however, this could almost be regarded as a success.

There was one caveat. The government's economic plan for next year would have to be implemented if these predictions were to become reality. Four billion in spending cuts would have to be achieved. Austerity would have to be embraced as though it had just been released by its kidnappers. Otherwise, these modest signs of recovery would go away to be replaced by even more of the doom and gloom we have become used to.

Sadly, for Ireland, and its economic recovery, these figures come from the Department of Finance and are as worthless therefore as an Anglo Irish Bank share.

Assurances from Finance that we will be fine if we follow its plan are as credible as those from a priest that we will be free of sin if we go to confession.

The Department of Finance's record in the area of economic prognostication is appalling. To take just a few examples from many: in July last year, Finance predicted that tax receipts would fall by €3bn. Two months later, it said that, actually, the shortfall would be €5bn. A few weeks later, it revised the figure upward to €6.5bn.

These adjustments were made without any sense of embarrassment, as though adding and subtracting were not skills that anybody could reasonably expect to find in a finance department.

Even the report leaked on Thursday – and subsequently confirmed by finance minister Brian Lenihan – was an adjustment of predictions that had been made in April.

The incompetence didn't start in 2008. The boom years were noticeable for the inability of the Department of Finance to work out how much it would take in in tax receipts. Even Lenihan has noticed that he is not surrounded by the sharpest tools in the financial shed, and on at least one occasion this year has commented on the regularly inaccurate figures being issued by his department. "My department got its calculations for revenue projection wrong three times last year," he told Morning Ireland in February. "I had to make decisions on the basis of that. I don't believe we should be rushing into rapid calculations overnight on what we should do."

This latest forecast shows Department of Finance officials to be in Joe Coleman mode, seeing apparitions of recovery where none exist and finding useful idiots in government, amongst economists and in the media to ululate over their manufactured visions. Those who gather together on 9 December and agree to take €4bn out of the economy, they promise, will see a great recovery appearing on the horizon, making us happy and leading us back to the promised land of economic stability.

Joe Coleman promises us the Virgin Mary but what Brian Lenihan and his officials offer is verging on the ridiculous. Their belief that removing so much money from an ailing economy can improve it is no less barmy than a visionary's claim that he talks to ghosts. But at least Joe Coleman has the Bible from which to pluck the colourful cast of characters who populate his delusions. By contrast, there is no economic template I know of that says you can deflate your way out of a recession, especially one as deeply entrenched as the one we're in now.

There is no place in Ireland for non-believers at the moment. The dominant religion of machoeconomics demands sackcloth and ashes as the means to redemption. There is no role for ecumenism, for the view that we risk our emergence from recession by so stringently austere an approach. Those who express such a view are treated as blasphemers, and subjected to a media-based inquisition of which Torquemada would be proud. Next year, as unemployment rises, and growth contracts because of policies implemented in the budget, we will find out exactly how accurate these agnostics have been in their predictions. What we can say with certainty now, though, is that the Department of Finance's projections will, yet again, be found wanting.

Tip to Tom: It's your legacy that's 'bullshit'

Tom Parlon has a unique position in Irish life in that he contributed so much to the destruction of Ireland through his position as a PD minister before moving on to represent the industry – construction – which has done as much as any other to bring us to the brink of ruination. It came as no surprise somehow to read in this newspaper last week that he had left a $2,600 tip to chauffeurs while on a trip to Atlanta. It wasn't his own money, you understand, but the taxpayers' – his trip was just another example of the waste which accompanied so many ministerial jaunts abroad. Parlon subsequently described the revelation as a "bullshit" story; in his remarks he showed himself to be in the same state of denial about his responsibilities as a minister as the rest of his colleagues in the PD/FF administration, the worst Ireland has seen.

ddoyle@tribune.ie