Marc Coleman

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (March 2008)

This article or section includes a list of references or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks in-text citations.
You can improve this article by introducing more precise citations.

Marc Coleman is Economics Editor of Newstalk 106 to 108 and an economic commentator. He is author of The Best is Yet to Come, a book which argues that Ireland's population is set to double in the coming century and which advocates economic re-unification of the divided country ^[1].

Coleman became Newstalk's Economics Editor in 2007 after working for the Irish Times between 2005 and 2007 ^[2]. He also writes for Ireland's largest Sunday paper, the Sunday Independent.

His articles on economic issues are generally conservative in tone, combining a belief in low taxation and free markets.

A former European Central Bank and Department of Finance official, Marc Coleman was born in Dublin but lived as a child in Erlangen, southern Germany, returning to Ireland in the mid-1970s. In the mid-1980s at the age of 15 he joined Fine Gael, becoming intensively active in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Within the party he took a conservative position on economic issues and established the Christian Democratic Initiative, a right-of-centre think tank, the inaugural meeting of which was addressed by former foreign minister Peter Barry. That organisation was wound down in 1991 and Coleman then concentrated on his studies.

He graduated from Trinity College Dublin in 1993, where he served as Secretary of the University Philosophical Society, and in the same year joined Carr Communications, a PR company associated with the country's top politicians. In 1994 he joined the Anglo-Irish desk of the Department of Foreign Affairs before transferring to the Budget and Economic section of the Department of Finance where he worked as an economist for three years. He received a post-graduate degree in economics from University College Dublin in 1996 and spent a brief period in the Department of Transport early in 1997.

In 1997 he went back to Germany, becoming a research analyst with the European Central Bank. Promoted to statistician in 2000, Coleman engaged in monetary policy research. That year he applied for sabbatical leave and completed the Advanced Studies Programme at the Kiel Institute of World Economics. Coleman returned to the ECB in 2002 and a year later was promoted to economist.

In 2005 he completed an Master of Business Administration in the Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School at UCD ^[3]. In July of that year he was hired by the Irish Times newspaper as its Economics Editor. Coleman covered Irish and European economic issues for the main newspaper and the weekly business supplement. He also wrote a weekly economics column in the "Business this Week" supplement.

Coleman's publications prior to joining the Irish Times included articles in the ESRI Quarterly Economic Commentary, the Jesuit publication Studies, Administration magazine and Magill magazine.

In June 2007 Coleman left the Irish Times, describing himself as an "early morning person", and moved to Ireland's new national radio station Newstalk 106 to 108 where he now regularly participates in breakfast-time, lunch-time and afternoon programmes. Keeping a hand in written journalism, Coleman now writes a regular opinion piece in the Sunday Independent.