TWO of Ireland's top economists may be set for a showdown on the air-waves, after David McWilliams was challenged to a "friendly debate" over claims he predicted the recession.

Since the ESRI stated last week that Ireland's economy is plunging into a short-term recession that could spell the end of the Celtic Tiger, economist and ex-RTE presenter McWilliams has claimed he had predicted the downturn months before it happened.

In particular, the author of The Pope's Children has argued that the current downturn will be a "middle-class recession" that will be worse than the 1980s because "if you never had wealth, you never knew what it felt like".

But hitting out at the claims today, economist and Newstalk radio economics editor Marc Coleman said his rival has been "wrong" and was "a bit disingenuous" in the past over when the looming crisis would hit.

And he is so confident of his own predictions that he has thrown the gauntlet down to McWilliams for a "friendly debate" to find out who Ireland's leading economist really is.

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Challenging his rival to the high-profile debate, the author of The Best Is Yet To Come insisted: "David has been wrong over the last 10 years. Those who predicted the downturn can't claim vindication unless they've been precise. I predicted an economic downturn in 2008 in March 2006 at the Irish Small and Medium Enterprise (ISME) national conference," claimed Coleman.

And while the Newstalk journalist said he liked and respected McWilliams, he added that it wasn't accurate to say the former RTE presenter correctly predicted the downturn because he never said when it would happen.

Despite the public call for a debate on the future of Ireland's economy, McWilliams has declined to be drawn into the debate, simply saying "I don't get involved in that at all. It's nothing to do with who is right and who is wrong".

Coleman argues that the economy is just "hungover" after years of excess and says the economy will have to pay the price for borrowing-induced excess growth over the past two years by lowering growth for the coming years.

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But he says this situation is "not a disaster" and predicts that so long as the Government does "nothing stupid" and keeps current spending in line with revenues, as well as keeping taxes low, the country will be "back on its feet by 2010".

However, his counterpart McWilliams instead argues that Ireland is "in for a four-year cycle of house price decline", with house prices potentially falling back to pre-2001 levels.

- Fiachra O'Cionnaith