If you're a middle-class person visiting a pretty little city you've never seen before, you stop at the estate agent's window and fantasise about buying something. When I did that in Kilkenny in southern Ireland recently, I had a shock: it was affordable. A nice house round there can cost under EU150,000. The halving of property prices since the crash of 2008 is just one index of Irish suffering. A woman buttonholed me on Kilkenny's main street to lament that three of her four children had emigrated - as have nearly a tenth of Ireland's population since 2008. Many who stay will never repay their personal debts, let alone Ireland's debt for bailing out its failed banks.

All this helps explain the extraordinary scenes I witnessed there: all weekend, Kilkenny's theatres and bars were packed for what is probably the only comedy economics festival on earth. Kilkenomics has been described as “Davos with jokes” and “Davos without hookers”. It may be a model for the world.

Some of the speakers were big-shot American economists. But they came unpaid, and once in Kilkenny, far from global power, everyone shed their guru status. It's such a small place that almost any pub you stumbled into, however far past midnight, was bulging with famous economists in T-shirts gabbing with ordinary punters. Most tickets to events cost from EU5 to EU15. This wasn't a Goldman Sachs investors' conference.