REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT THE MBA ASSOCIATION OF IRELAND CONFERENCE
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT THE MBA ASSOCIATION OF IRELAND CONFERENCE “CREATING THE INNOVATIVE ENTERPRISE..."
Good morning, and thank you for your very warm welcome. I would like, in particular, to thank Denis McCarthy, Chief Executive of the MBA Association of Ireland, for inviting me here today to open this conference on innovation and female entrepreneurship.
We have come a long way from those days of “You can’t ….because you are a woman!” - those long days that merged into generations and centuries of lost opportunities for women, wasted talents and hugely wasted potential of both individuals and society. If you want to see what happens when the talent of women is given its head, when the old barriers of gender bias come down, when equality of educational opportunity and of opportunity generally open up widely - take a look at the story of contemporary Ireland.
The old Ireland of outward migration, of chronic underachievement and widespread poverty has disappeared. In its place we have lived through an era of unprecedented economic growth and success: our income per capita is now among the highest in the world, we have near full employment instead of emigration out immigrants choose Ireland as a land of real and accessible prospects.
So what rang the changes—and so radically. We know education mattered, that inward investment mattered as did a benign corporate tax environment and membership of the European Union. But what has also mattered, and profoundly, has been the amazingly rapid growth of our own native entrepreneurial sector and the phenomenal growth in the rate of participation in the workforce by women.
For women with entrepreneurial ambitions this is their time, their decade, their chance to shine as never before. Ours is a culture that now actively supports and encourages entrepreneurial talent. It is a culture that can see at first hand that those organisations which have embraced the fullest empowerment of women are flourishing, successful and confident; those which have failed to do so are moribund and in decline.
Today’s world, and the world we face into tomorrow, set in front of us challenges that will call for the harnessing of our very best team effort. The better educated, trained and skilled we are, the better we will be able to secure our economic future and complete the noble ambition which lies at the heart of our nation—to bring opportunity and full social inclusion to every door. A country run by men alone was never going to complete that task. A country in which education was the preserve only of an elite was never going to complete the task. A country which corralled and limited the life’s chances of half its population simply because of gender was never going to realise that ambition. We are the first generation with a chance to complete our republic—to make it truly a place where, in the words of the Proclamation, all the children of the nation are cherished equally.
The members of this Association are particularly well qualified to help us to nurture, support and encourage the latent entrepreneurial talent among our citizens. Through your MBAs you have pushed yourselves to acquire the skills and competencies necessary to run and manage our future enterprises of all scales and sizes. You are the people who have helped to generate a new story for Ireland, a new image of Ireland, the best story ever told by any generation. Yours is the most sophisticated, talented, free, educated and successful generation Ireland has ever produced. You are a problem solving generation par excellence and one of the problems we need you to resolve is the still relatively low level of female entrepreneurship in Ireland. Old attitudes, old habits, old inhibitions can be so deeply embedded that an extra special effort is needed to weed them out and to plant the landscape anew with fresh ideas, fresh energies.
The Government is seeking actively to redress the imbalance and there is every sign that the abundance of female entrepreneurial talent that I encounter daily in my travels around Ireland is starting to be harnessed. Data from City and County Enterprise Boards shows that almost sixty percent of the places on the entrepreneurial training programmes they offer are filled by women. That is really encouraging news. Female education standards are now higher than ever before, female participation rates in the labour market have risen significantly and there is a very high proportion of our female population in the age cohort at which entrepreneurial activity is most likely to occur. Our economy is performing strongly and confidently even in a turbulent global marketplace. So the circumstances for harvesting a whole new crop of female entrepreneurs are the best they have ever been. Now we need get the message out that we have faith in the entrepreneurial talent of Ireland’s women and we have need of it too. Good role models are important in championing and encouraging more women entrepreneurs. Two of your speakers today—Anne Hearty of CPL and Angela Kennedy of Megazyme —are prime examples of the sort of role models Irish business women need. So too was the late Anita Roddick, whose death earlier this month cut short the life of an iconic entrepreneur and humanitarian, a woman who brought to her industry a whole new way of looking at ethical issues. ”Ladies who lunch” need to be complemented by “ladies who launch”!
I am sure your deliberations today will help gather the wisdom, insight and ideas which will help us to get to the Ireland where the talents of men and women flourish without false gender barriers —harnessing all our talents — taking us by the short and sure road to the prosperous egalitarian republic we aspire to be.
I would like once more to commend the MBA Association for hosting today’s conference and to wish you every success in your future endeavours.