REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE “UNDERSTANDING MODERN IRELAND” AT THE GOLDMAN SACHS CONFERENCE
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE “UNDERSTANDING MODERN IRELAND” AT THE GOLDMAN SACHS CHIEF INVESTMENT OFFICER CONFERENCE
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for your welcome. Let me reciprocate with my own welcome to each of you and in particular to those who have travelled from afar—our traditional welcome in the Irish language is céad míle fáilte, one hundred thousand welcomes. Thank you, Peter, for your kind introduction and of course for the invitation to address this very august gathering.
You are visiting Ireland at a unique juncture in our complex history. It is a watershed moment when so many of what appeared to be indelible characteristics of our island’s narrative which had been transmitted like toxic spores from one generation to the next, have shifted to the bottom of the text to become footnotes in history; extensive footnotes, but footnotes nonetheless. It is nothing less than the comprehensive end of one era and the auspicious beginning of another.
The opening chapters of this new narrative are exciting and encouraging and even allowing for the current frailty of the global marketplace we have entered a period brimming with new possibilities. Even the most cursory glance back down the longitudinal stretch of history makes us realise how privileged this generation is to be living through these times from which the old twin millstones of endemic underachievement and conflict have disappeared. It is a fascinating period in which to be a part of Irish society, but equally, from your professional perspectives, a period which begs the question of how together we can best harvest the traction now generated by this unique confluence of confidence and prosperity, peace and partnership.
For the first time in our history we have the chance to realise and reveal this island’s fullest potential as the old culture of wasteful and mistrustful disengagement between the partitioned parts of this island gives way to intelligent and mutually beneficial collaboration. Last week’s US/Northern Ireland investment conference provided a fascinating showcase of the fresh economic opportunities that now exist on the island of Ireland. It was very evident in the mood there, that the short-term vagaries of the global marketplace were never likely to overly faze a courageous generation which has painstakingly and comprehensively put an end to centuries of contemptuous feuding.
The harvest of misery this island has reaped was sown centuries ago in colonisation, in repression, in Reformation and Counter reformation, in plantation and partition. That long, bitter harvest is now in, the land is cleared and ready for reseeding. This time the seed quality is considerably better and the ploughmen and women are all on the one team, working together rather than against one another. While neither peace nor prosperity can be taken for granted and require careful ongoing nurturing, there is now the real chance of a bumper harvest to come.
Other reversals of fortune are of course less benign. These are difficult times for the Financial Services industry but that is all they are, difficult, not impossible nor insurmountable, just difficult. Difficult is what this problem-solving generation in Ireland does best. It applied its collective brainpower with huge success to ending an intractable centuries old conflict, high levels of unemployment, miserable levels of industrialisation, massive outward migration, chronic underachievement, poor infrastructure, political isolation, industrial instability, inadequate indigenous entrepreneurialism and low levels of foreign direct investment. From being the then poorest country to join the European Union back in 1973 it created the success story par excellence of the Union and made of Ireland a story that many others desire to emulate. If there are those who think that success and prosperity have made this generation soft, think again, for most of us remember the Ireland that was a third world country. We lived there not so long ago. Today’s Ireland is made up of people well used to the hard road. They have made an art form out of transcending the embedded problems that defeated past generations and that many contemporary cultures still find hard to overcome.
This resilience and fortitude are well captured, I think, in yesterday’s publication by the Economic and Social Research Institute of its Medium-Term Review: 2008-2015. The most encouraging point it makes is its finding that annual GNP growth of 3.75% is sustainable in the period leading up to 2015. What is striking about this figure is that it is exactly the same as that contained in the ESRI’s December 2005 Review, written in a completely different global economic context. It is a testament to the calibre and robustness of our economy, that even in straitened times, such optimistic growth can plausibly be sustained.
Our ability to achieve this is a hallmark precisely of our unique position as a first-world country with a recent third-world memory. We know the value of what we have. We know the work needed to sustain it. Our roadmap from one world to the other makes instructive reading.
At the core of our transformation lies an historic commitment to education. Many other factors, as Peter has written and spoken of recently, were also involved, among them our joining the European Communities, the construction of our unique form of social partnership and the introduction of our attractive corporate tax regime, but by far the most important basic building block was the unlocking of barriers to education so that we could harvest and harness our greatest natural asset: the brain power of our people. Narrow and elitist access to education had wasted swathes of our talent until the advent of a new culture of educational egalitarianism kicked in the 1960s giving us free secondary education, institutes of technology distributed throughout the country, a focus on science and technology and the beginning of the phenomenal growth of the third-level sector. That produced a broad, educated cohort with which to apply new imagination to our problems, with which to attract inward investors and with which to capture the second industrial revolution, the first one having missed most of Ireland by a very large Irish mile.
As the nation that brought both Christianity and literacy to the rest of Europe millennia ago we have always been a people who were passionate about education and as educational opportunities opened up they were resoundingly seized. In turn they massively increased our capacity to capture and generate economic opportunities. And that we did with a vengeance, breaking the generations-old vicious circle of unemployment and outward migration. As the foreign investors flooded in a new native entrepreneurial class and culture rapidly emerged. Suddenly Ireland was a prospering land, a leader in high tech industries, a land of opportunity to which migrants came and indeed keep coming from other shores making of us a dynamic multi-faith, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural Ireland, hungry for the best future we can create and unafraid of the work needed to bring it about.
Our near-total exclusion from the first industrial revolution was revealed to have been something of a blessing, as we saw other countries struggle with the systemic social, environmental, psychological and economic legacies associated with extrication from the old smoke-stack industries. We are today an ambitious knowledge economy preparing well for the next industrial revolution through investment in education especially in research and development. We have a lot of strengths. Educated brainpower, problem-solving skills, ingenuity, appetite for work, pride in our people, commitment to our shared future, a deep-rooted sense of community, of a shared journey, the soothing balm, the madcap challenge of an ancient and eternally self-refreshing culture, a strong ethos of social inclusion, an independent streak rather than a dependency mentality, and a generosity of heart and hand. Our 80 million strong family is scattered across the globe and there are few nations on earth which can claim to have such strong and active bonds as the Irish do to one another. The sources of our imagination whether in the sciences or the arts draw from many easily accessed wells at home and abroad.
Our Government is investing over 8 billion euro in research and development, in doctoral and postdoctoral studies which are driving up our capacity for innovation in crucial areas across the most exciting areas of science and technology. With the question of energy supply and sustainability now the large global elephant in every room, successful problem-solving in the future will require precisely the type of flexibility, adaptability and imagination that is an integral part of our cultural make-up.
I know that migration and the importance of migrants to our society and our economy are matters close to Peter’s heart. The Irish labour market has been radically reshaped by inward migration made up in part by returning Irish emigrants and in part by ambitious hardworking men and women largely from the European Union but also from many other parts of the world. They enrich and deepen us culturally and socially and the economic benefits they bring are considerable in terms of their productivity, skills and determination all of which increase our national human energy and intellect grid considerably.
There are a couple of factors which make the story of migration to Ireland a little different from elsewhere. First we know from bitter long experience what it is to be a stranger in a new land and we have a natural empathy with the newcomer evidenced by the fact that a recent Eurobarometer poll records that Irish persons have the second highest level of recent contact with a person from a different country of all of the Member States of the EU. The migrants who arrive here have very high levels of education, enabling faster transcendence of barriers to integration. Leadership in every sphere of Irish life whether at national level or at parish level, has stood firmly and articulately against any manifestations of racism. These things bode well not just for the future of an integrated, cohesive Ireland, but also for potential investors seeking out stable economies, communities and industrial climates.
Add to the mix the historic dispensation which sees a new era of collaboration between North and South and you can see why Gordon Brown’s prediction last week in Northern Ireland of a “future full of hope” could not have been more timely or accurate.
A future full of hope was exactly what we aspired to when we built the International Financial Services Centre here more than twenty years ago and that at a time of 20 per cent unemployment, of a graduate brain drain, and of double digit interest rates. Our then faith in our capacity to shift the deadweight of history from off our back, has long since been vindicated and we are still only at the very start of the story, in fact only a few pages into the opening chapters. The rest remains to be written and I hope that when it is, you will feature on its pages. Already those pages feature a who’s who of the leading global giants in every sphere of business and industry. Ireland has welcomed them warmly and rewarded their investment. We are not just a place to do good business but a good place to do business. Ladies and gentlemen, it is a great pleasure to see you in Dublin. I wish you every success for the remainder of the conference, and of course, a most enjoyable evening.