REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT A BUSINESS BREAKFAST HOSTED BY ENTERPRISE IRELAND
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT A BUSINESS BREAKFAST HOSTED BY ENTERPRISE IRELAND RADISSON SAS HOTEL, LIVERPOOL THURSDAY, 5 JUN
Good morning ladies and gentlemen. Martin and I are delighted to join you for this Enterprise Ireland breakfast in the city often described as Ireland’s other capital, a city that the Irish certainly feel completely at home in thanks to generations of emigrants who made this region their home. They came as economic migrants from a poor Ireland. They came in search of opportunity for a livelihood, a job, a place of better prospects in which to rear their families.
I come from a very different Ireland - a prosperous, well-educated and confident place which has reversed the centuries-old culture of emigration and which has now a highly globalised and sophisticated economy competing at the top end of the world’s knowledge economy.
The same problem-solving generation which ended endemic poverty and underachievement has also brought peace to Ireland and recalibrated the once skewed relationships that were the grim legacy of a bitter history. Today Ireland and Britain are close friends and partners driving forward an historic peace in Northern Ireland and enjoying a high level of mutuality in the world of commerce.
This morning we focus on our commercial links with this region of the North-West and North Wales. We look closely at the potential for even greater commercial cooperation and shared benefits in this area with which historically we have such strong and deep links of family and kinship. I am grateful to each one of you for being here and for your interest in Ireland and the enhancement of those links.
Already the story of our commercial links is a remarkable and encouraging one. The UK and Ireland share a bond of trade and a level of interdependence that is the envy of other countries. Our combined trade stands at more than 50 billion Euro. Ireland is the UK’s third-most-important export market and the UK is our most important market, representing almost half of EI’s client companies’ export sales.
We each ride the same economic storms and have a strong vested interest in each other’s commercial well-being. We work well together with a compatibility and ease that must surely confound those historians who focus on macro politics and who miss the intertwining of lived lives over centuries that brought this region and Ireland particularly closely into each other’s orbit.
Today we have furiously busy first-class connections by sea and air which are among the busiest trade routes in Europe. We share pride in names like Lennon and McCartney, Wayne Rooney and a staggering galaxy of names which have brought international renown to this region but which have their roots a short distance across the sea.
The genius that reveals itself in music and football is also evident in the world of business with the likes of JFC Manufacturing, Denison, Glen Dimplex, CFT Tooling and Digitary, who are actively working in and targeting the North West.
I know that sectors such as packaging, environmental products, construction, software - and in particular financial services - telecommunications and eGovernment all hold serious reserves of potential and I hope that together, we can harvest it.
Enterprise Ireland, our host today, is here to make that happen. EI, the Irish nation’s trade and technology board, has a strong presence in Britain, and offers a host of services to British companies as well as Irish starting with listening closely to their needs. The Irish government invests heavily in our network here through a host of organisations as well as Enterprise Ireland, Tourism Ireland, Bord Bia, the Irish Food Board and IDA, Ireland’s inward development agency.
Outside the semi-state sector, a host of other bodies, like the Irish Professionals Network for the Northwest give continuing life and energy to our unique history. Underpinning our national trade effort is the work of our diplomatic corps ably led here by our Ambassador, David Cooney, himself an English-born child of Irish immigrants and a formidable bridge between our two homelands.
To David and the team at the Embassy and to Stephen Hughes and the team at Enterprise Ireland I want to offer a very heartfelt thank you for your commitment to sustaining and developing the economic success that is contemporary Ireland. It is a success we want to enjoy with our partners in commerce here in the North West. Our relationship with this part of the world was first and for a long time forged in hardship.
If there was little opportunity in Ireland there were no easy jobs or paths paved with gold here in the North-West. Our common ancestors and their neighbours made their hard-earned wages by the sweat of their brows. They knew little about comfort or ease. Simply to put food on the table was their goal.
We are a singularly privileged generation to have such a landscape of opportunity as our inheritance. Though the global marketplace is a very testing place, especially at this moment, we know it is the place we have to be, the place we have to tame with the best of our analytical skills, our planning and our wise partnerships.
Sharing our brain power, putting it at the service of our economic power, building bridges over which ideas and commerce can flow spontaneously, seeding the ground which will bring opportunity and prosperity to this generation and the generation to come - these are our challenges and this moment in our history is our chance.
Overcoming adversity is in our DNA. I hope that in the friendships and networks established around these tables will lie the makings of the next chapter and the best chapter yet in our shared success.
It has been a pleasure to share this time with you this morning, and I thank you for your role in forging this exciting, fresh history for both Ireland and the North West.