Net Results/Karlin Lillington: Why is it that in this country, nobody likes a good story? A story that ends well? A success?
We seem insistent upon nurturing a cult of failure, taking a bizarre sense of national pride in national inability - or perceived inability. What do I mean?
Well, look at any subject in the news headlines: the healthcare system, the LUAS, the education system - we endlessly relish doing down whatever has been done so far, whatever is being proposed to be done, whatever could be done, and talk ourselves in circles without getting anywhere.
A listen to Joe Duffy in the afternoons on Radio One - which truly gives a broad cross-section of what Flann O'Brien called "the plain people of Ireland" - is a whinefest of Wagnerian proportions. Everyone has an issue, beef, a way in which they've been hard done by (setting aside the real tragedies of abuse and exploitation that surface on the programme as well).
On the most petty issues, there's an extraordinary enthusiasm for the "me-too" mindset - a radio version of what years ago would have been a weeping-into-the-pints moan-a-thon down at the local.
Everyone has an opinion about how bad everyone else is at doing activity X, with few suggestions on how to put things right. Especially not if doing so requires paying more taxes/changing attitudes/trying anything new.
In the Irish business world, especially in the technology sector, this cult of failure, of real pleasure taken in any proof that "well, of course, the very notion was doomed from the start", is expressed as nay-saying and begrudgery.
God forbid anyone be successful, have a good business tale to tell, an interesting innovation to offer, a great deal inked with a multinational.
The chatter in the backrooms, the boardrooms, the pub, the conferences, is full of cynicism, the knowing smirk, the "yes, but did you know" reason for why whatever was accomplished really means nothing in the "real" world. The "real" world seems to be anywhere that isn't Ireland: usually Britain or the United States.
All this, despite the fact that the Republic is actually doing quite well as a business nation in the "real" world, thank you very much. For example, we are one of the largest investors into the UK - the sixth largest in terms of creating jobs in 2002-2003, according to Invest UK. We are surprisingly large investors into both the US and Canada, considering how small the Republic actually is.
We have a phenomenally high profile in the technology sector abroad.
But I cannot even count the times somebody Irish will dispute this standing as a bit of a cod's game, a matter of the Irish somehow telling a very good yarn about abilities they don't really have, successfully fooling multinationals to pump a quite extraordinary amount of investment into the Republic in the past decade.
Oh, please. Do people really, really think major investment decisions are based on some sentimental Irish-American sop making investment decisions after reading a fistful of glowing IDA brochures?
Multinationals do the numbers. For a long, long time, the numbers have added up. Even as we moved away from being able to advertise the State as a low-cost base, the numbers have added up for many, many companies.
Then there is the gloating at others' failures. I hear it all the time - "so whatever happened to" and a name comes up of someone who founded a tech company that folded in the downturn, or someone who went off to the US in pursuit of new opportunities. More often than not, the question isn't asked out of cheerful interest. It is asked in a tone of anticipation at another's failure.
We, the members of the media, are equally guilty. We write big features on the woeful tales of the entrepreneurs who lost their companies or their jobs in the downturn, not as examples of people taking on new challenges, but relishing their crash and burn.
And we thus perpetuate that asinine Irish attitude towards entrepreneurship and risk-taking that ignores that risk and failure are necessary to the ultimately successful and capable entrepreneur, bringing business experience and increased acumen.
It's a cliché that in the US, having had a failed company or two is seen as a plus on an entrepreneurial or managerial CV. This of course depends on context but in general, this is true.
Imagine Silicon Valley if the investment and business community viewed such experience as failure! The Valley bounces back because of a belief in future possibility, not past problems. By contrast, we write off so many of our business people and entrepreneurs after they go through the kind of gruelling company experience that builds strength and expertise for the next time around.
We seem highly reluctant to grant that chance to our fledgling - even our experienced - entrepreneurs. We consequently lose many of them to the UK and US and Canada, where they become successes to those economies and losses to our own. That's "where they are now", folks.
We are fortunate to retain a few - those with steel spines who typically have had them forged from time spent in more accommodating entrepreneurial worlds abroad.
But we need to get over this pathetic mindset of begrudgery and schadenfreude - especially post-downturn. Either we get our entrepreneurial act together as an economy, or we become a sadly self-fulfilled prophecy - a nation of moaners working for others, rather than leaders shaping an economically-vibrant future.
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