Once dubbed 'the most dangerous man in Ireland', management guru Ivor Kenny tells Kathy Sheridan why business managers are the 'salt of the earth'

For his 13th and final book, Dr Ivor Kenny followed a friend's advice: first, no point-scoring and second, show sensitivity to people who might still be alive. That must have been a challenge for someone writing a business memoir in a tiny country?

"You just take out the un-nice things about them," he says, dashing hopes of an elegant hatchet job on a blue chip name or three.

In a life devoted to clarifying the thinking and strategy of top-level managers, first as head of the Irish Management Institute, and later at UCD, he clearly became close to many of them. While he never got rich himself, he says - although "rich" is relative, seated as we are in his privileged Dublin 4 enclave - "the odd thing is that a lot of my good friends are people who are extremely rich and it doesn't in any way intrude into our friendship".

There is point-scoring in the book, of course, though little of it is directed against his friends in business, except to chastise them for not making a decent case for themselves. Then again, he has never been shy about nailing his pro-business colours to the mast. Managers, he insists repeatedly, "are the salt of the earth".

Sitting opposite the genial 76-year-old in his bright, art-filled home, it is hard to believe that in the early 1980s, Ivor Kenny was dubbed "the most dangerous man in Ireland" by Tomás Mac Giolla of the Workers' Party. No-one who lived through that era will forget the tenor of the times. The country, in Gay Byrne's immortal phrase, was banjaxed. The banks were hammering their customers with 20 per cent interest rates. Inflation was around 17 per cent. Up to 157,000 people were unemployed. PAYE workers - saddled with by far the greatest burden of taxation - were alive to the bitter reality of crippling tax rates minus the self-employeds' balm of self-assessment. Boats and planes out of Ireland were packed with angry, young emigrants leaving heart-broken families in their wake.

It was in this raw, stagnant atmosphere that Ivor Kenny became the angry, insistent voice of business. The Broadcasting Complaints Commission upheld a complaint about lack of balance on a Late Late Show entirely devoted to his book Government and Enterprise in Ireland. The BCC held that Gay Byrne "clearly aligned himself with the views of three members of the panel - Ivor Kenny, Des Peelo and Tom Murphy".

So Kenny had become a spokesman for - what?

"My enemies would say a spokesman for the new right, which is an organisation that doesn't exist. I've never found it. You'll find the old left because it's represented by the trade unions . . . they've retreated to the high ground of State monopolies."

For added bite against the old enemy, he quotes John Monks, leader of the British Trade Union Congress: "Trade unions are like gorillas in the forest suffering from a shrinking habitat".

If business then was seen as an "ogre", as he puts it, he returns the compliment to the trade unions. Asked to do a consultancy job on a "very large Irish trade union" back then, he accepted, but never got to do it. "That was because, for example, a trade union official in Galway had made off with large sums of money. In effect the trade union was run extremely inefficiently and very much on an old boys' basis. There were literally jobs for the boys in the trade unions . . . "

Six and a half pages in the book are devoted to the reproduction of a piece he wrote for the Sunday Independent in 1984, responding to a claim by the then taoiseach, Garret FitzGerald, that his government had turned the economy around. "In that piece, I said, 'you didn't turn the economy around; you reduced the increase in the loss'."

Fianna Fáil governments also come under the Kenny cosh. "Charlie McCreevy said: 'When I have money I spend it and, when I don't, I don't'. This is such primitive economics. What you don't want from government is increasing the amount of money available for consumption. Back in the 1980s, I used to wake at 3 am fuming about the incompetence of governments. We now have a different kind of incompetence, only masked by the torrents of money flowing into the Exchequer. There is no real accountability. Something like PPARS ends up on a Minister's desk, who effectively washes his hands of it and gets into a different department as quick as he can . . . Or there's denial, like the bloody voting machines. If that happened in business, there would be just awful consequences. Above all, the person responsible would get his ticket to leave."

He takes well-aimed swipes at the Civil Service - "a priesthood, dangerously remote from the affected publics"; at the Garda - "a self-reinforcing priesthood"; at the institutional Church, for treating Eamon Casey with "extreme cruelty"; at UCD for awarding honorary doctorates to six golfers, based on eulogies that were "so thin".

But knowing what we do now about corrupt politicians (bought by business, remember), wholesale tax evasion and banking scandals, surely business has a case to answer too, not only now but back in the 1970s and 1980s? The normally genial Kenny bristles. "During that time, I met very fine people like Ian Morrison of Bank of Ireland who had luminous integrity. There was not a breath of scandal around banking at that time, or Don Carroll and people like that."

Did they shoulder a fair burden of taxation? "With what?" he snorts. "They were getting the pants taxed off them for goodness sake. The biggest single change in what we have now, the reason you, me, everybody has a lot more money now is because inward investment was attracted by the low tax rate and people have found out after long, painful learning that the less you tax people, the more income is generated."

So business people were among the few trying to make an honest living? "The business people - and believe it or not, the people at the top of corporations are people too, they laugh and cry and go to the toilet - they were suffering themselves from the heavy taxation. At that time there were a lot of disincentives to productivity and competition. There was still the weight of history of a Sinn Féin protectionist government."

After some jousting, he finally concedes that business was "pedestrian" then - "we weren't really into exports" - then qualifies it by saying that "business is a function of the society in which it works. It was a deadly society, hopeless, one that did not encourage enterprise or risk . . . " Moving swiftly on to the present day . . . He is as happy now as then, that Irish business - from which he excludes developers, "for whom I have no particular respect" - is clean and caring, even if it has been bulldozed there by legislation.

"I know of no substantial business scandal in Ireland. We've had nothing like the business scandals of Enron - and you have to remember that everything like Enron calls forth a plethora of legislation . . . I think there is very little danger of people in business behaving obscenely badly."

Could they treat their employees more fairly perhaps? Could Ryanair be regarded as a good employer for example?

"First of all I think you're talking about a completely unique enterprise. And I don't know how it treats its workers except what I read in the paper. But the girls seem to stay with them. I've only flown Ryanair once and the hostess - now cabin crew - was as nice as you could meet anywhere else . . . I think to treat any human being in a beastly fashion is unforgivable. I've also said that the only way companies survive and grow is to build a real team and when that is not happening, what happens in business is that politics comes in and drives out substance. Once you get that, you're literally in an unmanageable situation because you don't know what people are thinking."

A lengthy polemic towards the book's end calls capitalism's standard-bearers to arms, not to clean up their act but to learn to articulate their case from a moral basis.

"Rightists are neither angels nor devils. The right has its vice, and that vice is selfishness. New rightists mutter, 'Let me rest; I lie in possession'. State socialism has its vice, and that vice is envy. State socialists growl, as in Dr Faustus, 'Why shouldst thou sit, and I stand?'" The deepest problem capitalism faces, he writes, "is its estrangement from moral values. Wealth is created (or is not created) in accord with, and through, the expression of a particular set of values. The divorce of capitalism from the moral order results in the kind of demoralisation that faces businessmen today. The essence of the problem with Irish private enterprise is that it has no clear view of itself, no vision of the future, no articulated ideology. Faced with hostile ideologies (of which the archetype is State socialism), it has to fall back on a purely circumstantial defence."

In other words, socialism, having cornered the market in priests, poets, philosophers and the odd journalist, just happens to have more eloquent advocates. "Businessmen, who could be the activists, the champions, of capitalism, fall back on 'pragmatism', on 'knowing how things work'. Their pragmatism, divorced from any moral basis, fails to move hearts and minds other than their own."

Last Word: a Life Working with Managers, by Ivor Kenny is published by Oak Tree Press, €25