INFLUENTIAL IRISH Americans challenged officials from Dublin about the efficacy and accuracy of the message the Government conveys about the Irish economy at the meeting of the Global Irish Network on Thursday afternoon.
Two articles, the first by the UCD professor of economics Morgan Kelly, published in The Irish Timeson November 8th, and especially a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal on November 10th, entitled "Ireland's Fate Tied To Doomed Banks", dominated the discussion.
“It was the first comment that came up, and it ran right through the whole afternoon,” said Minister for Tourism, Culture and Sport Mary Hanafin, who chaired the meeting.
The 60 north America-based members of the network “were very, very concerned about that article being on the front page and the impact that it had,” Ms Hanafin said. “People were questioning and were quite challenging about what the Government is doing. And that is exactly why they were there.”
Like Prof Kelly, the Wall Street Journal cast doubt on the Irish Government's solvency. The article was all the more alarming because, as Ms Hanafin noted, "The op-ed pieces in the Wall Street Journal traditionally were quite supportive [of Irish Government policy]."
Ms Hanafin said it was “not so much a case of blaming the messenger” as of asking how the message could be improved. She said the importance of “changing the message to recovery” was a lesson she wrote down.
Public relations executive Susan Davis chaired the session entitled Restoring Ireland's Reputation and Promoting Confidence in our Recovery. She concluded that a "champion group" was needed "for the messaging of the campaign". Ms Hanafin said attention focused on shifting the message following publication of the four-year plan and the budget.
Ms Davis recommended conscripting individuals from the private sector, for example the international Irish businessman Peter Sutherland, or the directors of the American Ireland Fund, to “get the message across”.
Another suggestion was to use terms easily understood by Americans, for example that Irish cutbacks are equivalent to dismantling the US department of defence.
Alan Ahearne, special adviser to the Minister for Finance, fielded economic questions. Garret FitzGerald, a medical doctor who heads the Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics at the University of Pennsylvania, was struck by the tone of Wall Street executives who attended the meeting.
“A couple of the finance guys said very boldly, ‘You have a huge credibility problem. We don’t believe you. When you predict rosy growth rates for three years from now, we know you are just picking those numbers out of the sky . . . So front up with us. It’s absolutely misleading to say, ‘We didn’t know things were this bad until we looked into it’.”
Mr Ahearne responded that highly regarded people, including Prof Patrick Honohan at the Central Bank, have been appointed. “These guys said, ‘You are coming back to the bond market in six months, and we are telling you what the current state of disbelief is, and you are telling us these appointments are supposed to steady our fears’,” Dr FitzGerald recounted.
Mark Tuohey, a Washington lawyer who specialises in government investigations, and who has advised the Government, said: “There was a good deal of call for real transparency in the Irish Government’s approach to dealing with the emergence from a very deep, prolonged recession. People who are trying to help the recovery are finding that information is not readily available, that things are sometimes more opaque than transparent.”
Participants also said that it would “help [Ireland’s] reputation . . . to see people who might have caused any of this difficulty brought to court,” Ms Hanafin said.
“I told them the Garda Commissioner indicated recently that they hoped the investigations would be finished by the end of the year. I told them that they had taken 150,000 pages of evidence.”
Despite the sometimes combative tone of discussions, Ms Hanafin, Mr Ahearne and Brian Lenihan (who was not present), were praised by all the participants spoken to.
“I still think the Government, particularly Brian Lenihan, is getting the basics right,” said Loretta Brennan Glucksman, chairwoman of the American Ireland Fund.
“If they just hold steady and hold their nerve and if the markets allow that, I think that Ireland will come out of this on their own . . . Overwhelming negativity becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
"The horse is down and we're flogging him more," said Bill Whelan, the Riverdancecomposer, referring to the above-mentioned newspaper articles. "There is a need for the national conversation to get some forward-looking energy into it. That's missing."
The idea of using Ireland’s culture to convey a positive image was one of the main conclusions of the economic forum at Farmleigh, which established the Global Irish Network in September 2009.
Despite an eloquent speech about memory and imagination by the actor Gabriel Byrne, Ireland’s cultural ambassador, Ms Glucksman said “the nitty-gritty economic discussion . . . the grim realities of the world we are living in, took over”.