Ireland humbled by blinkered hubris, says President

PRESIDENT MARY McAleese has said the "blinkered hubris" of the financial and property sectors has inflicted "colossal damage" on the Irish economy.

Ireland is now a "humbler and more chastened" country as a result, the President told the Institute of International and European Affairs yesterday.

The institute is the premier Irish think tank for European issues and previous speakers have included UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon, British prime minister Gordon Brown and Jean Claude Trichet, the president of the European Central Bank.

President McAleese said Ireland had gone from being the "economic toast" of Europe to being excoriated for a "champagne lifestyle that was based on unsustainable levels of borrowings".

The early years of the 21st century had been a "roller coaster" and Ireland had come face-to-face with both confidence and crisis of confidence.

She outlined her belief that there was more to Ireland than the current recession, stating that it would be "massive injustice" to believe that it was all the country was about when there was a civic society and community sector "second to none and which has a capacity for transcending adversity by sheer hard slog".

There was an absence of "good, sensible, well-informed and reasoned debate", she said.

Instead, there was "tabloidism, anecdote and stereotype", which were fuelling moral panic when reasoned debate was needed.

The President outlined reasons, she believed, for optimism.

The political and social context had been transformed by the peace process.

Exports have held up reasonably well and external economic commentators were impressed at the "realism and sacrifice being brought to bear on our parlous economic situation".

The global Irish network, as exemplified by the Farmleigh Forum last September, presented opportunities as did Ireland's new migrant population.

Irish people also had a capacity for solidarity to protect the national interest which would stand the country in good stead in the years ahead, the President predicted.

"They say that a good team does not become a bad team overnight, and Team Ireland had and still has a panel of strengths to reposition us as a smart, innovative, ethically sustainable and competitive economy," she told the audience.

Ireland's relationship with the EU would be vital in any recovery, she predicted, and the country "should keep doing what it does well" which is engaging with the country's EU partners.

"Though human beings the world over are clearly capable of mega-mistakes, we are also clearly capable of clearing up our messes and making them better than good," the President said.