David McWilliams and Micheál Martin deserve praise for doing something positive at the Farmleigh summit, writes SARAH CAREY
I ATTENDED the final session of the global economic forum at Farmleigh last Saturday. Entering the magnificent mansion I was assaulted by a certain smell. Was it the flowers? Furniture polish? The aftershave of the predominantly male attendees? The whiff of money from some of the fabulously wealthy attendees? As the room filled and David McWilliams led a discussion on how best to use the infamous diaspora to our advantage, it finally came to me. That was the smell of optimism!
And it wasn’t just a smell – it was a room brimming with positive energy, goodwill and the sense that something good can happen. Lest anyone think naivety was also in oversupply, I should also stress that there was a will to work, to identify a burden and carry it together. After 15 months of public dialogue dominated by panic and vengeance, it was quite a culture shock.
Within a hundred yards of the front door the negativity seeped around like a poisonous gas. Talk shop; tax exiles; intangible goals; David McWilliams’s spring board; Micheál Martin’s handy number in Foreign Affairs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe there is no such thing as a truly unselfish act, but if you’re doing some good, does it really matter? McWilliams and Martin did something positive. It’s not a crime.
I wanted to nip back into the house, bottle some of the good vibes and bring them home to inoculate me from the virus of cynicism.
There were a few hangers-on at the conference who were clearly relishing the opportunity to promote themselves rather than Ireland Inc, but the main drivers were entrepreneurs who have gone out into the world and created something from nothing.
There was Liam Casey, chief executive of PCH, the supply chain company that links manufacturers in China with western companies. It’s a career built on spending your days trailing around factories in the industrial regions of China and your nights hanging around miserable corporate hotels away from your friends and family. Or John Hartnett, the successful Silicon Valley executive who is simply bursting with a work ethic and determination to help Irish start-ups in the US so that jobs back home will be secured.
For the past year I’ve been so smothered in the language of blame and bitterness I’d forgotten that business people are not criminals, but hard workers on whom the rest of us depend upon for the odd job or two.
At the session, there was much talk of culture of the arty kind. “Culture is the carrier” was the phrase of the day, meaning that someone on the other side of the world is most likely to be acquainted with Ireland through literature, music or Riverdance. That’s true, but it seems to me that the culture we’re most in need of is the one up at Farmleigh on Saturday – the culture of Notre Dame’s famous football team that was quoted by Martin Naughton, The Fighting Irish.
Now there’s something about the phrase which seems decidedly foreign. Leaving aside our unfortunate terrorist history, anyone who has spent too much time in this country will know that our kind of fighting is the bickering, jealous, petty kind. But abroad, and particularly in the US, the fighting is channelled into a determination that results in great success.
The only thought that worried me was how our diaspora might react if they catch on to the fact that while they want to help us, we’re not so interested in helping ourselves.
Put it like this. There are three kinds of people in the world: those who can help themselves, those who can’t and those who could but won’t. The delegates had a list of things we need to do that they can’t do for us. We’ve got to pass Lisbon; improve our competitiveness; reform our education system and they also insisted that our corporate and public governance get a makeover.
Can we do these things or are we going to stay in our national sulk? We’ve a right to feel angry but getting us where we are today was a national effort. How many people does it take create a bubble and burst it? Do we want to count up the public servants who overspent, the bankers who lent too much, the politicians with their lazy policies, the voters who elected them, the regulators who didn’t regulate, the buyers who borrowed too much? The circle of blame is getting wider every day and I think it’s a game we need to stop playing.
John Hartnett said that now is a time for leadership. It is amazing how much we depend on good leaders to spread that bit of confidence and optimism that can motivate us into a bit of work, old-fashioned self-sacrifice and, best of all, creativity. But where are those leaders?