Speech by Minister Eamon Ryan to the MacGill Summer School

Speech by Minister Eamon Ryan to the MacGill Summer School
Glenties, Donegal
22 July 2010
Minister for Communications, Energy, and Natural Resources, Ireland, Europe.
Our Celtic Tiger economy was always doomed to unravel because at its heart it was
unsustainable. Our central lack of intelligence was a mistaken belief that we could
continue to make money from money, that property speculation was genuine productivity
and there would be no limits, no ceiling to our continuous economic growth. As a country,
we chased cash and growth for its own sake with an eye only to the short-term. Our
politics too focused on “promises in the year of election”.
It was brilliant for our country, so long poor to have ten long years with full employment. It
was at times very exciting and great fun but in our hearts I think we all knew that there was
something not quite right about our Celtic Tiger. At its core was a systems failure, where
we felt we could control our own destiny without regard to the fact that a finite system
cannot grow forever. At some point it reaches its limits.
It was never going to work.
Its time has gone. We’re not going back. It is time for us to move on and reset our
compass in a new direction.
We entered Government in 2007 believing for years that the model was broken but if I am
to be honest not expecting the sort of shock to the system we have had for the last two
years. For the Green Party, our first task in the midst of the crisis was to stem the tide, to
stabilise a collapsing system so we had something left to re-draw. This has largely been
done.
At the same time, we set about an economic re-design. One that had been on our minds
for the last thirty years and whose time has now I believe come. One that understands
the geological certainty that we are near a peak in global oil production and that we will
have to find new ways of feeding, transporting and sheltering ourselves while using less
oil. One that understands that climate change presents the greatest challenge that
humankind has ever faced. That unless we make an evolutionary leap to tackle that
challenge, then our civilisation not to mention our economy will be in ruins.
As John Ashton, former climate change advisor to the UK government, says:
‘For business this is a no brainer - There is no point in trying to build recovery and then
trying to build a low carbon economy afterwards. We need to build a low carbon recovery
because if it is not low carbon, it won’t last very long.’
Today, I want to:
• outline my plan for economic recovery and where the new jobs will come from
• explain how we have begun to implement the plan in Government
• touch on the obstacles to such a recovery
• Outline how sustainability must also be social

I believe we can and will recover. In fact, I think that recovery is already starting in
thousands of small ways right across the country. The question should not be whether but
what type of recovery we will see. For me, the recovery will be green, it must be green –
anything else would be unsustainable, it would not last.
A PLAN FOR ECONOMIC RECOVERY
Our failings of recent years cannot obscure the real advances that have taken place in our
country. For all the carnage of the property bubble, we are still a capable people. If we set
our mind to a task we can achieve it. In fact, in so many areas we are bloody good at what
we do.
We are in a similar space to the 1950s. Then, as now, we knew our plan wasn’t working.
So we re-grouped and re-drew. We cast aside old ideas that had failed. Ken Whitaker
stepped away from the mistaken belief that Ireland looking only inwards would prosper in a
globalised world.
The 1958 Programme for Economic Development worked because it looked to the future.
It understood that openness was a necessary condition for change, and positioned Ireland
to take advantage of this new world. Today’s world may be different but the same
principles apply. We need to look to the future and concentrate on those areas where we
do best. In industries and services where we have a clear advantage and can make things
quicker, cheaper and better than the rest of the world.
We need to play to our strengths.
hand.
And unlike the 1950s we start with real strengths in
In 1957 our list of manufacturing exports read as follows:
• Apparel £2.7m,
• Vehicles £2.4m,
• Paper and cardboard £2m,
• Machinery and electrical goods £1.1m,
• Woollen and worsted woven fabrics £1.1m,
• Yarn and thread of wool or hair £1.1m
Today we export goods to the value of €150 billion, and rising. Over half a million people
are directly employed in this exporting sector and it is their wages which in turn pay for the
rest of the economy. This is the productive base, the creators of real wealth we need to
expand.
Having worked out what went wrong over the last few years we need now to start
concentrating on what we want to get right in the next few years
As Whitaker wrote in that first plan ‘It would be well to shut the door on the past and to
move forward, energetically, intelligently and with the will to succeed, but without expecting
miracles of progress in a short time.’
We learned from the implementation of that first plan that once the right course has been
set how quickly a country can change.

PLAYING TO OUR STRENGTHS
What can we sell to the rest of the world What does the rest of the world want from us
We cannot be jacks of all trades. Like any country, the productive base of our economy will
be based on our natural resources. For Whitaker, our climate and soil meant we had
excellent growing conditions for grass and we organised much of our economy around this
natural resource. What is today’s equivalent
We have two great natural resources – our land and our people.
OUR LAND
Agriculture:
We have developed an €8 billion annual export market out of our benign growing climate.
This sector employs around 110,000 both directly and indirectly. Farming remains the
lifeblood of our rural economy.
We can expand this sector by realising the value we have in knowing which field and
farmer rather than just the factory our food has come from. The lower intensity nature of
our farming can allow us add further value to the food products we sell.
This week such a Green Party approach to our food industry was adopted as national
policy. Last Monday the Department of Agriculture set out a new strategic direction for
2020 building on our international image as a ‘Green Isle’. We do not have to re-cast
ourselves entirely in the global mindset. We simply have to take advantage of the positive
reputation we already possess. For all the ho-ha about the stags, Irish farmers are starting
to realise that their economic future is improved by improving our green credentials.
Tourism:
The €5 billion income derived from Irish tourism helps support 119,000 jobs in Irish
hospitality. This industry has had a tough time in recent years but we still know how to look
after people.
Visitors come here to see the beauty of the landscape they saw first on the Quiet Man,
Ryan’s Daughter and The Field. For twelve years I had the privilege of bringing
thousands of visitors along the backroads of our beautiful country. I think I know what they
came looking for and what they loved here. I think it is possible to combine a modern
Ireland, relevant to ourselves which is still of interest to the rest of the world. It is the
humour of The Commitments, My Left Foot and Intermission that in my experience also
drew people here.
Each part of our Green brand will feed into and reinforce the other. If we carve out a
reputation for active and sustainable tourism, one which gives people a real connection to
Irish culture then we will be up and running again in no time.
Energy:
The successful economies of the future will be those that have cracked the low carbon
energy challenge. Having looked at this challenge up and down for the last eight years, I
don’t just think we can meet it, I think we can excel at it. We may not have Saudi’s oil nor

Russia’s gas but we are blessed with access to a far greater prize - vast quantities of
clean, wind, biomass and ocean renewable power supplies.
My plan is to create tens of thousands of jobs in Ireland in three key energy areas where
we have a real comparative advantage.
Firstly, we can develop our renewable resources so we meet not only our own energy
needs but also sell some of our excess to the rest of Europe. And we are doing it. Over
the last three years our wind power has doubled. We will be the leading wind energy
country in the world by the end of this decade. We are building our grid out into the
Atlantic to test our wave power and this summer we are building a new grid connection to
Britain. Our sea area is ten times our land area. We have some of the strongest winds
and ocean energy resources in the world. We are signed up with our European partners
to make this concept of a European Supergrid happen. We can create a whole new export
industry similar in scale to our food industry with thousands of jobs for this our western
seaboard and with the right political will and the hard work of our engineers it is starting to
happen. It is within our grasp.
Secondly, we can improve our building stock to cut the €6 billion fossil fuel import bill we
have to pay every year. This can get our construction industry back to work. Again we are
doing it. Four years ago we were upgrading about 3,000 houses to become energy
efficient. This year we will do more than 50,000. 5,000 contractors are working at it. 600
householders are contacting us every day to do the right thing. And we are only warming
up. There are a million homes out there that need to be done, that can be improved and I
have the right plan to get to them.
Thirdly, with perhaps the best potential for new jobs, we can use Ireland as a test bed for
the convergence of new ICT technologies and energy efficiency. I am proud to tell you
again that it is happening. It is starting to work. Some may wonder why we have been
pushing our smart metering and electric vehicles programme so strongly. The reason is
that whoever is first to crack this ‘smart grid’ technology is going to be the centre of a
major new industrial revolution. Being a leader in developing such grid here is one of the
reason why IBM set up their global ‘Smart Cities’ initiative here this year creating 200 jobs.
No doubt there were tears in every other industrial development agency in the world that
once again Ireland had won a really important flagship project.
OUR PEOPLE
The difference between today and Whitaker’s time is that we now know for certain that the
Irish people can be one of the best workforces in the world. We have done the right thing
by investing in education. There is something in our informality as a people that make us
flexible and responsive to the fast changing nature of the working world today.
High-tech manufacturing:
There is a view that Ireland cannot compete for manufacturing with Eastern Europe, China
or India. But we remain in an excellent position in high-value manufacturing such as
pharmaceuticals, chemicals, medical devices and ICT because we get quality control right.
We need to work out from that manufacturing base because in the long run we in the west
cannot give up manufacturing to the east.

Financial services:
Even in the midst of the downturn, the IFSC remains a €15 billion industry employing over
25,000 people. With our location close to one of the global financial centres in London
there is no reason why this industry cannot double again over the next twenty years as we
develop new ventures such as the Green IFSC.
Traded services:
In the area of digital technologies our success has been remarkable. We got the first wave
of American companies to come here and assemble their computer products. We got the
second wave of investment as we moved up the value chain in chip and other production
technologies and now we are catching the next wave of internet service companies such
as Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Linkedin and many more. Our opportunity is to now trade
digital services on cloud computing systems where we again have real software skills.
We are good at gaming, at animation, at mobile applications, at e-learning, at middleware,
at internet security. And perhaps because we love to talk; we are good at social
networking. We are young, we are international in our outlook and perhaps because of all
these things we can embrace the internet as our opportunity.
I know that people have been frustrated about our slow roll out of broadband but in the last
three years things have started to improve. We have doubled the amount of broadband
connections, from 600,000 when I entered Government to 1.5 million and rising. We are
providing high speed access to our schools and investing in an Irish Exemplar network
which has the potential to be a world leading technology to improve the speed and
efficiency of the internet. Our National Broadband and Rural Broadband Schemes will
mean that there will be no premises, no building in the whole country without access to the
World Wide Web. Before the term of this Government ends, , like the Finns, we will have
universal broadband access .
In my Department we keep a running total of jobs that are announced in the Green
Economy. The total is in fact conservative and has been verified by SEAI. Since entering
Government the greening of our economy has created just over 16,000 jobs.
If that were a single multinational coming to our shores we would still be talking about it.
This is not a projected figure of 100,000 jobs in the future. These are on-the-ground jobs –
announced, committed and in train.
These are sustainable Irish jobs that cannot be outsourced. If anyone thinks the green
economy is pie-in-the-sky, ask one of 5,000 contractors who have work insulating peoples
homes.
Or one of the engineers working in Nualight in Cork on energy efficient lighting solutions
Or one of the entrepreneurs in Solarprint in Dublin developing smart solar technology that
can work indoors as well as out.
The Green Economy is here and it’s real to all of these people, with more to come. We
have only begun the transformation.

OBSTACLES
There are of course still obstacles to recovery.
We are going to have to make further investments in our broadband networks and we are
going to have to invest further in the digital skills of our people.
I believe our children need inspiration rather than rote-learning. Our education system
needs to change the curriculum so we learn to learn, rather than to learn off.
We need to implement the Croke Park agreement so our public services are more efficient
and more innovative. Such a risk-taking, ‘can do’ attitude will come by promoting those
who are willing to do things differently and not hanging each other when some initiatives
don’t go to plan.
We need a banking system that knows how to lend to enterprise and not just to property.
We need bankers that understand you cannot foist debt on people who will have difficulty
paying it back, no matter what bonus you receive.
We need a political system that is not driven by corporate donations. In fact, we need a
political system where it doesn’t matter if you got the money from a ‘good’ or ‘bad’
developer, the point is you got money at all.
We need a politics that really gets this sustainable agenda, not just the easy bits but also
the harder bits when leadership is needed to make things happen.
And we need new metrics for success. GDP is not a measure of national wellbeing
We must change how we view economic growth to make sure we don’t fall into the same
traps again.
SUSTAINABLE GROWTH
The Celtic Tiger is gone – and that is no bad thing. We should not weep its demise. We
can take the best with us and discard the rest.
A capitalist system cannot survive if it corrodes the social capital and trust upon which all
contractual arrangements are based. If we are honest with ourselves a lot of the
characteristics of the Celtic Tiger did not sit well with us. There is no need for us to go back
to the world where the bank CEO earned 100 times what the person on the counter was
taking home.
I don’t think gated communities are going to provide a more secure world for our children.
I think we have to offer them a reason for studying and working which inspires them and
gives them a sense of purpose beyond material progression. If we can take on a new
national mission, to show the world a working sustainable economy, the next generation
can be proud and inspired by that common vision.
We need a new economics that will leave this planet in a suitable condition for our children
and not leave them saddled with our financial debts.
An economic order that goes beyond the simple assumption that was taught to me in my

first year studying economics in UCD; that people in all their actions are driven by the
motive of maximising their own profit.
Economics that understands that there are limits to material growth but not improvements
in our quality of life.
Economics that recognises that my security is tied up with your security, my welfare with
your welfare.
Economics that values the work that a parent does at home.
Economics that celebrates enterprise but curbs the worst excesses of the markets.
It is an order that answers the call of our great green philosopher John Moriarty for a
politics that connects to all the parts of our soul, that the conventional economic world has
no use for and is afraid of.
We have a plan. It is based on our natural resources – our land and our people. It is based
on making and trading green products and services that we know the world will want, and
thereby providing jobs that are here to stay.
Such a vision belongs to no one political party and would take more than one Government
to introduce let alone achieve. It will not be easy but if we can agree the vision this bright
sustainable future is ours.
What else would Ireland do