Peter Stafford - Freelance Economic & Business Research Analyst, Dublin, Ireland

Things I didn’t do during the Celtic Tiger

2012-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

The Celtic Tiger (c. 1996 – c. 2006) was, in retrospect, an unusual period. At the time, however, most of it made sense. With plenty of money swilling around, people had opportunities to try new things. To redress that balance, and to bring an air of misery to the proceedings, here is a list of things I didn’t do during the Celtic Tiger.

Some of these things I wish I had done, others I’m glad I didn’t do. This is in no way a “bucket list” of things I’d like to do in the future; it’s merely a list of things which people did, but which I didn’t do during the Celtic Tiger.

1. Ride in a helicopter

During the Celtic Tiger people took helicopters with the same nonchalance that New Yorkers take taxis. The helicopter business boomed as people became too busy or self-important to get the train or drive anywhere. I never went in a helicopter. I’m not sure I’d have liked to travel by helicopter, but like so many of the things on this list, the chance would have been nice.

It’s very rare that I feel out of my depth in social situations but I do recall one meeting in the early days of the Celtic Tiger being stuck for words when it turned out I was the only person who hadn’t arrived by helicopter. It turns out the location of the meeting had been chosen on the basis of how easy it was to get to from the nearest helicopter landing pad, a fact which passed me by even when I struggled to find a taxi driver who knew where the hotel was.

2. Go to the Galway Races

I’ve been to the races plenty of times in my life. My mum and sister are keen equestrian types. Indeed some of my earliest memories are from long afternoons standing on a windswept Northumbrian hillside watching distant horses run point-to-point, and feeling drizzle go down the back of my jumper. A Northumbrian point-to-point consists of Young Farmers getting drunk, old Land Rovers getting stuck in mud and red-faced farmers (and their sons) getting cold. The Galway Races is a very different beast. During the Celtic Tiger period, the week-long event seemed to consist of Fianna Fail TDs getting bribed, speculative developers getting planning permission and the country getting screwed, all in plush marquees where the horse-racing was a mere side-show to the main event; talking to other rich people. Apparently the thing to do was to get the helicopter to the Galway Races, in order to occasionally look through binoculars at the horse in which you own a share. Which brings me on to…

3. Join A Syndicate

Celtic Tiger people were always joining syndicates, whether to buy a racehorse or greyhound, or an apartment complex or even in one case I heard of - a vineyard. Groups of dentists, lawyers and taxi drivers would group together to buy shares in things, and pretend to each other that they knew what they were doing so that they could make profit from whatever it was they had bought. During the good times, well, if the horse or vineyard didn’t perform as well as expected and the syndicate needed to be topped up, there was always plenty of money to do so. Like so much during those years, mistakes could be hidden. Apparently the courts are now filled with feuding syndicates who now don’t know what to do with a knackered old greyhound or who is supposed to pay for the upkeep of the mare which they were told was of fine pedigree.

4. Date a Z-List Celebrity

There are generally understood to be 26 letters in the English alphabet. If you need proof, look down at your computer’s keyboard now. In Irish a couple of letters are missing and in German a couple more are added. No amount of adding of letters to the end of the alphabet could begin to describe the status of Irish Celtic Tiger celebrities. Their memory lives on in the pages of VIP magazine, but it’s a shadow of its former self. Compared to their US counterparts on the newsagent’s stand, Irish celebrity magazines are like the empty hulk of the Anglo HQ beside the glass and steel of the other Docklands buildings – a sorry mess of something that one had the beginnings of something good. Irish celebrity magazine are always worth a quick glance. Most of them are comprised entirely of photos of Georgia Salpa (who, I’ve discovered in the course of researching this blog post, doesn’t even appear on Wikipedia) and her friends pouting inanely over their shoulders while almost wearing incredibly scratchy-looking clothes.

I could have been the boyfriend of a Z List Irish Celebrity; anyone would have done. Georgia, Bryan McFadden (it’s rumoured that during the Celtic Tiger period, every single person in Ireland dated McFadden at least once. I think there was a Census question on it last April), even Twink (who, does appear on Wikipedia. And, of course, YouTube) would have done at a push. We could have gone to clubs together and appeared on the Late Late Show to promote our matching tattoos. I think it would have been fun, and it’s not too late. If you’re a Z-List washed-up Celtic Tiger celebrity and haven’t been asked onto RTE’s Celebrity Origami and you’d like me to be your date, give me a call. I’m usually free. And, if the clothes get too scratchy I’ll wear a vest.

5. Open A Shop Which Sells Nothing

Stephen King wrote a really good book called Needful Things which focused on a mysterious small-town shop which was always open and sold everything you wanted. The Celtic Tiger gave birth to the exact opposite – shops which never seem to open and which don’t seem to sell anything except a couple of bits of expensive objets d’arts or a tiny rack of half a dozen dresses. These shops, which usually located in south-side Dublin suburbs and have pretentious French names, are staffed by very grumpy ladies of a certain age and degree of facial orangeness which marks them out as the wives of red-trouser wearing developers. The only people who shop there are their air-kissing orange friends or some misguided soul who thinks that they might pick up a birthday present or a new dress, only to be met with six enamel buckets painted pale blue and a watercolour of a Kerry cottage. How these shops remain in business is a mystery to me (and the Revenue Commissioners, I expect).

6. Buy Property

The Celtic Tiger is synonymous with the property bubble and this isn’t the place to discuss the Irish property market, but I never bought property and nor was I particularly tempted. But by not buying property I missed out on loads of Celtic Tiger opportunities. I never had the opportunity to construct Greco-Georgian pillars outside my house. I never got to install gates which were opened by an illuminated keypad. But most tragically, I never got to buy potted trees. David McWilliams has made a good career out of measuring unusual economic indicators, but I think he missed a trick when he neglected to count potted trees as a barometer for the Irish property market. They seemed to arrive overnight, standing like soldiers on either side of the doorways of newly refurbished homes, guarding the occupants within and marking another success of the ever-booming market.

Eventually the pillars will crumble and the electrics inside the illuminated keypad will fail, but what will happen to all those potted trees which stood so bravely on the steps of Dublin homes in their little brown pots? Will they be liberated and returned to the forests, or are they too domesticated now? Will the government intervene if the owners abandon the house? They might even form ghost estates. Ghostly forests of tiny potted trees without owners, huddled together, waiting for the next property boom. Leprechauns could go paint-balling there on stag weekends.

7. Go to Renards (with my Celebrity Partner)

Are they still open? I might take my future Z List Celebrity Partner there some night.

As an aside, in order to find out if it’s still open, I did a Google search but mis-spelled Renards. Apparently Reynauds syndrome is a medical disorder which makes your fingers go white. As opposed to Renards where, according to Celtic tiger lore, something similar happens to your nostrils.

8. Go Skiing

Celtic Tiger holidays seemed to be the best. People recovered from the hectic nightmare of Christmas by going skiing in February. They recovered from the hectic nightmare of late spring by taking a cottage in France or Italy for six weeks over the summer. They recovered from the depression of autumn by doing to a country house hotel spa for a long weekend. The summers in Tuscany and the autumns in country hotels I could do but skiing sounds like hell. I hate the cold and I’m not very fond of falling over, so forking out a fortune to fly to a cold place in order to fall over all day isn’t my idea of a holiday, even with the promise of hot tubs and alcohol-fuelled hot chocolate.

During the Celtic Tiger skiing was the perfect holiday. It gave an opportunity to buy very expensive branded kit, to go to places other people hadn’t been to and to return to late winter Ireland with a tan. I’m sure some people even found ways to avoid the ski lift and take the helicopter.

Why you can be a Dubliner, and still love Temple Bar

2011-06-09T00:00:00+01:00

This blog post is based on a talk I gave at Ignite Dublin in the Science Gallery on the 8th June.

All urban dwellers carry with them an imperfect mental map of their city. Imperfect because it tends to over-state places they live or work in, or areas they spend lots of time in, and so know well. It also tends to leave gaps in areas they don’t know so well.

When I moved to Dublin from England a decade ago, I was surprised how many Dubliners’ mental map of their city contained a black hole where Temple Bar should have been. The mental maps reminded me of those medieval maps where uncharted areas of a continent or ocean were simply left blank, and marked “here be monsters” or “here be dragons” or simply “here be danger.” For Temple Bar, they were marked “here be expensive pubs, stag weekends, pools of vomit, fist-fights, aggression, groups of pissed up people shipped into Dublin by RyanAir or EasyJet like so many veal calves.”

During the Celtic Tiger, Temple Bar was the very antithesis of the “local shops for local people” idea. There were no local shops, so there were no local people. This was fuelled by overwhelmingly negative media coverage – for every good news story told, two bad news stories were published.

But the recession has changed Temple Bar, just as it has changed Dublin and changed Ireland. It has brought a renewed interest in our cities and urban life, and what we want from the places we work and live in. Fifty percent of people live in urban Ireland, and that proportion is only getting bigger.

Other urban regeneration projects have collapsed because of the recession – The Digital Hub and Smithfield are performing very poorly, but Temple Bar is entering a third period of growth, more like its original aims.

The first period of growth happened in the 1960s when CIE, the state transport agency had a plan of buying all of the buildings between the Liffey and Dame Street, and Trinity and Christchurch and demolishing them to create a central transport hub – the largest concrete structure in the country.

In the meantime, they leased the property on short-term leases and at low rents, and Temple Bar gained a reputation as an incubation hub for small commercial or cultural projects. It became the cultural quarter of the city, but also an area for fledgling enterprises.

During the Celtic Tiger, the area went through its second phase where the healthy competition between commerce and culture tilted in favour of commerce, and Temple Bar gained its poor reputation.

But the recession, and the need for commercial operations to revisit their plans, gives us a chance to go back to basics, and re-assess the original plans for Temple Bar.

The pop-up restaurants and shops, and their harnessing of new types of advertising, is a type of business which Temple Bar first wanted to attract back in the 1960s.

The regeneration of the area has been slow – it has taken over 50 years just to get to here – but just as a business which is launched in a recession is better placed to survive a recession than a company which has never seen bad times, so Temple Bar, and its slow, confusing regeneration process is more likely to outlive regeneration plans made during the Celtic Tiger.

The recession is the third phase of Temple Bar’s regeneration, and it is more inclusive than in the past. 300 businesses operate there. 3,000 people live there, and 10,000 people work there. It’s ours to use, and I hope by using it, the mental map carried in the mind of the Dubliner can be made more perfect.

Thank you.

The election: EPIC FÁIL

2011-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

The following are some thoughts about the general election. They’re in no particular order and all of them are up for discussion.

I had a walk on part in the election, working with Dylan Haskins and his small band of intrepid door-knockers, video producers and social media experts, in Dublin South East; the bearpit of Irish politics. He didn’t win, but we ran a brilliant campaign; probably the highest profile in the country. It was a fascinating project to be involved in, and has made me think about politics and political communications in a very different way.

On a macro level, the election was not an endorsement for Fine Gael, their five point plan or their leader. It was a vote to reject Fianna Fail. No more. It was the electorate’s opportunity to punish them for wrecking the economy, and the best way to show that punishment was to vote for their Civil War enemy.

Neither Enda Kenny nor Fine Gael should assume any mandate when they piece together their government. I believe that they were simply the party to which a disgruntled electorate turned to get rid of the memory of Ahern, Cowen and Lenihan, and for whom they voted, with little enthusiasm. Even though it is early days, I am not convinced this is going to be a government which inspires people to work for a new period of growth and happiness.

If you look at the economic backdrop to the election, the main party standing against Fianna Fail should have been elected with such an enormous majority that it re-wrote history. It is incredible that despite the money and resources that Fine Gael pumped into the election, and the terrible track record of Fianna Fail, they still needed Labour to secure a majority. Fine Gael reportedly spent over €2m on this election, but for what? Their social media platform was derided; their leader elected to sit-out a key debate and their message was hardly inspiring.

Many expected General Election 2011 to become one of radical solutions and a polarisation of the electorate, but in times of crisis, people do not seek radical solutions, they seek stability and calmness. Something solid to hold on to. They replaced Fianna Fail with Fine Gael, and the Greens with Labour. It was a rational belief that business as usual and politics as usual would help more than radicalism.

This is not the end of Fianna Fail. I was in the UK in 1997 and many people predicted that the Conservatives had been beaten so badly that a recovery was impossible. It took them a few leaders, but they got back. Fianna Fail will be the same. Simply too many people want them to return, and they will. Irish politics needs them. When the electorate get sick of Fine Gael (which is inevitable – pendulums always swing) they will go back to the comfort of Fianna Fail.

Political Reform

It was good that we heard a lot in the election campaign about the need for political reform, but I wonder how much of it will ever happen. Opposition parties always call for reform of the political process, but once that process elects them, they suddenly see the merits of the status quo, and go silent.

If we are to reform politics, it should begin with electoral reform. Firstly, it needs to be easier to get on to the electoral register. If Revenue can offer an online service, so should the Department of Environment and the city council. I’m not yet convinced by the argument of allowing emigrants to vote, but I am certain that everyone who lives in Ireland should be able to go to the polling station, working on the assumption they are on the electoral register.

Secondly, we need to clean up election finance because it’s now clear that money does translate into electoral success. It needs to be easier for independent candidates to fight an election with similar opportunities to the political parties. The financial gap between even the best funded independents and the political parties is too large, and this is distorting the election.

The Haskins campaign, comprising of volunteers and funded entirely from individual donations, proved that it’s possible to run an amateur campaign without it being amateurish. By thinking cleverly, we proved it is possible to run an inexpensive campaign without it being cheap. But when you’re competing against parties with enormous funds, legions of paid supporters, the backing of the best marketing companies and other mercenary advisors, the odds become stacked against you.

The campaign

For me, the election was an incredible experience. I’ve spent too many elections, sitting in passive stupor in front of the TV. It was great to be involved. I knew that by getting involved and having a stake in the result, there’d be good and bad moments but I had never expected how close together they could be. Within moments of feeling elated with how the campaign was going, I could be plunged into morbid despair.

Perhaps an ability to ride out those emotions comes from experience, but it speaks volumes for the strength of character of Dylan, that he maintained equanimity throughout it all, and indeed seemed to relish it all.

In the 1960s, a week became a long time in politics. In the mid-1990s, as campaigns became mediated rather than direct, a day became a long time. Now, in 2011, an instant can make an enormous difference to the fate of a campaign. The wheels have come off the news cycle, and within an instant, news becomes commentary, opinion becomes fact.

Received wisdoms become consolidated within a second of them being created, and with more people becoming semi-informed, in this election perception became more important than truth. It is almost impossible for any campaign to fight against perception in such a short period of time, if resources are limited.

Nonetheless, the level of engagement between elector and candidate is quite extraordinary. I was impressed at the number of people who emailed Dylan with their questions and genuinely wanted to hear his thoughts. In fact, so many requests arrived, that we ended up putting the questions and answers online. “On the doorsteps” is a political cliché, but on the doorsteps, I was also impressed at the level of engagement we got with people who wanted to talk politics. The turnout in Dublin South East was low, but the level of political engagement during the campaign was high. I’m not yet sure why that interest didn’t correlate into turnout and it is something I need to think about further.

2011 was the incomplete revolution. Both the manner of the campaign and the result moved Irish politics only a fraction, but I believe there is a pattern of change which will move a notch further at the next election. In Dublin South East, we set the benchmark for transparency, accountability and engagement at a higher level than anyone else would ever have done. We campaigned in a new way; supplementing the legwork of canvassing with the awesome power of good media engagement. Other candidates, many of whom were much more successful at the polls, were rightly jealous of our campaign.

Would I ever stand for election? No way. I couldn’t do it. I really love politics and I will work on campaigns in the future, learning from this one, and I know that if Dylan calls again, he’ll have my support in an instant.

The Dublin Pub: Myth and reality

2011-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

There’s a difference between a Dublin pub as promoted by Failte Ireland and a thousand Irish songs, and real Dublin pubs. Failte Ireland pubs are awful. Dublin pubs are great.

The first difference between the pub of the popular imagination and the real pub is the smell. Good Dublin pubs smell of wet coats, cheap toilet cleaner and farts. If the pub smells of Thai food, expensive aftershave or furniture polish, turn on your heals and leave. Proper pubs don’t serve food. They serve drink, Tayto and Manhattan peanuts. You might occasionally get a toastie which come in two flavours – ham and cheese or a special (ham and cheese and a slice of tomato, cooked to approximately the temperature of the sun).

Avoid Tayto crisps. They’re awful bags of thin, oniony slices of disappointment, designed to get stuck between your teeth and make your beer taste funny. Irish people go on and on about Tayto, but that’s just a national failing like the French love of disco music or the British interest in dogging.

Irrespective of the time of day, a good pub has at least one old man sitting at a high stool at the bar or some other useful vantage spot watching the racing or reading the Herald through rheumy eyes. He’s a useful person in the Irish pub scene, even if he is responsible for the farty smell. His role is to ensure that there’s a constant movement of Guinness through the pipes all day, so that when you arrive, your pint is poured from freshly moving beer, rather than stagnant stuff which has been sitting since last night. He might be a bit smelly, but so would you if you gave your life to such a noble cause and lived on a diet of Tayto and Joe Duffy.

A good pub will be recognised by its decoration. A fake pub is decorated in wood panelling, rubbed brasses and darkened mirrors advertising mysterious whiskey and Tullamore Dew (another thing to be avoided – Tullamore, I mean). The wrong pub likes to give the impression of being lit by gaslight. It will be home to a thousand cubbyholes and niches, for aspiring Joyces to write impenetrable books about the human condition.

Avoid them. The aspiring writers especially.

Real pubs are lit by fluorescent lights like an industrial kitchen, rendering all of their customers pale and drawn, and creating such deep shadows that the mice have no need for the power of sight.

The decoration will be minimalist, bare other than walls painted in custard-colour gloss paint and a garish photograph of the 1983 Mayo Senior Football team taken by the landlord’s brother. There might be a calendar hanging on a nail beside the door, or a photo of Michael Collins and JFK (bonus points if the photo shows them shaking hands). But apart from that, the walls should be bare so as not to distract the customer from his drink.

A good Dublin pub is staffed by a fat man in a pale blue shirt and black trousers or a woman of such extreme age that she looks like an escapee from the National Museum’s Bog People exhibit.

Good Dublin barmen are known by their uniform. Just as priests have special shops, so too do Dublin barmen. After all, very few self-respecting shops sell drip-dry nylon shirts in pale blue or slacks which shine quite so loudly.

The barman is unlikely to be a fanatical devotee of the hundred thousand welcomes school of service provision. He will give the impression of hating every second of his life, and seems to aspire to using as few words as possible, as if they were rationed.

There is a sentence which gives joy to all devotees of the Dublin pub. A sentence more powerful than “I love you,” more welcome than “the cheque is in the post” or more longed for then “I’m sorry Mr Cowen but we forgot to set up your pension fund.”

The sentence is “I’ll drop them down to you.”

When the publican says he’ll drop your pints down to you, it’s pretty much the best thing in the world. You go back to your mates at the table, and in a couple of minutes, the drinks will arrive with, if not a smile and a “have a nice day” then briskness and efficiency.

During the course of the night as the drink and the craic flow (“the craic” is Irish for “talking authoritatively about stuff you know nothing about and bitching about the prices”) you may feel the need to visit the facilities, in the hopes of taking the pressure of your bladder and fishing bits of Manhattan peanuts out of your fillings.

Everyone who knows good Dublin pubs will know about the toilets. It’s a little known fact that deep-sea divers use Dublin pub toilets to train holding their breath. They banned smoking in Dublin pubs not to improve the working conditions, but the fear that the fumes in the toilets were probably flammable.

In Les Miserables, there’s a song which goes: “From the table in the corner / They could see a world reborn / And they rose with voices ringing.” Yeah, that doesn’t happen in Dublin pubs. The Easter Rising could never have been organised from the table in the corner of a Dublin pub. The Iron Curtain would still be hanging if the revolutionaries had decided to meet in the back room of Kehoe’s to plot the fall of Communism. Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t pop into McDaid’s for a pint before taking his position in the Texas School Book Depository.

From the table in the corner of a Dublin pub, you can’t see a brave new world, all you can see is the arse-crack of the man at the bar and the door of the gents, but nonetheless, the table in the corner of a proper Dublin pub with your mates on a Sunday night is probably the best place in the world to be. Just don’t tell the tourists.

Tips for conference speaking: Stand up, speak up, shut up

2011-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

I’m preparing for a few forthcoming conference speeches at the moment, and I thought it might lead to an interesting blog post.

Being invited to speak at a conference is a nice experience and I generally accept most invitations. Speaking at a conference is a good exercise for the following reasons.

preparing your speech focuses your mind on to the important topics you will talk about, and helps you marshal and organise your thoughts on your area of expertise
having a specified amount of time to speak for makes you think how best to communicate these topics
nothing – nothing! – speeds your heart like public speaking, and most of us could do with the practice
engaging with other speakers helps improve your performance and it helps you see where your area fits into the wider environment
it helps cement your reputation as an expert in a field

Below are my 12 tips for a good conference presentation. I think these can be applied both to academic and business conferences, and are my thoughts having seen and delivered some good (and really quite toe-curlingly awful) presentations.

1. Follow convention

People attend conferences to be briefed on topics which they need to know about. They have busy lives and want to leave the conference knowing something new. They want to hear an expert talk about their area of expertise, calmly, authoritatively and factually. If they wanted jokes, they’d go and see a comedian. The main rule of public speaking – stand up, speak up, shut up – holds true. Be interesting, be clever and be engaging, but if the organiser asks for 20 minutes on the future of the Irish widget industry, it’s because that’s what he has told the delegates they will get, and it’s what the delegate has paid his fee to be told. We have all seen really bad speakers try to be funny or unconventional or quirky, and it usually doesn’t work. Keep it simple, follow the rules and give the audience what they demand.

2. Agree to the terms of reference

Usually a conference organiser will invite you to speak on a general topic and you’ll agree the points you’ll cover. If you commit to covering those points, then cover them. Not to do so is defrauding your audience and letting down the organiser. Of course, things do change, and you may need to update your presentation to take into account something new, but if you’re going to divert from the outline in their conference programme, tell your audience at the outset of your speech.

3. Speaking alongside a Famous Person

Conference organisers like to invite a Famous Person to give a keynote speech because it’s a good hook to get people to attend their event. You might be lucky – you may be the Famous Person; if so, well done. But it’s more likely that you’ll be on the agenda alongside a government minister, international expert or media star. Think carefully if you’re scheduled to speak before or after the Famous Person – while you may be able to bathe in reflected glory, they do have a tendency to overshadow other speakers, and possibly the event as a whole. I’ve seen really good speakers lose the attention of their audience when the Famous Person arrives in the middle of their speech, and all eyes turn away from the speaker and towards the Famous Person. It has happened to me, and it’s not much fun.

4. Assert your authority

You’ve been invited to speak at a conference because someone thinks you’ve something interesting to say which the delegates should hear. You’ve got to explain to them why your opinion on the topic is the one they should pay attention to. Outline briefly why you know your stuff and the audience will pay attention. Plan your speech to tell them something they didn’t know or couldn’t know by reading the papers or trade magazines. A PhD thesis is awarded for making an original contribution to knowledge – try to do the same in your speech; be factual and new, and add to the audience’s knowledge.

5. Flexibility

Ask the organiser for a delegate list and get a general idea of who is attending the conference and what their expectations are, and fit your presentation to that. You need to go to the audience; they won’t come to you. An academic audience has very different expectations from a business audience and you should be careful to give the right speech to the right crowd. You should also fit your speech to the time of day – in general, speeches in the morning are more formal than speeches in the afternoon when the delegates have had a chance to mingle, chat and relax. If you’re speaking immediately after lunch, then you’ve got to try twice as hard to get their attention because they’ll be sleepy. If you’re the last speaker of the day, then it’s likely that the conference will be running late and the audience will be thinking about going home. Don’t delay them or you’ll be the person they blame for getting home late. These are important factors to take into account when preparing your speech.

6. Listen to previous speakers

It’s not always possible to attend all of the conference but you should at least listen to a couple of speakers before you, so you can gauge the mood of the event. Each conference has its own atmosphere and a good speaker will be able to read that atmosphere and adapt their speech to fit it. Some conferences are serious and the audience will sit in silence and not ask any questions; others are more interactive and you should be able to cope with both. I’ve seen lots of very good speakers fail to read the audience and give a totally inappropriate speech (including one memorable occasion when a series of well-rehearsed jokes fell completely flat after working brilliantly at a similar event a week before.)

7. People can’t read and listen at the same time

If you use PowerPoint and have a slide showing a complex graph, give the audience a couple of seconds to decode it before you start talking. If the audience is reading your slide, they’re not listening to you. If they’ve been given a print-out of the presentation, it’s likely they’re reading it and not listening. It’s also likely they’ve turned to the last page and are mentally counting the seconds until you reach the last slide.

Remember that people are doing this. Remember the rule – show, don’t tell. If you begin your presentation by telling people you wish to discuss the three main trends in your business sector, then your audience will expect to be told what they are, and be reminded which of the three topics you’re discussing at any given moment.

Ask the conference organiser if delegates will be emailed a copy of the PowerPoint or if it will be put online. If not, tell the audience you’ll email it to them if they ask for it. This means they’re not going to spend your presentation writing everything down for fear of missing anything. They can put down their pens, sit back and listen to you. It makes for a better presentation.

8. Keep it simple

In a 30 minute presentation (the maximum time you’re likely to be given) you’re not going to say everything you want, so distil your message into three or four of the most important topics. If a topic doesn’t naturally fit into your overall message, miss it out and concentrate on your core issues. Look at the audience and get their feedback. Are they confused? Are they taking it in? Do they need a rest for a second? Are you boring them or confusing them? Do they need more background information? Can you skip a section? Can you miss out some of the background information and go straight to the heart of the presentation? If you’re not sure what their body language is telling you, ask them. It does no harm to say: “Sorry. I see some confused faces. Should I repeat that point?” You may find that a previous speaker has already covered some of the background. If you attend the conference, you’ll be able to see what ground has been covered and miss it out. Assert and re-assert your main points throughout your speech.

9. Take time to summarise

At the end of your talk, wrap it up. Don’t just finish, say “thank you” and scuttle off the stage. Take a moment to summarise your thoughts and re-assert your message. You’re not giving an after-dinner speech which is pitched to leave your audience wanting more – you’re briefing an audience and you should leave them knowing more, and understanding more than before you spoke.

If you run out of time (and it does happen, especially if you feel the need to expand on a particular point because the audience needs it) don’t skip the summary. Skip an earlier part instead.

10. Find out if you need to take questions

The conference organiser will have told you if you’ll be answering questions or if there’ll be a panel discussion after your speech. A good tip if you’re taking questions is to repeat the question you’re asked – not everyone in the audience will have heard what the question was, even if there are microphones, and the experience of repeating the question will help you gather your thoughts. Answer the question, and if you think your answer is too long, invite the questioner to make contact with you later, and discuss it over coffee or after the conference is finished.

11. Make sure to leave your contact details

If you’re using PowerPoint, make sure your email address is clearly shownyou’re your presentation contains a lot of links to websites, sources of information or charts, offer to email it to anyone who contacts you. It’s amazing how many people will contact you and ask a question they were too nervous to ask on the day, or which only occurred to them when they were driving home. Even though the speech is over, you’re still on duty.

12. Stand up, speak up, shut up

Good luck.

Channel 4 News Articles

2011-01-27T00:00:00+00:00

On St Patrick’s Day 2010, I was asked by Channel4 News in the UK to write a brief report on the extent to which emigration and the recession were over-shadowing the festivities across the country. In September, Channel4 again approached me to write a piece on the mood in Ireland, as the IMF were due to arrive. Since then, I’ve written a further few reports on the political and economic developments of the country.

The articles and the URLs of the articles are set out below.

Brian Cowen passes leadership to a willing recipient

http://www.channel4.com/news/brian-cowen-passes-leadership-to-a-willing-recipient

Saturday, 22nd January 2011

Brian Cowen retains control of ruling Fianna Fail party

http://www.channel4.com/news/brian-cowen-retains-control-of-ruling-fianna-fail-party

Tuesday, 18th January 2011

Brian Cowen: Shades of Downing Street 1990?

http://www.channel4.com/news/brian-cowen-shades-of-downing-street-1990

Sunday, 16th January 2011

Ireland Budget: A rhetorical exercise?

http://www.channel4.com/news/ireland-budget-a-rhetorical-exercise

Wednesday, 8th December 2010

Ireland Bailout: Worst-kept secret confirmed

http://www.channel4.com/news/ireland-bail-out-worst-kept-secret-confirmed

Sunday, 21st November 2010

Missed Irish warnings and the man who told them so

http://www.channel4.com/news/missed-irish-warnings-and-the-man-who-told-them-so

Thursday, 18th November 2010

Confusion in Dublin as Government’s position cracks

http://www.channel4.com/news/confusion-in-dublin-as-governments-position-cracks

Monday, 15th November 2010

Ireland’s economic and reputational crisis

http://www.channel4.com/news/irelands-economic-and-reputational-crisis

Thursday, 30th September 2010

Brain Drain takes edge of St Patrick’s Day festivities

http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/business_money/aposbrain+drainapos+takes+edge+off+st+patrickaposs+day/3581257

Wednesday, 17th March 2010

Sneachta

2011-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve mentioned before on this blog that in cyber-space everyone can be an expert, and I’m not going to claim to be an online communications guru. The bad weather in Ireland over Christmas gave an opportunity to businesses and service providers to show off their communication skills. I want to acknowledge a couple of companies who did really well, and shame some others who didn’t rise to the challenge.

During the snowy period, people wanted to know two things. Firstly, how will I get home, and secondly, will I get into work tomorrow? The information which answers those questions changed every minute – roads became blocked, buses were cancelled and points froze. This was a situation where live, real-time data is vital. Essentially, people were asking if all of the transport providers they use were still operational and how long the snow was likely to last.

The Irish Rail twitter feed (@irishrail) rose to the challenge set by their customers and provided vast amounts of information on a live basis about the state of the train, LUAS and DART services in Ireland. As a service provider, Irish Rail get a lot of criticism, and this isn’t the place to debate what’s wrong with rail infrastructure in Ireland, but they’re communication strategy was excellent. They were informative (“The Maynooth line is 40 mins slow because we are defrosting points.”) and reassuring (“Don’t worry. There will be delays, but we will get you home”). In a situation where people are beginning to panic about getting home, they want to be informed and reassured. Irish Rail managed to do both, even though things were changing rapidly. I can only imagine how chaotic head office was. They even tweeted a picture of the vast crowds at Connolly station to illustrate why people should try to travel through other stations. That’s clever.

Re-tweeting information is a powerful communications tool – you read something from someone you follow, and you broadcast it to your followers. Irish Rail served not only as a broadcaster of up to date information on the state of the railways, but as a communicator of information which they thought their followers would find useful – the state of the roads, areas of heavy snow, latest weather forecasts. Communicators shouldn’t try to elbow alternative sources of information out of their way, but use them to support and supplement their own broadcasts. Again, Irish Rail knew they were becoming the people to whom worried commuters were looking for information, and they became the “go-to” people for all transport news.

Weather forecasters (like economists) are notoriously unwilling to admit they were wrong. However, weather patterns change extremely quickly and long-range forecasts quickly become as inaccurate as long-range economic forecasts. In this area, Irish Weather Online (@iweatheronline) also rose to the challenge, giving their forecasts for the minutes and hours ahead sometimes in quite tiny detail, and explaining why their previous forecasts were changing. Irish Weather Online demonstrated incredible use of hashtags (A hashtag is a way of filtering the tweets you receive from the people you follow and everyone else into topics like #economics #weather #sneachta). IWO, like Irish Rail, demonstrated a willingness to communicate the intelligence they had received from others. They followed people who were reporting the weather in their area, and re-tweeted it to others. They realised that, during a crisis, they had to communicate quickly, repeatedly and accurately. When Irish Weather Online tweeted that Dublin Airport may need to close for a few hours on the morning of the 23rd of December that I knew I may not get home for Christmas. Neither RTE weather nor my airline (I name no names) had a mechanism for communicating that sort of detail even though they presumably had the same data as Irish Weather Online. On the 23rd of December, Dublin airport passengers were split into two groups – those with twitter who were following Irish Weather Online and were concerned about their travel plans, and those who were reliant on their airlines and were completely in the dark about what was going on.

Because of their superior communicating, Irish Weather Online had also become my default “go-to” twitter feed for the best, most accurate and most detailed weather information. God alone knows what hours they put in during the bad weather.

Other service providers failed to rise to the challenge, and ended up doing vast damage to their corporate reputations. I’ve written about Dublin Bus and its love of intrigue before (your bus may or may not have left a garage which is located at a place unknown to you an unknown number of minutes ago and may reach you in about 20 minutes after it past the last “stage” which was in turn 20 minutes beyond the previous stage. You’re good at adding up, right? Your fare will depend on how many of our arbitrary “stages” your journey takes, but we’re not going to tell you what a “stage” is. And all of this is irrelevant because we’re not telling you if your bus stops here anyway. Ha!)

Telling your passengers through twitter that their bus may be delayed or cancelled is not really good enough. A delayed bus is a very different beast to a cancelled bus. Allowing your passengers to hear on the grapevine that buses may be halted at 8pm or 5pm for the night also isn’t good enough. In fact, it causes panic. Someone, somewhere in DublinBus makes the decision to cancel a route, or all of the routes. Why didn’t they tell the person who looks after the twitter feed? Do they have a twitter feed? Incredibly, it was left to the users of boards.ie and politics.ie to communicate what they knew about the bus routes in Dublin. In the absence of fact, rumour steps in. This might explain the people in tears at various bus stops in the capital last month. Or the silent hoards of people, slowing trudging home in the snow, mentally composing their letter of complaint.

Twitter is a relatively new communications tool, but it has a very powerful role in crisis communications. Firstly, it keeps people reassured and informed. In a crisis people want to be informed. Secondly, it reduces the number of individuals who contact you and ask for information. When Irish Rail tweeted that the Maynooth line was running 30 minutes slow, it meant hundreds of people didn’t need to contact them and ask one of their operatives for that information. It was provided for them. DublinBus couldn’t do that mass broadcast, so their customers had to go to their website, and so it collapsed. Then they went to boards.ie and complained about them.

Outside of Ireland, Newcastle Airport (@NCLairport) where I intended to arrive on the 23rd of December has an excellent twitter account, even taking the time to respond to individual queries about individual flights. While this is above and beyond the call of duty, receiving a personalised response to a query does really help stressed and worried passengers.

Dublin City Council’s communication strategy has been worse than useless during the snow, but – as ever when there’s a potential election coming up – clever city councillors took over the role of crisis communicators. And fair play to them. My fellow tweeters have mentioned Ray McAdam, the FG councillor for the North Inner City (@RayMcAdam) and Labour’s Aodhán O Riordain (@AodhanORiordain) as people who positioned themselves as their constituents go-to people for information about transport, school closures and water shortages during the bad weather. I’m sure it’ll pay dividends in the ballot box.

During the bad weather, it was clear which corporations had decided they should have a twitter feed but didn’t know how to use it. It was also clear which corporations had put twitter at the centre of their customer communications strategy and gave it the resources it needed. It was also clear which companies really cared about informing and reassuring their customer base as accurately and as fast as possible.

It was, though, extremely telling which companies, when faced with a crisis, still maintain the US military tradition when it comes to communicating with their customers – don’t ask, don’t tell.

So, where are we? What have we learned?

2010-11-25T00:00:00+00:00

Ireland has been going through a period of crisis for months, but it has only been in the last couple of weeks that everything has come to a head – the arrival of the IMF, the withdrawal of the Greens from government and the new Four Year Plan. It’s a lot to take in.

Here are some thoughts.

Firstly, that the curse of living in interesting times is true. If you’re interested in policy-making, economics and the media, this has been a great week to live in Ireland. If you’re a tax-paying citizen, it’s a fairly rubbish time to be here. This last week has been a strange juxtaposition of deep worry and exciting adrenalin rushes. It’s great getting the inside story from friends and colleagues in the business. It’s great having important people ask your opinion. But it’s grim reading what’s happened to the country. Genuinely frightening.

The second lesson is that the news agenda does not stop because you’re tired. If the government schedules a press conference for when you’re working on something else, you have to change to fit it.

The third lesson is that it’s OK to say you don’t know the answer to something. I’ve been approached a lot by the foreign media over the last few weeks to explain areas of policy or politics to them, and on occasions I’ve had to say that my information is only marginally less sketchy than theirs. Most of the time, I’ve been able to give an answer, but sometimes I’ve had to say I don’t know. I’ve written a lot on this blog that the best research, the best policy, the best pronouncements and insights are content-led. The people who have done well in terms of building their reputation during this economic crisis are those who have done their homework - those whose statements have been based on a real understanding of the real numbers are rightly getting the exposure they deserve. I name no names. People, during a period of uncertainty and doubt, don’t want empty phrases or a well-crafted soundbite – they want facts, however horrible and upsetting those facts might be.

Think of the people you’ve seen on Prime Time or interviewed by Vincent Browne. The people you listen to are those who have done their homework. The people you want to shout at are those who mindlessly repeat empty stock phrases. Their days are over. Again, no names.

The fourth lesson is that everything is connected. Politics shapes the economy and the economy shapes society. Society give us the politics, and politics gives us an economy. There aren’t any dividing lines any more. People who thought of themselves as economists are listening to new trends in society to inform their views. Political groupies are learning about the economy.

The last lesson is that nothing is going to be the same again. The people who make and shape the news are changing. The role of the commentator, pundit and analyst in changing the speed and direction of the economy and Irish society is changing. It’s too much maybe to say there is a wind of change in Ireland at the moment, but if you’re interested in how an economy and society work, being in Dublin now is really living in the best of times and the worst of times.

What a Difference a Year Makes

2010-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

November marks the first anniversary of this blogging lark. It’s been an exciting and interesting year, and while the economic backdrop to my new working life has been fairly turbulent, my own year has been busy, challenging and much more fun than I’d ever expected.

Over the last twelve months, I have: 

Tweeted 1,305 times
Attracted 421 twitter followers
Had 3,298 visitors to my website (Including one regular visitor from Kenya. Hello!)
Built up 895 SuperQuinn points and placed around 500 unexpected items in the bagging area
Written twelve blog posts
Uploaded around 300 photos to my flickr account
Had 18,992 views of my photos (Nobody from Kenya though)
Attended 105 meetings
Attended fourteen networking events (the earliest began at 6.30am. The latest finished at 2.30am)
Drank around 1,200 pints (Thanks to Emma for working that out) of which approximately 500 were Guinness and the remainder were Carlsberg
Doodled my way through four spiral bound notebooks during the course of meetings and drafting reports
Lost €59m worth of Dublin Bus refund tickets and three Hodges Figgis loyalty cards.
Pretended to be a customer of the Shelbourne Hotel in order to use their toilets three times
Bought one iPhone
Became an iPhone bore
Spoke at seven conferences
Been interviewed on radio three times and in the papers four times
Been called “a cheaper David McWilliams” once (I wonder if Mr McWilliams is ever called “an expensive Peter Stafford”).
Written nine posts for myrecession.ie website
Written nine “The Professionals” columns in the Irish Construction Industry Magazine
Been called “The man who can save the construction industry” once (Take that, Mr McWilliams)
Lied frequently about my profession to taxi drivers (I tell them I work in the taxi regulator’s office)
Had great fun.

Thanks everyone for making the last year so fun and interesting and here’s to more change in the next twelve months.

The Death of Paper

2010-10-05T00:00:00+01:00

Last month, I went back to what I should call my parents’ house for a few days and finally threw out all of my school and university notes. I am naturally a hoarder, but when my mum made the reasonable point that my old room would be more use to them as a guest bedroom than a repository for old copies of Viz, I began the bitter-sweet process of looking through files of things I’d hoarded. I liked to think of them as "my papers" or "my estate" but my parents, who have been tripping over them for the last fifteen years called "that junk in your room."

The oldest thing I found was an undated exercise book from when I was five or six years old, in which the important events of my life are carefully noted, and accompanied by a picture, executed in crayon. The best story involved me being stung by a wasp. The accompanying picture shows a five year old being attacked by something approximately the size of a golden eagle. Other stories, often merely fragments of tales, reveal a contented life centring on Christmas shopping, some cousins visiting and a walk in the woods (an owl is seen, like something escaped from Jurassic Park. I’ve never seen an owl in the wild before, so I was probably exaggerating to try to impress Mrs Sprott at that point). I couldn’t face burning that book, so it remains, a fragment of a life, seen through a glass, darkly.

Moving through the years and through schools, my handwriting deteriorates and my imagination improves but my artistic skills remain at the stage where an owl and a wasp are rendered identical. My head ruled my heart in most cases, and drafts of essays, went into the flames, finally cancelling out the stresses and heartaches of Sunday nights battling with long-division and the pluperfect tense.

I had no such qualms throwing my A Level French notes into the fire. Indeed, only at Nazi rallies were books burned with greater enthusiasm. French and I did not get on at all. I was always a middling student – at school and a total of nine years at university, I was a solid C+ / B- student. If I tried, or if a topic interested me, I could engage my brain and get an A, but generally, I rested mid-table. Except for French. Even the memories of it makes me feel unwell, so it was with undiluted happiness that I watched the flames engulf my essays on Marcel Pagnol’s family holidays.

One of the most interesting sets of papers I discovered were letters written by school friends during our first year at university. I’d kept scores of letters, crammed into a shoebox, complete with their envelopes. The letters were heartbreakingly enthusiastic. They contained long descriptions of university life from all over Britain in the mid-1990s. There were tales of formal dinners, three-legged pub-crawls and all the other usual Fresher activities, written in pens of various qualities in immediately familiar handwriting.

I sat and read them all, enjoying stories of awful housemates, cheap cider ("It’s only £2 for an enormous plastic bottle. I think it’s making my teeth itch") and long convoluted plans for Christmas get togethers. This was 1995. Pre-mobile phones.

The last letter in the box was from an Oxford-based friend and finished with a PS enquiring if I had an email address. He gave his email address and suggested I try it out. That was the last letter.

From then on, all of my correspondence with my friends from school has been done by email, text or phone calls. There are no more long, multi-page letters, with scribbled out sentences and strange spellings.

It’s a shame, not only because the death of paper writing means there aren’t Freshers going to university this year storing letters in shoeboxes, but also because I no longer have the opportunity to accompany my letters with crayon drawings.

The Wheels on the Bus

2010-09-08T00:00:00+01:00

In last month’s post I listed a few websites which I really enjoy, and which I thought readers of this blog might also enjoy. I think I’m going to create a new rule for this blog – if I talk one month about something positive, or something I like, then I’ll follow it with a bitch about something. I got absolutely soaked walking home this evening when a bus went through a puddle, so alas, my well developed rant about larger, more weighty issues will appear later in the year, while I rant about DublinBus instead.

DublinBus must have a committee which meets regularly to decide how to make taking the bus as confusing and frustrating as possible. Let’s say you want to take the 46A from Dublin city centre to Dun Laoghaire. It’s the most frequent bus route in Ireland, but yet the notice at the bus stop wouldn’t tell you when the next bus was due or what the fare would be. This annoys me. The bus shelter will give you a mass of irrelevant information such as what time a hypothetical bus left a distant garage, but not what time it will reach the customer. This is like a TV guide refusing to tell you on what channel and at what time your favourite programme will appear, but giving you details of when it was filmed and who the assistant producer was.

Last month, I turned up late at a conference because of DublinBus’s policy of making bus travel an exciting adventure. The notice board wouldn’t tell me when the bus was due, but it did tell me (in two languages) to queue sensibly and watch out for mirrors. I looked around to see if there was anyone to ask, but everyone waiting in the queue was either a pensioner or a Spanish teenager. The former get free transport so they didn’t know how much the fare was, and the latter were too busy writing on each others’ backpacks to be interested in my query. I secretly prayed the Spanish teenagers, reading neither English nor Irish, would be flattened by a passing mirror.

When a bus does arrive, you need to ask the driver what the fare is and pop the coins into the machine. The driver may – or may not, depending on his temperament – give you an additional section of receipt if you’re due a refund. You will lose this receipt. I always lose the receipt. In fact my losses on unclaimed bus fare refunds probably rival Anglo’s losses by now.

While on the bus, you have no idea where you are going. On London buses, periodic announcements, usually at major junctions, tell you where your location and it’s a fairly straight forward process to get off at the right spot. In Dublin, the trick is to mentally calculate how far you have travelled and take it from there. It’s extremely easy to get caught up in a particularly juicy story in the Metro which you find squashed between every seat, and miss your stop.

As an aside, I once lived with a woman from Uruguay who told me that Uruguayan buses don’t have bells to press in order to alert the driver you want off. Instead, when you want off, you remain seated and go “pssssst” to catch the driver’s attention. She had done an entire circuit of the Manchester city centre before she realised why everyone except drug dealers were avoiding her.

Back in Dublin, many older double decker buses have ornamental doors towards the rear of the bus. Like a hilltop folly built by an eccentric Victorian landowner to amuse his gaze, so Dublin buses have these trompe l’oeil doors fitted to amuse the customers. You think they’re doors until you get closer and you realise they’re pretend. However much you go “psssst” at the driver, they won’t open.

Follow Friday

2010-08-06T00:00:00+01:00

Follow Friday is a familiar concept to people who use Twitter. Each Friday, you share your favourite fellow tweeters to your own followers and recommend that they follow them. So, taking a break from the usual theme of this blog, I thought I’d do the same.

I think you should follow these four blogs. If you’ve a suggestion of your own, add it at the end. And if you want to pimp your own blog, be my guest.

I’ll post four more in a few more months.

The Story

http://thestory.ie

The Story does for Irish political life what the Sunlight Centre for Open Politics does for the UK, except they do it better. Gavin Sheridan and Mark Coughlan gather and publish documents on public life – often through tortuous Freedom of Information processes – and make them available to the public online at The Story. They have been instrumental in revealing details of politicians’ expenses, use of funds at FAS, and the legal standing of NAMA. One of their greatest achievements has been to gain access to top civil servants’ diaries for the last half decade. More will undoubtedly follow. The Story has yet to claim a scalp, but already their presence is being felt in public life. If you’ve a few minutes to spare, scroll through the documents they have received and see if your TD’s name is there. See if your own name is there. This is good, old-fashioned investigative journalism at its best. It demonstrates the power of a simple desire to disseminate public information.

Investigative journalism is expensive which is why fewer newspapers do it. The baton has been passed to online bloggers, and Ireland is fortunate that The Story, working on a shoestring, is able to keep the information flowing.

Political Reform

http://politicalreform.ie/

Political Reform is the online home of Ireland’s top political scientists and academics. While much of their debate is focused on scenarios for reform of Ireland’s political system, other contributors provide expert analysis of election campaigns, party politics, opinion polls and the institutions of the State. This website is live. It provides an almost daily supply of context and intellectual background to the news which you don’t get in the daily newspapers.

Articles are short and accessible. The writers know what they’re talking about, and so do the discussants. If you want to know why Irish politics looks like it does, look at this blog. If you want to know how it could be reformed, look at this blog. If you despair of Irish politics, look at this blog. If you’re Taoiseach, don’t bother. It’ll annoy you.

Ireland After NAMA

http://irelandafternama.wordpress.com/

Ireland After NAMA is the result of a symposium of geographers based at NUI Maynooth, but it has widened its scope from the geography of NAMA to include the widest possible discussion on the Irish property crisis. It is the blog of the National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis, based at Maynooth.

While you may not have heard of the blog, you will have read the authors in the daily newpapers. Rob Kitchin’s comments in last week’s media about oversupply of houses and the need for planning reform made headlines. Like the previous blogs, this is a good example of experts from different institutions coming together to broadcast their thoughts, research and findings without fear or favour. A debate is emerging in Ireland about what went wrong with the Irish property market. Policy-makers are scrambling for solutions to complicated problems. The authors of this blog make the problems understandable and they present rational, evidence-based solutions, which – even if they are not implemented – are part of a vital national discussion.

Ronan Lyons

http://ronanlyons.com

Ronan Lyons is really really good. He is an economist with a great ability to present complicated data properly in graph format. This is a welcome skill. Not many of us are able to know what information to include in a graph and what to leave out. The trick is to know the data inside out, and Ronan knows his data. While much of his work focuses on property (he set up the economic research unit at www.daft.ie) there is a lot more here too. This is economic opinion and solid fact merged in an award-winning way.

July 2010 Rent or Buy Report

2010-07-30T00:00:00+01:00

Download "July 2010 Rent or Buy Report" (pdf)

This information is updated monthly, and if you would like to receive more detailed monthly information and analysis for each tax heading, including Income Tax, Stamp Duty and VAT, please subscribe to my mailing list.

It is the tale, not he who tells it

2010-07-05T00:00:00+01:00

In 2006, the economy of Ireland changed. Universal growth across all areas – tax income, spending, employment, exports and imports – stopped and some commentators began to vocalise their concerns that perhaps the economy was not as healthy as many people wished to believe. After a decade of telling good news, many in the media found themselves suddenly telling a different narrative. As the data came in, it became clear that the business and economics pages of the newspaper looked different (more red ink than before), and the headlines of the six one news would be telling a less than happy story. George Lee, David McWilliams, and all the other familiar faces who had told us the happy story of the Celtic Tiger suddenly stopped looking so happy as the announced job cuts, tax increases, falling house prices, bank difficulties and recession.

A strange thing then happened. Rather than accepting the basis for those commentators’ pronouncements, they were blamed for talking down the economy. Between 2006 and 2008 perhaps one of the worst crimes one could commit in Ireland was to be seen talking down the economy. George Lee in particular was accused by many of actually creating the economic turmoil he described on the news. We don’t blame the weather forecaster for rain, so why blame the economic commentator for the recession? Between 2006 and 2008, many of us preferred to focus on the teller of the story, rather than the story itself.

Bertie Ahern told a Ictu conference in 2007 that he often wondered why the “cribbers and moaners” didn’t just commit suicide. Wow. But, for me, what is really interesting is the laughter and applause his comments received. You can see the clip of Ahern’s speech on Gavin Sheridan’s excellent blog:

http://www.gavinsblog.com/2009/08/29/bertie-ahern-just-commit-suicide-lads/

What would have happened if the cribbers and moaners had committed suicide and the only commentators left were those who were endlessly optimistic? Would the recession have been averted? Would we be back into a period of uniform growth? Would new jobs be created? Would the transatlantic flights be full of shoppers rather than emigrants? Hardly. While it is true that economic activity is largely sentiment based, and thus open to being suppressed if the prevailing opinion of the day is negative, we should give equal credence to those who are telling a story we don’t like. Ireland won’t be served if the only people who are listened to are those who are willing to be optimistic irrespective of what the facts are telling them.

It is the tale, not those who tell it. Some of the latest economic indicators suggest the bottom of the economy has been reached – tax receipts are on track, employment has stopped falling so rapidly etc etc – and over the next few months, we are going to be bombarded by commentary suggesting the economy is growing, shrinking or stagnating. This diversity of opinion is good. The more commentary we have, the better. So long as the commentary is fact-based, we shouldn’t be afraid of people who are telling us things we don’t want to hear. For the sake of the economy, we need the cribbers and moaners more than ever.

The Loss of the Irish Economy and the Seven Stages of Grief

2010-06-09T00:00:00+01:00

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk at the Professional Insurance Brokers Association conference on the Irish economy and the seven stages of grief. It seemed to go down quite well with the audience, and was picked up in the media, so I thought I’d pick out the key messages and make it into a blog post. This is a cut-down version of my talk, and if you would like to receive the full version, complete with fancy graphs, quotes, charts, pictures and PowerPoint, do let me know.

The starting point for my talk was to question whether economies move through inevitable cycles of growth and decline, or whether they move through clearly marked stages which are shaped by policy decisions. It is common to think of economic cycles where lean years follow fat years, as night follows day. It was inevitable, says this process, that a deep recession would follow such rapid growth in the Irish economy, and it is inevitable that the economy will at some point “turn the corner” and growth will return. I’m arguing, however, that there is nothing inevitable about economic change – it requires policy decisions. It took vast EU and FDI money for the Irish economy to grow, and it took policy decisions in the banks and government for the economy to collapse.

It is going to require further policy decisions to return us to growth.

Governments and banks should not think of themselves as passive recipients of economic change, riding out the storm, and hoping for the bottom of the market and then turning the corner (to mix my metaphors). Rather they have the ability to change policy and move us into the next period of economic activity. I’m arguing there are seven periods in the Irish economy. The first five follow the classic five stages of grief, and the last two will return us to growth.

Denial – back in 2006 and 2007 the economic indicators began to deviate from their uniform pattern of growth. Investment was not as solid, house buyers seemed reluctant. Something negative seemed to be happening to current expenditure. Ireland had firmly lost its competitive edge. 14% of all tax take each month came from selling and buying houses. The economists who voiced these concerns were blamed for talking down the economy. Bertie Ahern wondered out loud why they didn’t commit suicide. The government and many others denied anything worrying was happening. They told themselves, the media and the back room of Doheny and Nesbitt’s pub: “The Irish economy is different. The downturn is only affecting countries which engaged in sub-prime lending. The indicators, at worst, are mixed. OK, the Celtic Tiger might be over, but at least we are not the UK or the USA which have real problems.”

It became harder and harder in 2008 to ignore the mixed indicators, deny anything was wrong, and blame people for talking down the economy. By 2009, denial had moved onto the next stage of grief: Anger.

Anger – the debate about the collapse in the economy became personalised as people, the media and the government looked for scapegoats. The reasons for the recession were (and are) complicated. However, two scapegoats emerged – Michael “Fingers” Fingleton and Sean Fitzpatrick. Blame for the recession moved from a wide-range of policy makers to one or two people, and Molesworth Street echoed with the sound of people marching on Leinster House or the banks. After a while, people realised that burning effigies of Fingers and Seany weren’t going to get money flowing, and people began to bargain.

Bargaining – when anger and denial don’t halt the meltdown, people began to see if they could bargain their way out of recession. People cut back on their expenditure. Companies (unnecessarily) sacked people in order to reduce their costs, but in fact reduced their capacity to deliver for their clients. The market over-reacted as people, businesses and government tried to bargain their way out of recession. In 2010, government has been forced to explain to a suspicious electorate about their Budgetary projections, and differentiate between real borrowings and what Brian Lenihan in April 2010 told Ivan Yates on Newstalk “Accountancy devices (and) not real borrowing.”

Depression – since 2008 the government has introduced a vast range of policy responses to the banking and financial disasters, including the guarantee of banking liabilities, restrictions on bankers’ pay, requirements to lend to the enterprise sector, but expenditure continues to rise and tax continues to fall. Between 2007 and 2009, tax income fell by 20% and expenditure rose by 9%. In 2010, tax income has stagnated, and very few policy responses seem to have been able to turn the economy around.

Acceptance – this is where I think we are now because we are hearing the following comments a lot: “Mistakes were made”, “we are where we are”, “we can’t live beyond our means”, “we need to find out who did this and get the money back.” Bertie Ahern has acknowledged in May 2010 that tax incentives should have been stopped earlier. Martin Mansergh has said that government wasn’t very good at saying no to pressure groups and that if we are to avoid future policy errors, government needs to be stronger in the face of pressure groups.

Those were the five stages of the recession. There are two more stages before we can get back to economic growth.

Learning – we need to learn why Ireland slipped into recession so easily. The Celtic Tiger is now usually seen as two periods – the first period was when Ireland manufactured and exported products and attracted inward investment. The second period – put simply – was when we sold things to each other and allowed an ever-larger number of people to take a slice of profit for each transaction. The economy grew but it did not diversify. The tax regime did not diversify either. Ireland, I believe, threw money at problems rather than reforming the problematic institutions and processes, and when the money ran out, the institutions and processes ground to a halt.

We confused lagging indicators for leading indicators. We denied there was a problem for too long, and when the picture began to change, we realised that the statistics and data on which we were operating we incomplete, dated and wrong.

Implementing – The government talks about a smart economy, but the economy needs to be founded on real timely, smart, data. We need to move the spoofers and chancers to one side, and focus on informed, evidence-based policy. Whatever the government does in 2010, it is going to be unpopular. Vested interests (at sectoral and regional level) have been used to receiving money from a government with a massive surplus. That money does not exist any more, and now is the time for government to fix the institutions and processes which are dysfunctional.

If government is going to do unpopular things, they might as well be based on evidence, informed by expertise and on the basis of real data.

In cyberspace, everyone’s an expert

2010-05-06T00:00:00+01:00

The last six months have been an incredibly fun learning curve for me. Moving from a salaried job into consultancy has brought me into contact with some impressively dynamic business people in hitherto undiscovered parts of the economy. I’ve had to learn new ways of working, new methods to develop the business and new services to sell. And, most interestingly of all, the last few months have brought me into contact with the so-called and self-appointed “expert.” Like a big-city con-artist waiting on a street corner to fleece trusting country folk, so the expert lurks on the internet offering promises of untold wealth and success in return for some upfront cash.

As soon as you register a website, choose a twitter username and get some business cards printed, you come into contact with the expert. In fact, usually the self-appointed expert will thrust himself upon you. Without warning, you’ll be bombarded by tips to increase your twitter followership, tips to double the number of web clicks and a gallon of snake oil to grease your way to the top of the google ranking. The expert often has impressive-sounding credentials. He might point you to his self-published book (available as a PDF on his website) or a shaky video of his poorly-attended lecture during a break-out session at obscure web app summit in 2008. In some cases, his LinkedIn profile will stretch to many pages. In all cases, the expert’s promises will be vague, his credentials unsure, and above all, he should be viewed with suspicion.

The internet did not create the self-appointed expert, but it has given him a lair in which to work.

In their book “The Puritan Gift: Triumph, Collapse and Revival of an American Dream” (London: Taurus, 2007) the authors, Kenneth and William Hopper believe that the rise of “the cult of the (so-called) expert” was one of the reasons the USA lost its economic dominance in the post-war period. They chart the rise and fall of the United States boardroom as business lessons learned from the first generation of American economic titans such as Andrew Carnegie and Du Pont during the great 19th century expansion of the US economy were exported to Japan during the US Occupation in the 1940s and 1950s. Exporting these skills transformed Japan from a backward country to a modern industrial machine. Since then, and following the Japanese economic miracle, the US model of professional business management has spread around the globe, modernising the economies of many other countries, including, of course, Ireland whose economic miracle is now the subject of many history books.

Andrew Carnegie, John D Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt’s first-hand business techniques were replaced in US boardrooms with new mantras from a cult of self-appointed business experts, schooled in expensive business schools rather than in their own companies. Appearances of mega profit and rapid expansion were pursued by the so called experts as the ultimate goal of business, rather than making money through developing and selling good products. According to this school of thought, between the 1970s and the collapse of the financial system in 2008, the domestic US economy focused on financial services and moving pieces of paper about while the real economic activity took place overseas.

Governments and business owners were enthralled by the enormous profits promised by the cult of the so-called expert. The authors argued – correctly in retrospect – that businesses and economies built on real activity rather than the promises of experts would fare most strongly. The recession, ironically, has shown those areas of the economy where there were genuine experts at work, and those areas (such as the Irish banking system) where so-called self-appointed experts formed a cult which was admired but not fully understood by outsiders.

The Puritan Gift is an excellent book, written well before the recession but its lessons are very timely – the spoofer, the self-appointed expert, the spinner all fare better during periods of growth than periods of recession. If you’re good at what you do – like Carnegie or Vanderbilt – your company will be more likely to survive, but if you’ve replaced hard work with a cultish devotion to the so-called expert, you’re in trouble.

The Seanad needs a sense of purpose, not abolition

2010-04-12T00:00:00+01:00

Last October, Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny made it his party’s policy to abolish Seanad Éireann, the second house of the Oireachtas. This has been the most recent of a long line of recommendation for its abolition, reflecting a generally held opinion that the Seanad has somehow lost its way since its creation in the 1930s. A perception has developed that the Seanad is a weak, powerless home for aspiring (and failed) politicians, plucked from interest groups and universities through a complicated system of patronage and panels.

The Seanad has become the whipping boy for the failures in the Irish parliamentary system to hold the Government to account. With a majority in the Dail and the ability to manufacture a majority in the Seanad, the government never need worry about the passage of legislation. Very few people know what a senator does. Unless something spectacular happens, Seanad debates rarely appear on the news. And if a voter didn’t like what a particular Senator was doing when creating laws, they have no idea how to get rid of them. I would be sceptical about using these weaknesses as an excuse to abolish what could be an important debating chamber. Rather than abolish an important check on the power of Dail Éireann, the Seanad should be reformed, strengthened and given a new sense of purpose.

In looking for a new purpose for the Seanad, international experience gives us very few pointers. It has been extremely difficult for other countries to find a role for its upper house. The United Kingdom, having decided to abolish the hereditary system from the House of Lords, has been unable to find a reasonable alternative. It’s likely that the current half-way system, where appointed and hereditary Lords remain in unhappy co-existence longer than anyone had intended.

The use of Vocational Panels was originally intended to allow access of civic interest groups into the heart of policy-making in Ireland. The five panel system allows senators to be selected by business groups, trade unions, charitable and social bodies and represent their interests when deciding the future of Ireland. Grassroot members of organisations such as Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport in Ireland, the Irish Country Houses and Restaurants Association, the Irish Playwrights’ and Screenwriters Guild, People with Disabilities in Ireland appoint senators on their behalf.

Of course, many of these interests have another access point to policy-making through Social Partnership, the hugely powerful process of deliberative democracy which – over the last twenty years – has brought together unions, employers, community and voluntary organisations, and government to agree multi-annual policy frameworks on economic and social issues.

I have written about Social Partnership on this site previously when it looked like Partnership was dead. Recent public pay negotiations at Croke Park – and the subsequent discussions at the teachers’ conferences – confirm the death of Partnership and a return to simple wage bargaining. Gone are the non-pay elements of Partnership agreements such as social development, environmental improvements and “the developmental welfare state” (a favourite term used by Partnership policy wonks). Instead, late night debates beyond the scrutiny of the media and the public between unions and the State have focused on money and workplace issues. We are back to the 1970s.

Partnership is dead, and the Seanad is on its last legs. Why not try to give both the kiss of life by merging them? Make the Seanad the national Social Partnership plenary debating chamber. Most of the interest groups which participated in Partnership are already represented in the Seanad, and it would be very easy to dissolve the current Vocational Panels and organise senators into the six pillars of Partnership (Government, unions, employers, community and voluntary groups, agriculture and environmental groups). Negotiations on Social Partnership agreements would then be held in open session, rather than closed rooms. Pay and workplace issues would be discussed in full view of the people whose jobs will be affected rather than through off-the-record leaks to journalists.

It is good for a democracy to bring in expertise into its policy-making forum. Indeed, the creators of the Seanad went out of their way to do exactly that. A parallel process of Partnership confirmed the importance of engaging civic society in the creation of policy, but it has been hampered by criticism of its secretive and unaccountable structure. Bringing that process from windowless rooms in Croke Park conference centre into the grandeur and spotlight of Leinster House and the full scrutiny of the populace will allow daylight in upon the magic, as Walter Bagehot said of the Victorian monarchy. A Seanad comprising of the Social Partners whose purpose is to debate their vision for Ireland’s development will undoubtedly win over many of its current critics. It will remove from the Oireachtas the friends of the Taoiseach and the future (and failed) politicians who see the Seanad either as a holding pen to election to the Dáil or retirement. Opening the Partnership debate to the public will make it easier for members of the Partnership groups to see what is being negotiated and it will give a renewed sense of purpose to a potentially important policy-making arena which has currently lost its way.

It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

2010-04-01T00:00:00+01:00

Every Spring, around the time the clocks change, I sign up to run the Dublin Marathon. Every Spring for the last three years, I’ve filled in the application form, worked out a training schedule, purchased massively expensive new kit and headed out to pound the streets of my adopted city. And not once over the last three years has my schedule or my kit made it past the June bank holiday weekend.

Dublin is a great city for running. The famed broad streets, parks and seafront make ideal training routes. One of my favourite running routes takes me along the Grand Canal to Kilmainham, over the Luas line and through Phoenix Park. On an early winter morning in Phoenix Park, the Dublin runner shares one thousand acres of wilderness with only a few startled deer and the President, and during the summer, a late evening trot along the seafront is a great way to get some much needed fresh air.

When you’re running, it’s pretty much impossible to do anything other than think. You can’t sustain a phone conversation, nor can you text, tweet, blog or update your facebook profile. You put one foot in front of the other and think about whatever comes into your head. Sometimes, it’s half-forgotten song lyrics and I’ve lost count of the times a run has been ruined because I can’t remember the words to the song which is going through my head.

Other thoughts have been more profound, concerning bigger thoughts about life, careers and places I’d like to live. I recall one long run through Dun Laoghaire when I came up with an entirely new taxation system for Ireland, and another when I planned my Oscar acceptance speech. As someone with a terrible sense of direction, running when thinking often involves me becoming terribly lost in unfamiliar areas of the city. It’s very easy to get lost when your mind wanders as you run and many times I’ve finished mentally working out a solution to a client’s question only to think “hold on, I have absolutely no idea where I am or how to get home.” When you’re lost, Dublin is enormous.

I have completed two previous marathons – Edinburgh and London, both in 2006 and really enjoyed them. The secret to training for a marathon is to run. A lot. Three or four times a week for months. You eat, you run, you wash your kit, you run. You experiment with new energy gels. You buy €15 pairs of doubled-layer socks. You plan new runs, you record details of previous runs. You run. And when you’re in bed or in the office, the ache from your legs is a constant reminder of your last run. There’s really no great secret to it. Anyone can do a marathon if they give themselves plenty of time to train for it. Your toenails might fall off, but you’ll do it if you run.

I have always called myself a runner, not a jogger. I’m not very fast and I don’t look that great when I run, but I’m a runner. When I’m in my office working on some research, I’m a researcher. When I write this blog article, I’m a writer. I do the job so I’m entitled to call myself by my proper title.

The collapse of the global financial system and a more questioning society has resulted in a decline in the awe in which we hold people with certain titles. The pronouncements of politicians, religious leaders and economists are now being held to greater scrutiny than ever before. The titles don’t come with automatic respect any more as people feel confident to challenge them, question them and broadcast their mistakes.

There has been a lot of elitism in the past about job titles which have largely been destroyed with the rise of a new, more meritocratic economy online. The traditional title of “writer” has been undermined as amateur bloggers have developed successful business models through which they can make good incomes from their skills. Anyone with an internet connection and a website can honestly call themselves a writer. They might not be very good, but there are a lot of not very good traditional writers. I’m not very fast, but I’m still a runner.

I like the idea that if you do it, you are it. If you run – even if you potter around the backstreets of Dublin – you’re a runner. If you write a blog about your new kitten, you’re a writer. I like that once protected titles are being opened to scrutiny and a new era of writers, bloggers and tweeters are challenging old vested interests. Websites like politics.ie or thestory.ie now have the capacity to bring down ministers. Blogs, email and twitter can carry the news around the world faster than ever before. They can shape the policy arena more powerfully than the most expensive lobbyists. If you want to be a writer, then write. If you want to have a share in making the news, then do it. And if you want to challenge my business and become a researcher, get researching. There’s space for everyone.

And when you need a change of scenery, get running.

April 2010 Employment Data

2010-04-01T00:00:00+01:00

April 2010 Employment Data

The CSO has released employment information in Ireland for the Fourth Quarter of 2009 (Q4 2009). The Quarterly National Household Survey provides more detailed information to supplement the monthly Live Register data.

Headline information Q4 2009 (Q4 2008)

Employment in Ireland:1,887,700 (2,054,600) -166,900
Unemployed 267,400 (169,700) +97,700
Labourforce: 2,155,200 (2,224,300) -69,100

The decline in the labourforce of 69,100 (-3.1%) is due in part (approx 15,400) to the changing demographics of Ireland. Employment has fallen by 8.1% in the year Q4-Q4. Employment amongst men has fallen by 127,200 (11%) and amongst women by 39,600 (4.3%). Unemployment has increased by 97,700 (+57.6%) in the same year. Male unemployment has increased by 72,000 (61.5%) and female unemployment by 25,800 (+49%) Currently, the unemployment rate amongst those with a Third Level degree or further is 6.1%

The largest decrease in employment was in the construction sector which saw its employment levels fall from 216,300 in Q4 2008 to 136,700 in Q4 2009 (-79,600, -36.8%). Of those construction job losses, 59,000 were classed as employees (as opposed to employers or assisting family members).

Nationality

There are 422,800 non-Irish nationals of working age in Ireland in Q4 2009, a decline of 41,500 (-8.9%) in the year. Of this number, approximately 303,100 are in the labourforce, a decline of 33,600 (-10%) in the year. Irish nationals account for 86.4% of employment (85.1% Q4 2008). In construction, Irish nationals account for 89.4% of employment, an increase from 85.2% in Q4 2008.

Why we will all be Elvis

2010-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

One of the main themes of this blog – if there are any themes – is the importance of setting aside fact from opinion, and using them for their proper purpose. Facts can lag and lead the economy, they can tell us what is likely to happen and they can quantify what has happened. Opinions can help us give colour to those indicators.

In an earlier entry, I suggested that one of the problems which lay at the heart of the Irish economy was an under-reliance on using indicators for their proper purpose, and an over-reliance on anecdote and conjecture. Simon and Garfunkel (while not universally recognised as economists or social anthropologists) did note the common trait of tending to hear what we want to hear, and disregarding the rest.

We are all guilty of poring through factual datasets and indicators which conclusively prove something we don’t want to hear, and totally ignoring their conclusions the moment we get chatting to someone who tells us something we like. The bathroom scales tell us we’re putting on weight, but a friend tells us we’re looking slim – who do we believe? Who do we want to believe? How does the information have an impact on our actions? Answer: We ignore the scales, we listen to the friend and we order desert with our meal. Result!

Evidence-based policy research has long been at the heart of political science. By using evidence, properly captured, professionally analysed and rigorously compared we can get an idea on where policy should be focused. More and more, political parties, interest groups and businesses are moving their businesses, informed by evidence-based research. Good quality, timely data attracts a high value, and there has been a large increase in using focus groups; brought together to help policy-makers sift through a range of opinions and experiences to give colour to the facts.

When I write a survey for a client, I like to give respondents a chance to add their own comments after they have ticked a box. It helps me understand why they answered their question and it explains something of their motivation. It’s another strand of evidence which informs the client what their customers as thinking. The aggregate data is still the most important outcome of the survey, but the comments often give useful insights.

One concern in using evidence-based research to direct policy is that indicators are used in the wrong way. The Romans, as ever, had a phrase for it - Post hoc ergo propter hoc – just because something happened after an event, it doesn’t follow that it was caused by the event.

Here’s an anecdote. In 1977, when Elvis Presley died, there were 37 Elvis impersonators in the world; by 1993, there were 48,000 of them. This year, if the trend has continued, there are 2.5 billion Elvis impersonators worldwide. The global population is roughly 6.8 billion people – therefore one in three people are Elvis impersonators. 1.63 million of them live in Ireland – more than the entire population of Greater Dublin.

The data tells clothing manufacturers to invest in sequins jumpsuits and it tells political parties that if there are plenty of votes to be obtained in promising to reduce VAT on medallions. The Elvis data clearly points us in the wrong direction. A simple piece of real-world research tells us that it’s highly unlikely that every third person – man, woman and child – is an Elvis impersonator.

Using one indictor on which to base an economic forecast, policy statement or business decision does not work. There is no way of knowing if you’re falling into the logical error of confusing a cause with a consequence, until you’ve a warehouse full of white leather suits, CDs of Heartbreak Hotel and a failing business. It’s only by using all possible evidence, cross-referenced, double checked and supplemented with new research that truly evidence-based research can have a real impact.

March 2010 Economic Briefing

2010-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

Download "March 2010 Economic Briefing" (pdf)

An Irish solution to an Irish problem

2010-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

After nine years living in Ireland, I am slowly beginning to understand the consequence of the expression “the long finger.” Putting something on the long finger essentially means forgetting about it until some unspecified point in the future. Everyone does it at some point in time, hoping that if the finger is long enough, by the time it gets remembered it will no longer be of any importance.

Ireland’s political elite are especially good at putting things on the long finer. Tricky, difficult, awkward or complicated issues are put on the long finger, while small headline grabbing issues are dealt with as a matter of priority. Issues requiring thought, planning, foresight and joined up thinking are relegated to a committee and promptly forgotten about. I’m convinced there’s a government appointed agency tasked with the introduction of the euro still in existence. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if there are still meetings of the task force organising the Pope’s visit to Dublin.

Ireland loves its committees. Its politicians, trained through decades of serving on town and county councils enjoy nothing more than sipping tepid water from chipped glasses and scribbling in the margins of the agenda. They’ve been schooled in making points of order, raising issues in Any Other Business and agreeing dates for the next meeting.

Social Partnership, proportional representation and the clientilist model of Irish politics promotes the use of committees as a way of discussing issues. An issue, such as unemployment becomes an irritant, and government – tired of having to deal with it every day in the Dáil – decides to form a task force. They appoint one of society’s better known members to be its chair. Maybe a semi-retired judge. The chair is delighted because he gets a small stipend and, if he’s lucky, the media will name the committee after him.

In Britain, if someone is successful in public life, he gets the title “Lord.” In Ireland, he becomes a report.

The chairman then selects the committee. It must include a few of the lesser-known backbenchers. And if there are Dublin TDs then there must be a couple of rural TDs (we can’t let Dublin have everything, after all). And then there’ll be a couple of the tamer senators. It’s always good to have a celebrity on the committee, so we’ll have a hurler, and there will be a few distinguished business people. There are, of course, fewer distinguished business people in 2010 than there were in 2007, but with nothing else to do but panic about bank shares, membership of the committee is a form of therapy for some of them. They can probably get it on VHI.

But what about the Social Partners? OK, add a middle-ranking trade union official, someone from Ibec, a couple of community groups and a sheep farmer, and we’ve got the committee.

The Task Force on Innovative Employment and Economic Reprioritisation now exists. Give it a website (with a semi-permanent ‘under construction’ sign), set up a few public consultation sessions in Dublin Castle and a Tullamore hotel, and you’re ready to go. A logo would help, so that’s a sub-committee formed.

It doesn’t need to do anything. The purpose of the Task Force is to exist. Much like TG4, we don’t want it to do anything, but it’s nice that it’s there. The committee’s theoretical purpose is to present a report to the minister on innovative employment and economic advancement containing an analysis of international best practice, a report on the views of stakeholder focus groups and some costed policy recommendations. Its actual purpose is, of course to be a handy excuse for the Minister when he is being tackled by Opposition TDs.

“We’ve set up a Task Force” bellows the Minister. “And it’s not my job to pre-empt the findings of that committee.” He sits down, happy.

In a couple of years time, when it has run of out sub-committees and everyone has had an opportunity to stage a theatrical walk-out (the union official, important chap that he is, is allowed two theatrical walk-outs. Nobody notices), the Task Force presents its report. It even has a logo, and the media helpfully names the report after the chairman. His wife is delighted.

The government, not entirely keen on all of the recommendations, decide that the report should be published on a Tuesday afternoon half an hour before Declan Kidney announces the Irish Six Nations squad. The chairman, photographed outside Government Buildings with his report (note the logo) has given the State some service.

The report, briefly dissected by a few interested bloggers, is given a few paragraphs in one of the less well-read sections of the Sunday papers and is quietly forgotten about. It may be that some of the easier recommendations are adopted as government policy but the chances are that the more complex issues are put on the long finger and the committee is sent back to do some more work.

The economy is cyclical. The world is globalised. The problems are complicated. But somewhere deep inside a government agency, a couple of backbenchers and a sheep farmer are discussing logos.

Welcome to Ireland.

February 2010 Economic Briefing

2010-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

Download "February 2010 Economic Briefing" (pdf)

January 2010 Economic Briefing

2010-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

Download "January 2010 Economic Briefing" (pdf)

Whatever happened to Social Partnership

2010-01-06T00:00:00+00:00

For the last twenty years, Social Partnership has been at the fore of Ireland’s economic and social policy-making process, but during the last year, it seems to have quietly died. Where once Government Buildings hosted vast private meetings of the great and powerful, in 2009, Partnership collapsed and union leaders, employers, civic and lobby groups rushed to the media and attempted to force policy through the airwaves. It’s not working.

On 24th June 2009, an Irish Times poll reported that 67% of people believed that “the era of Social Partnership is coming to an end.” There had been no formal plenary sessions of the Partners and there had been some minor industrial unrest amongst electricians and dock workers. With the Exchequer receipts in freefall as the property market collapsed, unemployment rose and commercial activity halted, the issue for Partnership has changed from ensuring the equitable allocation of resources, through to managing the orderly decline in public spending and increasing taxation.

Policy-making by consensus has been replaced since mid-2009 by policy-making through combative soundbite. This is fine if your aim is to make the headlines on Morning Ireland, but less useful if you’re trying to shape the national policy agenda. While Partnership has been credited for Ireland’s peaceful industrial relations environment and for laying the environment for economic growth, the same process seems to have proven itself incapable of coping with the downturn. The problem seems to be that as new Partners were welcomed into the policy-making process, and the range of policy areas under its remit expanded, Partnership lost its focus. During the good times, Partnership became a mechanism for sharing wealth rather than a process for seeking solutions.

In 2009, The McCarthy Report recommended massive cuts to the number of public sector workers and cuts in social welfare receipts. As Prof Bill Roach of UCD School of Business noted in an Irish Independent article entitled “Social Partnership faces its greatest challenge in eventful 22-year history” previous cuts in public service numbers were offset against small increases in wages and other “sweeteners” which allowed agreement between unions, Government and employers. However, the 2009 cuts, set as they were in the middle of a recession did not offer any such sweeteners and this made negotiations very difficult and threatened to bring any negotiations to a halt.

During what we now think of as the Celtic Tiger period of Ireland’s economic development, the task for Partnership was to distribute the winnings from economic growth as fairly as possible, while ensuring that social advancement also kept pace. Demands from community and voluntary groups were largely met thanks to the Budget surplus, and union and employer demands were met with “sweeteners” (ie cash). In July, the Sunday Tribune noted that during Bertie Ahern’s period as Taoiseach consensus could easily be reached amongst the Partners by ensuring each of them received something in the final deal: “Ahern’s way of doing business…as he fixed problems and won favours with interest groups such as the social partners was by throwing money at them.” Brian Cowen, naturally less of a fan of Partnership than Ahearn, has had no such luck.

The Partnership process - at its most simple – has been a search for consensus. First agree on what the problem is, then agree the solution. The agreement on what to do to solve problems needed the endorsement of all participants across all sectors, and during the good times, it was forthcoming. The longer-term consequence was that the process tended to erode radicalism at a point in history where radicalism was needed. In a consensus-forming process, radical solutions become watered down as controversial conclusions are avoided, difficult solutions abandoned in favour of easier answers and the finger of blame kept hidden. As the Irish Independent noted in an editorial in June 2009 entitled “Social partnership must head to the scrapheap:”

We do not need political spin, manufactured victories or bureaucratic triumphs: we need clear-headed leadership that is prepared to identify the real problems and then have the courage to deal with them. Social partnership, a bureaucratic construct designed for a different time, is part of the problem, not part of the solution (Irish Independent, 21 June 2009).

As the number of organisations involved in Partnership increased and the economy declined, so the search for consensus became more challenging. Arguably the solutions created through Partnership became less convincing. If the Partners cannot agree where the problem lies (which would necessitate some finger pointing at those sitting around the table) then it’s unlikely they can agree what the solution is and even less likely that they can agree where the cuts should be made. So Government has just cut them out of the picture.

The solution to Ireland’s fiscal crisis is unlikely to be one which all Social Partners – unions, employers, government, community and voluntary groups - can endorse, requiring as it will, that some hard-won concessions are removed and public projects shelved. Because Social Partnership groups will never agree in public to endorsing reform against the wishes of their members, the soundbite media-led policy-making process will quickly supplant deliberative, participative Social Partnership. As four firms a day go out of business and tax incomes collapse, this is a moment for the consensus-forming model of policy-making to be supplemented with genuinely radical solutions and ideas for policy.

There is the potential, in the absence of any sweeteners and in the increasingly polarised view of grassroots members of the Social Partnership organisations, for a return to quid pro quo zero-sum negotiations. This would exclude many of the newer social policy members of Partnership and would mean a return to a smaller economic policy-based form of simple bargaining. Ireland’s problems are too confusing for such a simplistic form of policy-making.

Radical solutions proposed by economists, think-tanks and outside organisations have been doing the rounds at academic and business conferences and online. Indeed, the volume of proposals has increased during the recession and as a result of normal policy-making process falling apart. Now that the consensus-building model of policy-making isn’t working, and the doors of Government Buildings seem to be shut to old-style Social Partnership, it’s time to take serious consideration to the range of ideas which are floating outside Government Buildings. Let the baton be passed from the old vested interests, to new more radical experts who are currently shouting in the darkness.

Monthly Tax Receipts

2009-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

Total Monthly Tax Receipts € Million
	Jan	Feb	March	April	May	June	July	Aug	Sept	Oct	Nov
2007	474.5422	350.0367	360.0131	234.4738	441.2496	220.9187	419.5293	233.6716	411.7880	347.2771	973.7265
2008	460.9789	295.1911	354.5116	215.7083	385.7769	200.5696	354.5794	210.0227	370.4762	299.7582	738.3912
2009	373.4706	202.4135	275.1430	158.7896	343.1115	228.0211	287.9241	210.2798	291.4076	239.0513	466.3144

Cumulative Receipts: January-End November € Billion
	2007	2008	2009
January - November	44.67	38.85	30.75

Do your research, and get off the doorstep

2009-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

Many of us who listen to politicians mentioning what people “on the doorstep” are telling them, wonder which doorsteps they’re canvassing.

Politicians have a strange ability to pick doorsteps owned by people who want to tell them how great they are. Second hand reports from the doorsteps give politicians great ammunition when facing a hostile interviewer. How many times have we heard a cabinet minister say “actually, the issue of the missing money isn’t an issue, Pat/Miriam/Holy Father. The people on the doorstep are telling me that I’m doing all of the right things and they want me to keep on as minister.”

An unverifiable anecdote masquerading as fact is great when you’re a politician being interviewed on drive time radio but it’s no use at all for a start-up business person who wants to know if anyone likes his product. Politicians have incredibly selective hearing and it’s only by tuning out the sound of all of the doors which are slammed in their faces and by ignoring the angry constituents who vow never to vote for them that they’re left with a group of loyal fans whose welcoming doorsteps give them the self-belief to keep on working.

Many small businesses fall into the category of tuning out opposition and ignoring people who aren’t interested in their product. They think to themselves “actually, people aren’t saying that I’m flogging overpriced tat six months after the trend has moved on. The people on the doorstep are telling me that my product will change their lives and they’re willing to pay twice as much for it.” Survey sample? One person.

Good businesses need good research. They need proper analysis of the facts, not an unverifiable anecdote from a loyal supporter. Not only do businesses need to know who will buy their product and how much will they pay for it, but they need to know what external factors are likely to have an impact on sales. What’s government doing to regulate the field? What’s happening to the economic context in which you’re making a sale? Is there a societal consequence to your business?

Bill Clinton ran an election campaign on the simple statement that it’s the economy, stupid. The economy will dictate everything. The economy will decide how many clients you have and how much money they have to spend on your product. It will dictate how much the government will tax you on your product (and, if you’re lucky, any profits) and it will dictate whether competition from home or abroad will gobble up your business.

At the time of writing, the stockbrokers and financiers are beginning to make their economic forecasts for 2010. Ireland will, depending on whose forecast you read, emerge blinking into the sunlight of strong economic growth, or spend next year in the darkness of prolonged recession. GNP growth (% per annum) is not an abstract number, created by economists for the amusement of economists (although if you go for a pint with a group of economists, you’ll find it is) but it matters enormously to the start-up business Do you want to start your company in a recession? Is there merit in waiting? Will the forecast for the economy help you persuade the bank to finance your endeavour? Have you factored the tax implication of the change in the economy into your business plan?

Personal anecdotes from potential clients and customers will undoubtedly help you hone your business model into one which can maximise customer loyalty. Politicians, economists and stand-up comedians all use focus groups.

But the input of potential customers needs to be grounded in fact, and all start up companies should be spending time listening to the financiers and the economists talking about their projections for the economy. This doesn’t mean you necessarily need to read the Financial Times every day. Indeed, one of the great secrets of economics is that nobody really reads the Financial Times; they just look at the adverts for expensive watches and cry for their lost millions. The pink pages of the paper blot away the tears.) But using good, well-networked research support can help put some facts in place which will make an enormous difference to your business plans.

Why? Well, for one thing, the chances are you already have a better understanding of the macroeconomic context in which your enterprise takes place than anyone else. Donald Rumsfeld (who, as a politician, is probably guilty of using doorstep anecdotes in place of the Financial Times) said of the Iraq War in 2002 that there are “known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don’t know.”

In six short, but bewildering sentences, Rumsfeld summarised the need for solid research, well presented. And that’s exactly what I’m trying to help Irish businesses do – find out what they know and what they don’t know, but also what they think they know, what they think they don’t know, and sort it, and fill in the gaps.

There are countless books about how to keep your home clutter-free. There are – dotted around different sections of the bookshop – more books about how to keep your mind, your career and your spirituality clutter-free. But there is a task to keep the flow of information in and out of your businesses clutter free. How do you compile and use all of the information you know about your business and how can you use it effectively? How do you summarise it into a report you can give to your bank manager, your PR Company or your shareholders? How can you fill in the gaps in your knowledge without becoming cluttered with more useless information?

The answer is by taking some time to find out what information your company lacks, and present what you do know convincingly. My aim is to look after all of that for Irish companies – streamline and maximise the usefulness of what you know, and present you with what you don’t know. Grounded in fact, stripped of clutter, presented clearly and convincingly, your company will be on better footing than any politician, blinking under the studio lights as he launches into another tale from the doorstep.

New Services for a New Economy

2009-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

Every so often a sentence jumps out at me, stops me in my tracks and makes me utter a silent swear. The most recent sentence to do this to me was buried away towards the end of A Colossal Failure of Common Sense, the story of the downfall of Lehman Brothers. The sentence reads: “The economy of Ireland crashed, making the short years of prosperity look like a mere blip in a poverty-studded history.”

Wow.

Is that it? Has the Irish economy crashed, and were those glorious years of €15 plates of pasta, boutique hotels and Italian coffee from paper cups merely a blip? Has normal service resumed? And, if so, how can businesses influence and control it?

My main motivation for setting up this website was to create a place where I could put together the tools I use in my work as a freelance researcher and writer, as well as the things which I enjoy when I’m not working. I hope it will become a repository or an archive of facts, figures, opinions and forecasts for my clients. It will pull together articles I’ve written, speeches I’ve delivered and thoughts which I’ve had. But, one thing at a time.

The underlying theme of this website, and my work, is that the Irish economy is changing, people like Larry McDonald who wrote the sentence I quoted earlier, are making forecasts about what’s happening. My own view is that the more we understand that change, the better positioned we will be to cope with it. My job is not to join the ranks of those who make forecasts (although I’ll do that), but rather it’s to help companies gather information about what impact the changing economy will have on their businesses.

So, that’s what I’m doing. Helping businesses with their research needs. Helping them understand what is happening in the changing economy. A full list of services is somewhere else on this site, as are a few recent economic indicators. Life, as someone recently said, is what happens between blog posts, but I’ll update them when I can.