O'Driscoll warns against 'smart' focus

DURING “THE mirage of the Celtic Tiger”, Ireland made the mistake of abandoning hands-on engineering and manufacturing for financial engineering and a focus on promoting mostly “smart economy” jobs, Glen Dimplex chief executive Seán O’Driscoll said yesterday.

Mr O’Driscoll, along with speakers including three presidents of the American Chamber of Commerce in Ireland – Intel vice-president Jim O’Hara, Hewlett-Packard vice-president Lionel Alexander and Pfizer vice-president Paul Duffy – told a Dublin event yesterday that manufacturing has not been given proper importance in Ireland even though it should be central to the economic recovery.

Mr O’Driscoll noted that the countries leading the way out of the recession, such as China and Germany, are all countries with a strong manufacturing base. Those in the most trouble are countries such as the United States, Ireland, and the UK, which slashed and exported much low to high-end manufacturing.

“We need to go back to making things again, to real engineering, not financial engineering,” O’Driscoll said. “We need to export our products, not our jobs.”

The cost of doing business in Ireland remains too high and makes it challenging to build and keep operations here even with lower wage and other costs due to the recession, he added.

All the speakers expressed alarm about figures this week indicating Ireland comes 30th amongst 33 OECD countries in spending on education.

Mr O’Driscoll said a strict focus on high-end “smart economy” jobs was a mistake.

“Do we really want an economy based on a number of high-end jobs, with the rest making little money?”

He said wage agreements had destroyed many sectors of the economy. If the goal of unions was to guarantee manufacturing jobs through wage agreements, then the tactic had failed “appallingly”.

Speaking later on RTÉ radio, Mr O’Driscoll said he was seeking a five-year pay freeze to restore competitiveness.

He said Glen Dimplex has kept three manufacturing facilities here – in Dunleer, Newry and Portadown – out of “loyalty” to the country in which the company was founded. If he weren’t Irish there would have been little reason to maintain costly manufacturing here.

The speakers were addressing the second annual session of the Lemass International Forum at the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin in the presence of its patron, economist and secretary of finance in the Lemass government TK Whitaker.