'Speed and urgency' needed to fix economy

A CONCEPT of speed and urgency to fix our problems is one of the key things needed in the State, the head of Microsoft Ireland said yesterday.

Paul Relis was speaking at a public forum in Dublin discussing Fintan O'Toole's book Enough is Enough. Panellists were Fintan O'Toole, historian Diarmuid Ferriter, chief executive of Barnardos Fergus Finlay and Mary Murphy lecturer at NUI Maynooth.

Mr Relis listed lessons from business which were important to apply quickly in the State and public service. These “very simple interventions can help to change the culture”, he said.

These concepts were; you do not pay for activity, you pay for results, not to reform the public sector but to reset the goals of the public sector and to reset the public services so that it serves the citizen.

Benchmarking should be done against the EU average to make ourselves productive rather than benchmarking as an ATM, and there should be no tolerance of non-compliance, he added.

Ireland should take advantage of the “unstoppable momentum” of business growth in the Far East, not at the “speed of molasses” but quickly, he said.

Ireland needed to go after the technology companies if the vision for the State was to be a competitive nation attracting hundreds of companies, he said.

There is no recession in technology, he said. Ireland could intervene in the cloud computing revolution and attract hundreds of small companies who could learn from Ireland’s experience of selling into European countries, he added.

The Irish were “laggards” compared with the rest of Western Europe and China in the use of technology to make the economy and public sector more productive and to help people live fuller lives, he said.

Historian Diarmuid Ferriter said a lot of the rot began in the general election of 1997 which was based on tax reductions as the solution to all our ills.

It could have been about decency, fairness and public service but instead we were reduced to the idea of personal tax cuts, he said.

The electorate now had to think about who they vote for and on what basis and they need to think of the future and what change they want, he said.

He spoke of how values of the generation of politicians in the War of Independence were relevant to today.

The generation was genuinely committed to public service and did not to urge people to take a dangerous course they were not prepared to take.

Those politicians were very decisive about sovereignty and that is something people need to think about again as it is a “very serious business”, he said.