Billionaire Denis O’Brien thinks university graduates are “entitled”, remote working is a bad idea and HR professionals are “weak” people who “also want to work from home”. In a free-ranging speech at a conference this week, he criticised a “lack of joined-up thinking” on infrastructure.
O’Brien, who has personally been tax resident in Malta and Portugal, also took aim at the State for being “complicit in facilitating global tax avoidance” by big US technology giants. “This is perfectly legal and within OECD rules,” he acknowledged. But, he went on – pertinently, or so critics of his own tax arrangements might say – “the question is: is it acceptable?”
Tech billionaire John Collison thinks Ireland is hopelessly inefficient, stymied by too much regulation and too many quangos. Airline boss Michael O’Leary made headlines during the general election campaign a year ago for making one of his Statler and Waldorf-style pronouncements on how he wouldn’t employ teachers to get things done. In another of his intermittent outings as a no-frills provocateur, he mused that the MetroLink to the airport isn’t needed, because people can just get the bus. This is the man who, as Justine McCarthy pointed out, famously bought a taxi plate to dodge traffic. Billionaire Dermot Desmond agrees with O’Leary that the MetroLink is unnecessary because he thinks we’ll all be driven to the airport by AI. And so on.
It is a good time to be alive if you are the kind of person who believes football managers make good presidents, or that O’Leary should be overseeing the health service and charging sick people to pre-book seat in emergency departments plus double for their suitcases.
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This is a recurring theme of Irish life: the notion that everything would be vastly improved if only rich men such as O’Leary, O’Brien or Collison were in charge. According to this worldview – which itself seems a particularly American import – there is a great chain of being, and billionaires occupy the link just below the Jesus Christ himself. It’s not that they are wrong in their pronouncements: O’Brien and Collison have a point about our inability to deliver on infrastructure, even if Collison’s prescription – deregulate everything – struck some as simplistic.
What is wrong with Ireland’s housing and planning system?
The government has come under increasing intense criticism of its record on housing, and the sluggishness with which its addressed the need to build more affordable homes.Today on Inside Politics, Hugh Linehan discusses the issues with the planning and regulatory system that some argue is slowing down the process of boosting housing supply in Ireland.On the podcast today is Orla Hegarty, assistant professor at University College Dublin and a fellow at the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland, dismissed Mr Collisons case, saying: “It jumps to a solution that doesn’t relate to the problem”.
But why are we so starved of big ideas that it takes an opinion piece or a throwaway remark by a billionaire at a conference to start a national conversation?
It is certainly worth hearing what they have to say, but the thing about very rich men that we overlook is this: most of them got where they are by doing one thing very well. O’Leary cut out the creature comforts and made it cheaper to get to Luton, Tallinn or somewhere north of Paris. Collison and his brother built a payments system that was better than existing payments systems. Desmond is a canny investor. O’Brien’s Esat Digifone won a mobile telecoms licence.
We should stop waiting for people who are very good at running businesses to tell us how to run the country, demand more from those we actually elected to the task, and then allow them the space to take risks
They may go on to do other things well too, but their initial success was achieved by zeroing in on a single goal – often, as they like to later brag, at the expense of absolutely everything else (see O’Leary on how he rarely changed a nappy, etc). Generally, you can’t run a country like that.
During Covid, we conducted a mass global experiment in what would happen if countries behaved like start-ups. Ireland – and almost every other country, aside from Sweden – diverted all of its resources towards a single goal. It worked, to the extent that it slowed down Covid’s spread and prevented our health service being overwhelmed. But by most other metrics it was a disaster: cancer diagnoses and school days missed; businesses destroyed; supply chains disrupted; soaring domestic violence rates and mental health problems; isolated older people; vulnerable children allowed to disappear through the cracks.
Or take the example of Ardnacrusha, frequently cited by commentators who wonder where our ambition is gone; less often mentioned is the fact that the State spent one in every four to five pounds available to it between 1925 and 1929 building the power station. It did that one thing really well, but it had to stop spending entirely for those few years on things such as housing, slum clearance, roads and railways. That simply would not be tenable today – not only because of the bureaucracy bemoaned by Collison, but because the public wouldn’t stand for it and, in a hostile political culture where even minor mistakes are career-ending, politicians are far too risk averse to try.
We should stop waiting for people who are very good at running businesses to tell us how to run the country, demand more from those we actually elected to the task, and then allow them the space to take risks. The recent presidential and general elections were notable for how devoid they were of big, bold ideas. And as evidenced by the reaction to Collison’s essay, some politicians are not only short on ideas, or too timid to venture them, they appear to have entirely forgotten that they’re in charge. “Too many layers, too many structures, processes that take too long. Time for the pendulum to swing back,” Tánaiste Simon Harris said on X, as though he was a caller to Liveline and not someone who was in government for much of the relevant period. Politicians generally were tripping over themselves to agree with Collison’s thesis – so why did it take a tech billionaire to point it out?
The world abounds with cautionary tales about the wisdom of letting rich men loose with their free-market solutions to our thorniest problems (I’ll just leave two words here: “Elon Musk”). But while we might not want our elected representatives to take too much instruction from chief executives, it would be nice if they could stop behaving like disgruntled and disempowered middle managers, and show a bit more initiative.
