Madam, - It bothers me that Peter Sutherland can get his facts so wrong ("So, how did we get here?", Innovation Supplement, February 11th).
He asserts that a key cause of Ireland's economic failure prior to 1990 was that we had largely wasted our "relatively significant" structural funds. However, it was not until 1989, as part of the first massively expanded EU regional development programme of 1989-1993, that Ireland actually received sizeable funding in the context of a National Development Plan. Before 1989, most EU funding came in the form of agricultural price supports. Regional development aid was extremely modest and unfocused.
When Mr Sutherland praises Portugal for spending its EU funding on infrastructure, and suggests that Ireland should have done likewise, he is also wrong. At the time of Portugal's accession in 1986, it suffered from very serious education and training deficits. Yet it still devoted the greater portion of its post-1989 EU development aid to large-scale infrastructure projects. Research shows that this is a key reason why Portugal has not converged, as Ireland did.
The initial Irish phasing of EU aid to training and to investment by firms proved to be a wiser allocation. The more recent urgent need for improved infrastructure followed convergence, and finance has been largely domestic, made feasible by earlier growth.
With respect to Ireland's decision to join the euro zone, this was taken in the mid-1990s, when recovery and convergence were well advanced, and not in the depths of the recession of the 1980s (as Mr Sutherland asserts). And since most of our direct investment is of US origin, there remains a very serious possibility of threat due to fluctuations in the euro-dollar rate.
As for his comments on our "allegedly superior education system", Ireland moved quickly in the mid-1970s to strengthen its third-level technology capacity, and now ranks high in international league tables. The IDA, under Michael Killeen and Ray McLoughlin, were key agents of this early change. Without a high level of education and training, the inflow of high-tech firms would not have been sustainable.
It is always difficult for a small and vulnerable country such as Ireland to signal its strengths to the wider, global economy. Mr Sutherland is one of our most prominent spokespersons in this process. So it is a pity that his analysis is such a mixture of error and confusion. - Yours, etc,
JOHN BRADLEY, EMDS (Economic Modelling and Development Strategies), Bloomfield Avenue, Portobello, Dublin 8.