Madam, - I enjoyed Fintan O'Toole's gently humorous piece on the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur Of The Year Awards (Opinion, June 17th). The self-congratulatory tone of the proceedings reminded me of the worst type of Oscars speech - perhaps one given by Mary Robinson or Bono.
However, behind the jocular tone of his article Mr O'Toole tries to prove that the private sector is not the only engine of wealth creation, and that the role of the entrepreneur in that process has been exaggerated. He cites the Human Genome Project, the Internet and the World-Wide Web as examples of public sector success.
He fails, however, to mention one crucial point; the public sector and other state-run concerns do not operate in a political and economic vacuum. Not one of these state-run success stories would have been possible without the wealth generated by "rugged individualism" at work within a capitalist/liberal-democratic paradigm.
Societies where the "profit motive" is absent or, worse, denigrated - tribal societies, for example, or economies run on socialist principles - have been singularly unsuccessful in creating an environment where innovation and thus wealth creation is possible. Only where the entrepreneur has been at the forefront of economic activity has this been possible over the long term.
So by all means satirise the vulgarity of the entrepreneur, especially the nouveau riche Irish variety, but remember that without their singularity and vision, there would be no intellectual - and, above all, economic - space in which state-run initiatives could flourish. - Yours, etc.,
DECLAN MANSFIELD, Grange Road, Dublin 14.