Sir, – In opining that Ireland is fundamentally disadvantaged by being an island nation and by having a very small indigenous market, Bryan Redmond implies there is no point in Irish businesses improving their product offerings to compete against foreign competitors (September 12th).
In addition, Noel Leahy confuses a call to encourage Irish productisation and hence consumption of Irish products with protectionism (September 10th). I say these challenges should be taken as opportunities.
Being small nations with small indigenous markets hasn’t discouraged the peripheral northern European countries from being industrious and selling their wide variety of quality wares locally and globally.
When looking at Wikipedia’s list of indigenous Finnish companies, it is quite impressive for a peripheral nation of just five million inhabitants, a nation that, like Ireland, has no direct land route to the rest of the European Union. Irrespective of geographical location, they have developed a sufficiently deep and broad industrial base which continues to retain their people in jobs developing Finnish products. The same could be said for Norway. The alternative would surely have been mass emigration of the nature repeatedly experienced in Ireland.
The depth and level of commitment in the northern European countries to indigenous enterprise is what Ireland needs to emulate, implying less dependency on foreign direct investment. Ireland belatedly needs to build up her own broad portfolio of indigenous enterprises catering to local and global markets. In particular, Ireland must leverage the effects of globalisation and the current economic doldrums to foster indigenous development of specialisation industries, whereby inventiveness, patenting and yet-to-be-developed products can position Ireland as a world leader in certain niches, much as Norway has done in oil and gas exploration.
In the 1960s the actor John Huston said, reflecting on the lack of film culture in Ireland, that an Irish film made by Irish people would be worth much more in the long run to the people of Ireland than a film made by outsiders for the quick million toward the economy. The government of the time should have picked up the hint in terms of indigenous economic development. The Government of today can still pick up that hint. – Yours, etc,