New thinking with vague targets

ANALYSIS:The Government's statement of intent summarises earlier aspirational reports, writes LAURA SLATTERY

EVERY MONTH when the people in the dole queues are totted up by the Central Statistics Office (CSO), as they will be again today, Opposition parties issue statements wondering when the Government is going to come up with a job creation plan.

The plan has landed. It is called Trading and Investing in a Smart Economy. The Government describes it as "New Thinking" and "Strategy in Action", with these concepts capitalised for extra effect.

“To recover from the current unprecedented economic crisis, we need New Thinking about our country and her place in the world,” the Taoiseach said at Enterprise Ireland’s Dublin HQ, where representatives of a range of State agencies had gathered.

However, it is more accurate to describe it as a set of vague and aspirational targets which the Government claims will be reached if another set of equally vague and aspirational targets are first achieved. It’s a statement of intent that duly summarises some of the more attractive-sounding policy goals contained in a range of pre-existing State agency and high-level group reports.

For example, when Minister for Tourism Mary Hanafin observed that tourists from China and India tend to stay longer and spend more money in Ireland than British visitors, she was echoing the reflections of a Tourism Ireland report published in 2007.

A section of the document is devoted to how the Department of Foreign Affairs might use the “unique opportunity” of St Patrick’s Day “to raise Ireland’s profile abroad”. Indeed, “the decisions on where the Ministers go for St Patrick’s Day will be based on strategic considerations”, it promises, raising the question as to how such trips were decided upon heretofore.

Elsewhere, there was liberal mention of an old favourite, the “smart economy”. The foreword to the report places it as the third in a trilogy, after the original “broad blueprint” of the Smart Economy Framework document and the Forfás response report, Making It Happen.

A Government spokesman maintained the newly announced target of creating 150,000 jobs by 2015 was in addition to the 62,000 jobs target and 640 new investments that the IDA said it would create by 2014 in its Horizon 2020 report, which was published in March.

Yesterday, the Taoiseach narrowed down Ireland’s key sectors to food, tourism, electronics, life sciences, construction and engineering, financial and business services, software and retail consumer products.

If there was any one theme emerging from the document, it was its desire to embrace the Bric, – the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China. It also wants to rely less on foreign-owned multinationals to prop up Ireland’s exports and to get “priority” embassies to do more work.

The document notes how Ireland’s exports have “showed remarkable resilience” during the recession. But it neither mentions the uncertainties faced by global trade nor dares to raise the possibility that Ireland might actually lose some FDI projects over the next five years, dampening its headline job targets and keeping the dole queues swollen.