Seeds of reform

Kenneth Hopper was a 30-year-old manager from the UK working in a Cork textiles firm during the late 1950s. With previous experience working for Procter & Gamble, he was chosen to work on the Committee for Industrial Organisation (CIO).

Set up in the wake of the Whitaker revolution, its mission was to prepare Irish industry for the coming competition by probing weaknesses and helping the government direct grants in the right direction. The new organisation was part of a mood swing that swept across the country in the late 1950s, as Hopper recalls.

"There is no doubt that Whitaker's work led to a springtime in Ireland," he says. "There was this feeling that at last the glaciers were cracking. It was definitely a time of new hope. People didn't know what was ahead of them, but were pleased that something was happening. They hoped to do something good for Ireland and were ready to accept change."

The CIO had mixed success: the shake-out of Irish manufacturing that followed the abandonment of protectionism was to cost up to 80,000 jobs in the 1960s. Some industries were just beyond the reach of Whitaker's reforms.

"One of the companies I worked with, a quite large company in Dublin, at the time introduced Just-In-Time in 1961. Having to cover Irish needs - given a protected economy - meant that they had to produce a huge variety of output through the factory. They were not able to specialise or get into the kind of scale needed."

Companies in the UK and Ireland were undergoing structural change and getting government support to do it. Hopper suggests that state aid to industry in Ireland may have made the mistake of offering too much too soon.

"Companies like Goodwear, where I had been working, knew they had to go through with this change. They were getting very large grants, amounting to one-third of the price of the equipment they had to buy to modernise. One result was that people were buying equipment they didn't really need. This was part of the protected economy. It couldn't go on indefinitely. The Committee of Industrial Organisation report was more optimistic than perhaps it should have been."

But even as early as the 1950s, industrialists such as Hopper could see that even if time was needed to yield results, the seeds of reform were sown on fertile soil. "What I saw back then were very good managers around me, a good social system and a reasonable trade union movement. The human potential was excellent in Ireland. I was not surprised when the country did well afterwards."