In Depth interview with Bertie Ahern

Bertie Ahern

As Minister for Labour, he remembers asking Paddy Galvin to undertake a review to see what could be done to stimulate economic activity and employment, at a time when Government had no innovation budget, when Science Foundation Ireland had not come into being, when little was being done for indigenous industry and career aspirations tended to focus on the permanent and pensionable.
“We needed to encourage people to be risk takers and to not be looking at public service employment,” he says, recalling a time in the late eighties, when Ireland had twenty per cent unemployment. “Right through the eighties overall economic growth declined by about two per cent.”

Social Partnership

As Minister for Labour, he remembers asking Paddy Galvin to undertake a review to see what could be done to stimulate economic activity and employment, at a time when Government had no innovation budget, when Science Foundation Ireland had not come into being, when little was being done for indigenous industry and career aspirations tended to focus on the permanent and pensionable. “We needed to encourage people to be risk takers and to not be looking at public service employment,” he says, recalling a time in the late eighties, when Ireland had twenty per cent unemployment. “Right through the eighties overall economic growth declined by about two per cent.”

Even when the economy began to turn around, with a growth rate of 5 per cent growth, it was what he calls “jobless growth.”

The employment figures had hardly moved. It was that time that we started, in the Finance Bills, to get rid of all the tax shelters and allowances and bringing a very streamlined tax system that was far easier for business people to do business within. Better incentives, better structures and, for the first time setting up equity funds where a person starting off didn’t have to go to the banks.”

One of the politicians he credits for particular sensitivity to emerging needs is Seamus Brennan, who, when small business operators asked for a small business forum, responded positively. That first forum came up with a set of recommendations, many of which Bertie Ahern enacted as Finance Minister. It was arguably the first time small business had forced Government to understand that SMEs were a key part of the economy and needed to be disinterred from under the mountain of bureaucracy and form-filling.

Recognition

“It was then we brought in the thresholds that under a certain figure they didn’t have to do anything,” he recalls. “We were recognising small business wasn’t the same as big business, the person that employed five wasn’t the same as the person that employs fifty five or a hundred and fifty five. In one go we brought in new rules and got Revenue on side. I think it’s one of the better things I got involved in. If you look back over the nineties an enormous part of the drive of enterprise and the economy at the middle and lower level was from the small business. From the mid-nineties, it took off.”

He stresses that, while roughly €1.7billion now goes to science and innovation now, back in 1997, it was a very different picture. He lifts his hands, palm upward, to indicate the figure at the time: zero..

“You have to spend money looking at innovative ways of seeing where are the jobs in the future. If you’re not out there doing product development and research, you won’t succeed. It’s never about the jobs today. It’s about the jobs tomorrow. The life span of most jobs during my political career has been getting shorter, as has the development time for products. From when someone starts designing a product on their computer screen till the time it hits the shelves is only twenty months and its life span might only be two years. Therefore you have continually put money into research, into development in innovation, looking where the new products are.

Innovation

Now that a set of Government agencies are dedicated to enterprise and innovation, the criticism has shifted. Today, questions are asked about how many innovations have emerged from R&D investment. The Taoiseach shrugs: successful invention, in his view, has a lot of hit-and-miss about it. He gestures at the journalist’s Blackberry, sitting, silenced, on the table between them.

“Texting wasn’t designed as texting. It was a code used by software technicians at the highest end between themselves. Then somebody said ‘this is a very sexy issue,’ and now the world’s texting every day.”

Radical Change

The famous Bertie Ahern capacity to tap into the zeitgeist is evident, when he talks wonderingly of the radical change in national attitudes to jobs and careers. Not only are parents today not urging their offspring into safe jobs, the association of enterprise and youth has also eroded, with members of the Gardai and Army taking early retirement to go and start businesses. Every townland, these days, has indigenous industries, many of them aiming their goods at the export market. This, he indicates, is partly due to the concentration of his colleague Micheal Martin on helping smaller, quality-driven companies as a counter balance to the companies arriving through Foreign Direct Investment (FDI).

“Multinationals are necessary, but the more work from the products they need we can do here from small companies the better, that there not importing it. Galway’s the best example. All over Galway you’ve people who have left multinational companies to set up small companies, who are now doing the products for the big companies and running very successful businesses. Or Sligo, where you have very good engineers, now producing components for the bigger companies. That’s increasingly happening where people work for multinationals see a niche in the market and say to themselves, ‘Listen, I could get out here and make that and supply them rather than them getting it from Germany or wherever.’”

Outside the sitting room, the door bell constantly rings, as does the phone. People arrive and leave. Inside the sitting room, Bertie Ahern is oblivious to the noise. Oblivious, too, to the framed photographs and cartoons of himself, starting with dark hair, working up to the more recent shots of him turning to grey. The photographs show him with international VIPs – and with ordinary people launching new endeavors. He’s always been known as a soft touch for launches. Ask Bertie to cut the tape. What have you to lose?

He laughs and then gets serious about his PR availability, pointing out that in the early days, when Irish start-up companies went to trade fairs in Germany, France and Britain, they found that if they didn’t have some international standard of accreditation, they were not going to get in the door to even show their brochure.

“At that time we were exporting our people as well as our products,” he says. “But there was a big effort to get as many companies as we could to have ISO accreditation. It helped them for me to come along and praise their staff. It gave status that this was a serious thing to do. Companies felt good about having. It was recognition that this was a standard that made them better than anyone who hadn’t got it. The standard equalled contracts.”

Entrepreneurship

“At that time we were exporting our people as well as our products,” he says. “But there was a big effort to get as many companies as we could to have ISO accreditation. It helped them for me to come along and praise their staff. It gave status that this was a serious thing to do. Companies felt good about having. It was recognition that this was a standard that made them better than anyone who hadn’t got it. The standard equalled contracts.”

“I also know a few guards who had been going around taking names and addresses of people for having no lights on their bike who now drive technology companies. I do not think you have to go to the Smurfit school, as good as it is, to be somebody who is driving businesses. It helps to have the bright people with you but the individual who drives it, who takes the risk, who goes into the bank and puts their entire house up, that’s a different kind of person to the person who might simply have brain power. The person who takes the risk is a different breed.”

Economic Downturn

About the current credit crunch, he is realistic, not pushing the line that it’s merely a blip. Nobody, he maintains, can fully gauge the damage done by the sub-prime lending fiasco, and this, as a result, is a year to batten down the hatches.

“I don’t go with the optimistic view of ‘Forget it, it’s not going to make a difference,’” is his firm statement. “The big difficulty for business and entrepreneurship is where you get the money to get going and keep going. It’s going to be a cautious period but that will lift. There was too much money in the system, anyway. People couldn’t find homes for it and started doing things that were fairly irresponsible and that has to be corrected before we take off again. But take off we will, I’ve no doubt. We’re saying this could be a bad year with lowest growth estimates of 2.2%. However, we went through a decade of negative growth and next year will jump off again. It’s going to be a tighter year for risk takers, a tighter year for entrepreneurs. We just have to manage our way through it.”

Managing our way through it will require attention to overseas markets like South Africa and Dubai where he sees good opportunities for small and medium sized Irish companies in markets where we haven’t yet scratched the surface. It helps, he agrees, that in those markets, Irish people and the Irish nation are liked and seen as reliable.

“We’ve a good reputation for doing contracts on time now,” he says. “No longer is the Irish person afraid to get on a plane and travel to the other end of the world and spend a week there.”

What's Next?

He tidies the papers in front of him and hands them over. They’re filled with details of initiatives being taken to assist exporting entrepreneurs. The interview is over. But not quite. What about his own future? Has he ever thought of setting up his own business, when he leaves politics for good? He laughs, sits back and considers the question.

“I honestly have often given thought to that possibility. Often when you’re out there, particularly as part of a trade mission, you think it might be an interesting possibility…I’m not sure what I’ll do and I’m not going to race into it. I’ll take my time. I’ve worked between 70 and 80 hours a week for the past 30 years, actually for nearly 40 years because when I was in the Mater, before I went into politics, I was sorting a lot of things out. So I think if I had a job that was fifty hours a week I’d still be wondering what to do with my spare time. It would have to be something interesting. I don’t just want to do something. Doing just something would bore the hell out of me. The hardest part of the job for me will be coming to the 9th of May, because for the last 9 years or 10 or 11 years, almost every decision came through me. My colleagues got used to ringing me and asking for decisions, because they knew I would make instant decisions. After the second week in May, that’ll stop. There’ll be nobody ringing. I’m going to have to fill that in some other way…”

The door opens and people flood in for photographs with the Taoiseach. He welcomes them individually, reminds two of them of the last time they’d met, asks a third how his business is going. He’s been called the father of the Celtic Tiger and the driver of the Peace Process, but, ultimately, this is his key strength in action. Customer care.

Published in the May 2008 Issue of Irish Entrepreneur