SPEECH BY THE PRESIDENT, MARY ROBINSON, AT BREAKFAST, SAN FRANCISCO, ON 18TH OCTOBER, 1995
SPEECH BY AT BREAKFAST HOSTED BY THE IDA AND THE SAN FRANCISCO CHAMBER OF COMMERCE
It is a great pleasure to return to California, to this beautiful and historic city of San Francisco, and to have the opportunity to meet here with representatives of business, both American and Irish, in the Bay area. My thanks are due to the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce who have been gracious enough to act as co-hosts for this breakfast. I am naturally very pleased also to be a guest of IDA Ireland which has been active in California for many years and which has been notably successful in persuading American business leaders of Ireland's economic attractions.
As President of Ireland, I attach great importance to sustaining and renewing the ties that bind Ireland to the United States. These ties, already established at the time of the Declaration of Independence, have been continued and developed in each succeeding generation. Not least among them at the present day are the many successful United States firms established in Ireland, where they employ about 53,000 people. Some of the major enterprises among them are familiar names in the electronics and data-processing field - Apple, Intel, Motorola. Others are companies which fill a specific market niche.
Ireland has an economy which is among the smallest in Europe, but its recent performance has been quite impressive. For example:in 1994 Ireland was the fastest-growing economy in the OECD area;between 1990 and 1994, GDP expanded in Ireland at nearly four times the rate of the EU as a whole. total employment in Ireland grew in each of the years 1992, 1993 and 1994 at a rate faster than the OECD average.
If we are to utilise the talents of all our young people we need to expand employment on a continuing basis. Our current unemployment rate of 14% is a continuing spur to our efforts at economic development. Nevertheless, we take pride in what we have achieved without increasing the burden of public debt and without incurring the penalty of inflation. Consumer prices have been rising at a rate of no more than 2.5% per annum.
I believe this measure of economic success has more than one ingredient. I would suggest that in Ireland's case there are at least three:
We have committed ourselves to an enterprise economy. We have been seeking for some time past to create the kind of stable conditions where enterprise can flourish. Our real interest rates are now quite low; our energy costs likewise; our labour costs are competitive.
We have been assisted in maintaining price stability by Ireland's membership of the European Monetary System. The European Union intends to move to a full monetary union before the end of the present century, and Ireland is preparing for this. On present performance, it has been recognised that Ireland is one of the countries which can meet the rather stringent economic criteria agreed for membership of the new monetary union.
Integral to the expansion of business and industry has been the contribution of foreign firms. We now have a thousand of these located in Ireland, four hundred of them from the United States. They have been attracted to Ireland by a number of advantages, including a corporation tax rate of only 10%, our young and well-qualified workforce, our access to the Single European Market with its 370 million consumers, the facility of telecommunications system. While our economy has benefited from their energy and expansion, the investing companies have also gained substantially. I am happy to be able to say that Ireland is the most profitable location in Europe: U.S. firms there have achieved a return to investment there almost four times the European average, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.
We in Ireland know very well that if we are to sustain such a dynamic performance we must work now to lay the foundations for the future. Since a nation's greatest resource is its people, we have devoted special attention to the development and education of our young people. This is particularly vital at the present time when 44% of our population is under 25 years of age. Of our total population of 3.5 million, one million are at present in full-time education. We have been successful in recent years in expanding third-level education very significantly, so that two young people out of five can go on to higher education, and this number is almost equally divided between the universities and the technical colleges. The ambition and enthusiasm of our young people is such that the demand for university places has continued to grow. In addition to my own alma mater, Trinity College Dublin, and the three colleges of the National University of Ireland, our two newest universities, the University of Limerick and Dublin City University, are fully established since 1989. They have taken their inspiration largely from American models such as Caltec and MIT. Outside the university sector, the long-established colleges of the Dublin Institute of Technology continue to provide professional and specialised technical courses, but there is now in addition a total of eleven Regional Technical Colleges which offer students the opportunity to prepare themselves for careers in business and industry. I have seen with admiration the efforts and achievements of Ireland's young graduates at home and abroad. They give me great hope for the future.
Ireland is well-known to you all as the land of William Butler Yeats and James Joyce and of the Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney. Our well-established tradition of literary and creative endeavour could distract attention from our achievements in the mathematical and scientific field. Since this is the year when University College Cork celebrates the 150th anniversary of its foundation in 1845, it may be a year to recall the pioneering work of George Boyle, Professor of Mathematics at Cork in the last century. His work on probability theory was an important step towards the development of modern information technology. We might remember also William Rowan Hamilton, the inventor of the quaternion calculus, and Ernest T. Walton, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1951.
Heirs to this distinguished tradition, the young people of the 1990s are embarking in considerable numbers on scientific and technological careers. Ireland has been seeking to provide centres of excellence in research and development, and has already had some success in the areas of electronic research, biotechnology, and in composite materials for engineering. The number of young people graduating in mathematics, engineering and computer science has increased substantially. They have found employment not only within Ireland but in many other countries including the United States and Japan. In fact, in the course of my State Visit to Japan earlier this year I was able to meet a number of them.
One result of this trend has been the quite remarkable growth of the software industry in Ireland, giving rise to exports valued in billions of dollars. Apart from the major multinationals in the field of information technology, many of which have established European bases in Ireland, the number of indigenous Irish software companies is now estimated at 400. Some of these have already located distribution operations in the United States. Many of you will be aware that the Irish Trade Board earlier this year organised a special Software Mission to California to introduce representative of Irish companies to potential partners on the West Coast. You will be glad to know that the reaction of the participants was so positive and the business opportunities they identified so useful that the Irish Trade Board plans to organise a similar mission in 1996 for another group of companies.
I welcome all these developments especially because of the worthwhile challenge they offer to young Irish people. In my experience they rise to this challenge magnificently. Here in California, they are already competing with the best in the world.
Irish people everywhere have been enormously encouraged by the knowledge that Northern Ireland now enjoys peace and real prospects of political progress. The United States has played a tremendously positive role in bringing this situation about and has been especially mindful of the need for economic growth and development as a means of consolidating the peace. The White House Conference on Trade and Investment in Ireland which took place in Washington D.C. in April last was a clear affirmation of this belief. This historic event enabled Irish business people, politicians and officials from North and South to come together with their American counterparts in a common effort to realise the peace dividend. With support like this, I am confident that new possibilities will be opened up and new energies released which will amply justify the confidence of the American sponsors and will lay the foundations for a more hopeful future.