St Patrick's Day visits have a real purpose

The details announced last week of ministers going around the world for St Patrick’s Day was received with a little less cynicism than usual. The Ministers from round these parts are part of that caravan. Dara Calleary is going to Atlanta and Savannah in Georgia.

Atlanta is in many ways the business capital of the southern United States. Ireland opened a consulate – essentially a mini-embassy – in Atlanta over a dozen years ago to develop business, cultural and tourist links with that region. There is plenty to talk about and plenty of connections to make over there that would be useful. That Atlanta is also the home of Coca-Cola makes the justification a bit of a slam dunk.

Alan Dillon is going to Vancouver and to the US state of Utah. On the Vancouver leg, he will probably meet as many young Mayo people as he did on the playing fields of his youth, but sin scéal eile. He will also meet a huge number of people working for companies trading between the two countries. 

There will be plenty of people in Vancouver – not much more than 30 miles from the United States border – who will be only too willing to talk to him about the danger of American tariffs. In Utah – a state that voted big for Donald Trump – there are local companies with operations in Galway, Athlone and Shannon.

Marian Harkin is off to the Netherlands and Belgium, where the many contacts made during her time as an MEP will be put to good use.

The justification for going on these trips – whatever criticisms are made – couldn’t be more clear this year. What will be different this year is the message, especially for those heading across the Atlantic. Usually these trips are used to emphasise and grow the amount of jobs the US companies bring to Ireland. This time, the message is in reverse: Irish Ministers are going to the US to tell the Americans how many jobs are created by Irish companies stateside.

With the election of Donald Trump that is of course smart. Everyone, not just those folks in Vancouver, is talking about tariffs, the taxes on imports that is Trump’s signature dish. Tariffs are a big problem for the whole EU. But there are particular and specific danger areas for us in Ireland from the wider Trump agenda.

One, there is a major trade deficit between the United States and us, meaning we export to them a lot more than they export to us. Trump will want to close the gap. Two, a number of what are essentially American companies pay vast amounts of corporation tax here, and many Americans think much of it is due to the American treasury rather than to our exchequer. You can bet one of those Americans is called Donald J Trump.

Much of what we see happening in our politics is considered by many to be a form of background noise. But what Trump has in mind and how it could affect our livelihoods – each and every one of us – is really serious stuff.

And so we need to send people out to sell our message. We need to go to critical locations around the US – it’s a big country – and develop relationships with political and business leaders in those places. That is what Calleary and Dillon will be doing. Building our unique case in Brussels is another big part of that, and Marian Harkin was a respected and influential MEP.

And before anyone says anything about the cost of all this, let’s just pause to reflect on some figures. Ireland – the state – is an over 100 billion euro a year operation. The idea that we wouldn’t send some people around the world to promote ourselves, at the one time of the year when the world is celebrating Ireland, seems almost ludicrous. I don’t know what the cost of the trips are, but they are a drop in the ocean.

Politicians understandably don’t like talking about this aspect of it. But it is this aspect that deserves looking right in the eye. On these visits, our economic model is supported and when under threat, defended. Our ministers, whoever they might be, have an obligation to protect the livelihoods of people here. And not just in terms of jobs. We make our money as a country from trade and we make our serious money from international trade. The trade is generated by investment and the ability of the companies who make those investments in Ireland to sell freely around the world.

The EU provides the stability and the market access, the Americans often – but by no means exclusively – provide the investment, and smart young Irish people who want to earn a decent living, do the work. That’s the model. A challenge for us in the West is that those investments tend to cluster, concentrating expertise in particular locations. Like it or not, that is how business works.

But the money that is generated – in salaries, spin-off jobs, in income taxes, in VAT or in corporation tax – is not some abstraction. It pays quite literally for pretty much everything in Ireland, all over Ireland.

Corporation tax mostly comes from a small number of multinational firms, and it generates an amount more or less equal to everything the Department of Social Protection pays out in a year. Everything it pays out. And the money that comes from trade isn’t just money: it pays for health services and all sorts of vital social supports that people badly need, and need more of.

Locally, and without having to name them, imagine Mayo’s economy without the multinational firms in the county. We don’t have enough of them, truth be told, but let’s just imagine us without the welcome few we do have.

Have a think about that. Impossible to imagine? No, not at all. It’s easy to imagine. You just have to remember what our region was like in the past. The Mayo and the Ireland I was brought up in was an economic disaster zone. We were poor and getting poorer. That is not of course to say that we don’t have problems now, regionally and nationally. Of course we do, housing being the first one.

Prosperity has brought challenges: houses are ridiculously expensive and we need to build an awful lot more of them, everywhere in the country. But remember, houses were cheap in the 1980s because there was no money to buy them. And for our region, the lesson of the last forty years is that better connecting an area, be that a country or region, to sources of wealth and economic activity is the surest route to prosperity. The challenge for the West is to figure out how to connect and tap into more of the fruits of our economic model, not turn our back on it.

And the big picture matters. Ireland is a very small country on the fringe of a smallish continent which is losing its global share of the world’s wealth. Our economic model is under threat across the globe, and most definitely across the water.

So unless we can find another way to make the serious money we need to pay for the high standard of living we want everyone to enjoy, then we should be wishing our ministers well as they head out into the world on St Patrick’s Day.