An Address by Ann McGeneey to the Irish Association,

In imagining forward I would like to invite you first to imagine backwards. Specifically to the time of the Táin when greed drove Maeve, the warrior Queen of Connaught, to acquire more possessions than her husband, Ailill, so as to put herself in prime position in Connaught. Meave and Ailill's wealth was equal apart from Ailill having the prize White Bull while Maeve didn't, but she knew a man, Daire Mac Fiachna, who owned the Brown Bull of Cúchulainn, a bull which was equal if not superior to Ailill's White Bull. Despite her attempts to deal with Mac Fiachna, including offering twelve bondmaids and her own daughter, Mac Fiachna refused. Henceforth the greed getting the better of Maeve and the raid ensued with much bloodshed, loss of life and complete societal breakdown. This happened on the border.

I wish Pauline Murphy the very best. I am from the Cross-Border Centre for Community Development. I propose to imagine Ireland in 2020 in an optimistic light where we have a more just and equal society on this island. One where there is a more equal distribution of wealth, a well developed system of social care including child care, elder care and disabled care, which is people-centred. And where we have an economy driven by both individual and societal success. In considering 2020 our current buoyant economic situation, albeit on one part of the island only, lends us to be enabled to build on what we have with a view to creating a world leader in how to get it right. However, our opportunity to create this world class leadership is not confined to the economic only. We are an island which is beginning to enjoy the benefits of peaceful times and we are a maturing modern society. How do we use this position of advantage well?

In our mainstream economy we have two disparate states on the island. One part of our island is economically successful and the other still remains heavily dependant on the public service for employment, with little or none passed through from one to the other. While there maybe the networks established, the benefits of one aren't accruing in the other economy. Economists are concerned that entrepreneurship and investment north of the border in Northern Ireland have continued to decline and the situation is likely to deteriorate before it gets any better. In the rest of the island we have had unprecedented economic growth which has caused some of us to lose the run of ourselves. We are hardly a generation away from absolute poverty. I wonder if there isn't an economic cyclical pattern here for us. We only have to look at where greed got the warrior Maeve, the slaughter, the loss of her family and for what? Arguably we have our modern day equivalents. It was already mentioned, the national road building programme in Ireland which has been driven through the sacred Hill of Tara, a place which arguably is at the core of our island's essence. We have the constant drive of individual's to acquire high value houses, cars and second foreign homes. In trying to keep up economically we are faced with the new concepts of time poverty, a sense of disconnectedness and a lack of social cohesion. What good is it to us? We read from the UN Development Programme in its 2005 Human Development Report that Ireland has passed both the United States and Japan in terms of development and has risen to 8th place in a prestigious world table for human development. This report tells us that the Irish people are the second wealthiest, with GDP per head of €30,000. However, we are reminded of the downside of this economic success. The same report has shown that among the world's wealthiest countries Ireland is one of the most unequal with the 3rd highest level of poverty in 18 industrialised countries surveyed. Furthermore, we have an increase of about 35% in the level of murders in Ireland over the past year, where up to October we have had something like 50 murders. Furthermore, there is an unprecedented level of suicide. I don't have figures for that, but I think it is commonly acknowledged that that is particularly high. The level of reckless and violent living is on the increase as well. In the border region we famously have the fringe economy. This is a contested space and an area which has two peripheralties in it – one still facing Dublin and the other Belfast. This region has been the melting pot for a number of interesting economic stories, from the aforementioned raid of the Brown Bull of Cúchulainn to the fringe or smuggling enterprises of the last century and indeed their continuation into this century. We are now beginning to face the fallout from the illicit gains from smuggling and violence with, as recently as last week where specific border neighbours were featured in the international press. Finally, we have the social economy which is still fairly much in its infancy, but historically benefiting from this island having had a deep sense of social responsibility and good neighbourliness.

In building for the future we recognise that economic success has to be at the core. How do we move it on responsibly and in a sustainable way? A way which recognises wider societal needs of the Irish people whether they live in the north or Ireland or in the contested zone of the border. We are reminded that some would argue that our psyches have been invaded. We have been so used to poverty and now fear of returning to that has left us in danger of becoming isolated in our own capitalism.

For others, we have lived with violent conflict, some of us for all of our lives. I was interested to hear about the correlation, if you take the security forces out of the equation, between poverty and conflict. This additional impact of the border in relation to poverty was raised recently as well by Helen Johnson, the Director of the Combat Poverty Agency, who maintains that the conflict in Northern Ireland has contributed to less investment and the breaking up of networks across the border. There has been a displacement of people from Northern Ireland and there are some very disadvantaged areas with little investment. So there is an additional legacy of disadvantage in relation to the conflict. In moving towards 2020 we need to consider a set of key challenges. Today, for the most part, we are a sophisticated modern and intercultural society. We have the capacity to understand the complexities of the modern situation we find ourselves in. We understand the challenges that face us in economic terms as do our leaders. What we need is a holistic approach to the development of the future, one which genuinely acknowledges our past, which recognises the potential of good leadership and provision of a good economic infrastructure which not only looks at economic benefits, but which builds in social, cultural, political and environmental considerations.

How do we use this economic power well? Not just for the benefit of ourselves, but indeed internationally too. This island is a model of working practice. Economically we have the international community looking to Ireland's economic success. Furthermore, we have the same varied international community, considering how we are managing the peace building process and how we can use the stable society, albeit with its blips, to build further sustainable economic wealth. We have demonstrated an international capacity for world vision and famously we look to people like Bono and Bob Geldof, both of whom have enjoyed vast economic success and who have shown international leadership for the benefit of people who are poor.

Returning to the previously mentioned UN Development Report, which sites that for Ireland far more attention should be paid to creating conditions under which the poor can increase their share of future national income gains. How do we do that by 2020? It is not enough to for us to look at the economic situation in isolation. We need a wider approach and a more "feminine" approach. We look to our leaders to be imaginative and to take risks for better economic integration. Businesses have enjoyed low levels of corporation tax. What about more radical incentives for philanthropy and creating the infrastructure to encourage business to integrated with community so that it in turn can develop and build better social cohesion in communities which are in danger of disconnection. We look particularly to commuter communities, the working poor, people who are not able to contribute to the place where they live. We think of the increasingly segregated communities in Northern Ireland and we look to neighbouring post-modern societies like Sweden and Holland, which are essentially feminine societies which have passed into more stable economic times. The challenge for us is: How can we use the radical entrepreneurial spurt which enabled us to turn the Irish economy round in a fairly short time? Perhaps it is an approach for better economic integration around achieving balance in that gap between the "haves" and "have-nots". Can we perhaps challenge stereotypical occupations and take an imaginative approach to create new opportunities? We need to address the issues of illicit gains from the violence. How do we deal with the former warriors whose pensions for peace are being threatened by the Assets Recovery Agency and the Criminal Assets Bureau? At the local level, how can we strengthen and deepen partnership between the private sector and community? In my own organisation we look at how we integrate and socialise the new ethnic people who are coming into our communities. What we have done there is that we have piloted a volunteering initiative which gets professional Nigerian people and others from the African continent to look at how they can contribute to our community. We have looked at how we prepare them and prepare sponsoring organisations to host them in a volunteering capacity. At the individual level we look inward and recognise the Maeve and the Brown Bull in this. We look to the fearful child whose life has been so affected by the conflict we have experienced. We take courage and we look to see how we can contribute to the society while recognising how busy we are economically. What we do need is the leadership to help us do this and help us create the infrastructure which we all can feed into.

I'd like to leave you one small anecdote. For those of us who had a television we were able to watch Sesame Street. It all happened out in the street. Now we are faced with Barney, a purple dinosaur, who has a nice ethnic mix of children dancing around. I have to attribute that analogy to a former colleague. What do we want? Do we want to have a Sesame Street in moving forward or do want to have a Barney in moving forward?

Q1: I note Dr FitzGerald's comment about harnessing the talents of the immigrants and the last speaker about the pilot scheme in her area. If you are getting these groups of immigrant professionals together, who do you put them in touch with?

A1: In our own case we are fortunate in that we have access to immigrant communities, refugees and asylum seekers and community organisations who support them. We were able to tap in quite easily a network of people who we might otherwise wouldn't be able to. The imitative we started was based on good will, trust and imagination around how you get people in direct provision centres who aren't even allowed to cook their own food and who are hanging around with their thoughts. Then we create an opportunity for them to do something and to work around the system.

Q2: I am sure you are familiar with the American notion of going it alone and society breaking down and atomising. People are not part of the community. Do you notice that this may differ from region to region in Ireland, and is this and issue in the voluntary sector?

A2: It is certainly in Dundalk. What we try to do is put together support services for people who are not national to these parts and trying to get social cohesion going by dispelling some of the myths around people coming in abusing the system. There is on one hand a dissipation of society, but on the other hand there is quite a sophisticated community and voluntary sector who have recognised that and who are taking many steps to tackle those issues held on.

Q3: With relation to the idea of the Celtic Tiger, I have a friend who is pessimistic in the way the government is encouraging housing down south, such as allowing 100% mortgages, and he is very worried at this stage.

A3: Yes, I think there is a one in two chance of there being a hard landing and unpleasant circumstances in the Republic, but I was asked to talk about imagining 2020 and there will be hard times along the way, but if handled properly it shouldn't throw things totally off. I am concerned about how the economy is being managed in the last three or four years. It is like somebody driving a car dangerously.

A4: In relation to the future for Northern Ireland with a high public sector involvement in the economy, I think that has to be addressed. Huge amounts of money are directed by very small numbers of people who are essentially answerable to themselves. The problem for the underclass is you have minimal manufacturing, a community and voluntary sector who are basically controlled by the government anyway and it doesn't look very good.

Q4: As an outsider coming in a spending a certain amount of time interacting with the administration here, I think there is a problem of huge inertia. You have people here who feel they don't have a mandate to change things and the Minister from Britain feels he doesn't have a mandate. I think there is a problem and I think that will be addressed when the political institutions are up and running.

In terms of the public sector, I think in the long run it is desirable to wean the northern economy off. I think a combination of local decision making and taking your time to do so. If you look at East Germany and German unification, it has been pretty disastrous from the German government's point of view because they had created the region in a similar way. That is not going to be solved overnight. Our best example would be looking at France where Brittany was very poor in the 1950s and they have managed to develop Brittany as a successful region.

Conclusion by Chair: