Category Archives: Ireland

November 21, 2013 · 1:32 pm

Ambassador’s Message – Some Themes of Topics from my Twitter Account, November

I thought you might be interested in some of the topics and themes that I’ve been covering via Twitter over the last couple of weeks.

The Tánaiste and Deputy Foreign Minister, Eamon Gilmore, TD, announced a major review of Ireland’s foreign policy and the means of their delivery.   He said “the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade will shortly launch a consultation process as part of this review, inviting input from members of the public, and other stakeholders with an interest in Ireland’s foreign policy.”   The Irish Times report is here  http://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/gilmore-announces-complete-review-of-state-s-foreign-policy .

The Tánaiste made the announcement in the course of a speech whose main focus was on the centrality of Human Rights to Irish foreign policy principles and diplomatic activities.  The text of the speech is here http://www.dfa.ie/home/index.aspx?id=89926.

This Review comes at an important transitional time with Ireland proudly and stoically exiting the EU/IMF programme.  This is a not just a major achievement by Ireland but an invaluable investment in our reputation.  In the international bond market, a good reputation translates directly into lower and stable bond yields that will aid our delivery and lighten the burden on our future.  The Government announcement is here http://www.merrionstreet.ie/index.php/2013/11/ireland-to-exit-the-euimf-programme-on-15th-december-as-planned-and-without-further-supports/?cat=3

Another theme I’ve been picking up is hi-tech start-ups, with some links to articles and quotes.  This article from the Guardian used the example of Snapchat – very popular with my wife and daughters, its speed and disposability lends itself to pictures of the funny things of daily family life – as an insight into the current start-up culture: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/13/snapchat-app-sexting-lawsuits-valuation .  The BBC carried an interesting article on the almost artisanal approach to start-ups and creativity in Norway at a place called Mesh, “Oslo’s first bespoke hub for budding entrepreneurs”: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24912717 .

A lot has been happening on the Northern Ireland front and Anglo-Irish relations generally.  The President of Ireland, Michael D. O’Higgins, will be the first Irish President on a State Visit to Britain next April.  This is accurately described as an historic event, a hinge moment in the long narrative of Anglo-Irish relations; see Irish Times editorial on its significance here http://www.irishtimes.com/debate/editorial/mr-higgins-goes-to-windsor-1.1599118 . 

The platform for this amicable visit, so reflective of the good relations now enjoyed between Ireland and Britain, was laid by Irish independence in 1922, the progress of the Northern Ireland Peace Process from the 1990s onwards, the pioneering visit of President Robinson to Buckingham Palace in 1993, the tremendous bridge-building work of President McAleese and the visit of Queen Elizabeth II to Ireland in 2011. 

For history buffs, it comes on the millennial anniversary of the Battle of Clontarf (Good Friday, 1014) when the great and only truly High King of Ireland, Brian Bóru, broke the power of the Vikings in Ireland (and some historians think fended off a major Danish invasion). 

More directly, it coincides with the centennial commemoration of the start of World War I.  We Irish nationalists have had a conflicted response to those Irishmen who enlisted in the British Army and fought in the Great War, instructed though they were to do so on Ireland’s behalf by the great Irish nationalist leader John Redmond (i.e. that fighting for ‘little Belgium’ would translate to an obligation to grant Irish home rule).  Since the late 1980s, however, Irish thinking has moved on very considerably and we are now recovering the deeply rooted tradition of Irish service in the British Army, lost sight of in the winnowing of Irish nationalist resurgence in the 20th century.  See an interesting article on this here http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/alex-massie/2013/11/when-50000-irishmen-gathered-to-commemorate-the-first-world-war .  Both the Taoiseach and Tánaiste attended remembrance day services; see here http://www.rte.ie/news/2013/1110/485740-gilmore-belfast .

The peace process in Northern Ireland is very much a work in progress.  This is true of the divisions still entrenched between the communities manifest in the Peace Walls, included in this Guardian article graphically illustrating the walls of the world (including the barrier here): http://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2013/nov/walls?CMP=twt_gu

Dealing with Northern Ireland’s past and the legacy of the conflict is an ongoing issue as most recently shown by a new investigative report here  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24987465   on British Army killings and by the Northern Ireland Attorney General’s suggestion that no prosecutions be pursued for acts carried out prior to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998: http://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/anger-at-call-to-draw-line-under-past-northern-killings-1.1601889

I keep an eye out for insightful coverage of the Holocaust and this New York Times article captures a sometimes forgotten aspect of the rapacity and significance of stealing and disposing of the quotidian goods belonging to Jews destined for the death camps: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/16/opinion/sunday/the-banality-of-robbing-the-jews.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0 .

Twitter lends itself to sharing photos which I gleam from a variety of sources including National Geographic and Irish Archaeology, all involving Ireland of course: some examples here https://twitter.com/NatGeopix/status/401194177629028352/photo/1/large  and here http://www.betterphoto.com/gallery/dynoGallDetail.asp?photoID=10380075&catID=198&contestCatID=&rowNumber=1&camID  . 

In local news, I attended the funeral of the Irish priest and renowned academic, Fr. Jerome Murphy O’Connor in Jerusalem.  A Dominican father, he devoted his life to the study of St Paul and the Holy Land, writing the brilliant and now standard guide The Holy Land: An Oxford Archaeological Guide.  He was appointed Professor of New Testament at the École Biblique in Jerusalem in 1967 and held the position for the rest of his life.  His walking tours were legendary as was his expansive personality and deep intellect.  His brother Fr Kerry delivered a heartfelt tribute to his life, his personality and achievements at the funeral service at the beautiful Basilica de St. Etienne.  He noted that three of his grandparents’ children and six of their grandchildren joined religious orders, including his cousin, Archbishop of Canterbury Cormac Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor. 

Though he lived for some fifty years in Jerusalem, Fr Jerry, as he was fondly called by all who knew him, remained a true and great Irishman.  After an evocative service and blessing by his brother, accompanied by transcendent chanting by his Dominican brethren, Fr. Jerome Murphy-O’Connor  was interred in the vault there, in the company of fellow scholars.  As I paused on the steps on the way in, I captured the scene here https://twitter.com/EamonnMcKee/status/400653809753395201/photo/1

As always we welcome your feedback and any suggestions you might have about links to things of interest to Ireland and Israel. 

Best wishes,

 

Eamonn

 

Eamonn McKee

Ambassador of Ireland

Tel Aviv

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September 26, 2013 · 1:31 pm

Why did Lithuanian Jews come to Ireland when the Irish were going to America?

I am old enough to remember Danker’s antique shop on Clanbrassil Street as I often cycled from my home in Clontarf to my grandparent’s house in Kimmage.  I had little reason to stray into the streets behind it, which along with the South Circular Road and environs formed the hub of Dublin’s Jewish community of which Danker’s was a part.  As I passed through Harold’s Cross and Terenure, I was unknowingly tracing the migration of those Jews to leafier suburbs as they prospered and gentrified.  I had heard of the Briscoes and of course Leopold Bloom (who ‘lived’ in Number 52 Clanbrassil Street) but knew little else of the Jews of Dublin.  Where did they come from?

The number of Jews in Ireland historically was very small indeed: Some traces of Sephardic Jews after their 15th century expulsion from Spain and Portugal, Jews from Holland and of course a number of Anglo-Jews.  Portuguese Jews established the first Synagogue in Dublin in 1660.  Taken together, Jews in Ireland up to the mid-19th century never comprised more than a few hundred.  It was only in the 1880s that the Jewish population in Ireland suddenly began to grow, hitting four digits and eventually about 5,000 by the 1930s on the island as a whole.

The following traces the background to Jewish emigration to Ireland and draws some comparisons and contrasts with Irish emigration in the same period. It is based mainly on Ó Cormac Gráda’s scholarly and charming Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce (Princeton, 2006), a typical little masterpiece of his work that combines hard data, eloquence and the human dimension.  I have also drawn on Chaim Herzog’s biography Living History (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997) and Kirby Miller’s Emigrants and Exiles, Ireland and the Exodus to North America (Oxford, 1985).  See also Dermot Keogh’s Jews in Twentieth Century Ireland: Refugees, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust and Holocaust Education Trust Ireland here www.hetireland.org.

The influx of Jews – at least an ‘influx’ comparative to the earlier Jewish presence – came mainly from one area in what is today Northern Lithuania.  They were therefore Litvaks as Jews from Lithuania were called.  In fact the shtetls in Kovno province from which they came were all within 50km of each other.  They began arriving in Ireland in the 1870S but only in numbers in the 1880s.  They came mainly to Dublin (by design), Cork (reputedly by accident) and Belfast (because of its industrialization).  But Dublin remained the preferred option, for the Jewish population declined in Cork subsequently and the numbers in Belfast never exceeded those in Dublin despite the disparity in economic opportunity.

Why did they leave Lithuania?  With Ó Gráda’s trademark parsing of the evidence, it is clear that the stories of pogroms and oppression mythologized the decision to emigrate.  The primary motivation was economic, with diminishing opportunities acting as the push and prosperity further west, particularly in America, acting as the pull.

This is not to completely discount persecution as the spark for emigration.  The pogroms in Russia and the Great Famine in Ireland certainly generated an immediate wave of respectively Jewish and Irish emigration.  However, the soaring levels of European migration and emigration in the following decades pointed to much more powerful economic forces at work.  In Ireland’s case, the reshaping of farm ownership brought about by the Famine – single holdings only inheritable by one son – and the failure to create an urbanized industrialized economy (outside of Belfast) meant that only emigration offered prospects of economic betterment.

In the creation of this lore of persecution the Lithuanian Jews had something in common with the Irish.  For the Irish emigrants too mythologized themselves as exiles from British oppression rather than being mere economic migrants.  In another parallel only a fraction, less than 1%, of either group ever returned home.

In contrast, where the Jews did not lament the homeland left behind, the Irish did and created a canon of songs lamenting their plight and longing for the old country.  (The often painful and lonely adjustment psychologically and culturally of the Irish to America is too often unacknowledged in Ireland; but it was in this adjustment that Irish America took shape and defined itself; see Kirby Millar’s Emigrants and Exiles.)

So the Jews like the Irish emigrated for primarily economic reasons, though Jews tended to be married on departure where the vast majority of the Irish were single.  In Lithuania (at the time part of Tsarist Russia), their traditional sources of income as artisans, middlemen, traders, creditors and so on were being squeezed by the coming of the trains with their cargos of cheaper manufactured goods and supplies; by urbanization and the development of retail; and by modern retail banking, facilitated by new communications like telexes which eroded the local Litvak role as creditors.  This combined with a rapidly growing population meant that local opportunities were shrinking just as industrialization and technology was spurring unprecedented prosperity in the West.  For those with some capital and some skills, the chance was not one to miss.

The Jews of Eastern Europe, along with their Irish counterparts, were part of the late 19th century European migration westward, one of the greatest mass movements of people in human history.  Many were drawn by the lure of America and its vast burgeoning markets, its opportunities and its freedom.

The Jews arriving in Western Europe would embrace modernity with gusto; urbanization, retail, mass communication and mass transport, commerce and banking.  This would create not only dynasties like the Rothschilds in France but a whole class of successful professional bourgeoisie throughout western Europe.  Michael Marks, a Polish Jew who arrived virtually penniless in England in the early 1880s, would found Marks and Spencers.  They would not only embrace European science and the arts but lead in the cascade of new thinking in literature, music, painting, physics and psychology.

Simon Schama’s sweeping yet deeply felt narrative of this ‘deal’ – integrate and become a citizen who happens to be Jewish as he summarises it – in episode three of his documentary The Story of the Jews is well worth seeking out.  As he eloquently and passionately describes it, the Jewish attempt at integration into European Society would end up rejected, symbolically in the Dreyfus affair in the 1890s and catastrophically in the Holocaust.  Prescient Jews like Theodore Herzl, in sensing the fell danger of this failed deal, would create Zionism as the last, the only option for the future security of the Jews.

The Litvaks who arrived in Dublin were far removed from the Rothschilds of course.  As Ó Gráda points out, the sheer poverty of urban Ireland at the turn of the century meant that the Litvaks found a ready if modest use for their skills as craftsmen, traders, lenders and middlemen.

Yet economic opportunities were only part of the attraction of Dublin for the new arrivals.  It was said of their like that they were particularly literate and erudite and found Dublin temperamentally appealing.  Many would only transit Dublin but those who stayed were according to one of them “the type that were not very ambitious to make a lot of money, but there was an atmosphere of learning in the place that the more temperate of the emigrants preferred, so though the opportunities for financial success [were] not very great, there was a feeling of ease” (quoted p. 29, Ó Gráda).  This tradition of learning of course meant that within a generation, the Litvaks began a progression to the professions and middle-class status.  In the 1880s 2% were middle-class; 5% by the 1920s 17% and by the 1980s over 70% (Ó Gráda, p. 84).

The Herzog family illustrated the point.  As Belfast-born and Dublin-raised Chaim Herzog recalls in his biography, the social life of the Jewish community in Dublin revolved around the synagogues: Adelaide Road for the Anglo-Jews and Greenville Hall for the Orthodox Eastern Europeans. His maternal side hailed from Kovno and his paternal from Poland; males on both sides were rabbis.  His father Isaac, a renowned scholar and Chief Rabbi of Ireland, would be elected Chief Rabbi of Palestine in 1936, a mere year after the family moved there.  Chaim Herzog himself, after a secondary education in Alexandra and Wesley, would go on to have an illustrious career in Israel, eventually becoming its President.

In Ó Gráda’s nice phrase, the Litvak emigration to Ireland was then a “tributary” of the great movement of Eastern European Jews westward, for some to what they called ‘England-Ireland’, for some to Palestine and for many more to Europe and America.  The Jews and the Irish would arrive and settle in the larger cities of the United States, forming dense urban communities.  Both the Irish and the Jews would form powerful political constituencies; the Irish would shape the Democratic Party through their ‘machine politics’ whose roots lay in the Irish slums of Boston, New York and Chicago where clientalism and collaboration were keys to survival and advance.  Jewish entrepreneurial skill and general erudition would see them rapidly advance economically, academically and socially, providing the means for political influence.

The highpoint for the Irish was John F. Kennedy’s election as President but thereafter as the Irish dispersed to the suburbs the famed Irish American political machine would disintegrate and with it direct political influence, though it would be re-animated among Irish American leaders for a time by the conflict in Northern Ireland.  The affinity for Ireland, if not the organization that once characterized it in the late 19th and early 20th century, however remains resilient and enduring in Irish America.  Organized Jewish political influence remains famously strong in the US, animated in great part by the deep desire to support Israel.

Perhaps some of the Jews who left Lithuania sensed the darkening mood as anti-Semitism began to get a foothold in European thought at the end of the 19th century, gathering a fateful pace in the opening decades of the 20th.  For most, the decision to leave was simply a search for a better life.  They could not have known how fortuitous the decision to emigrate would prove to be. Nor could those who stayed behind imagine that extinction awaited them.  Of some 210,000 Lithuanian Jews alive there in 1939, 93% or up to 196,000 would be murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators, most of them in a concentrated period of butchery during the second half of 1941.

Thanks to Irish neutrality, the Litvaks in Ireland escaped World War II, though some German bombs fell in their neighbourhood (thanks to the heavy clay of South Dublin, the bombs did little damage).  Had the Nazis made good on their plans to invade Ireland their fate would have been sealed.  In fact, the only Irish born Jew to die in the Shoah was Ettie Steinberg whose mistake was to marry and move to Belgium where she and her family, including her young son, were rounded up and transported to Auschwitz, one day before visas from her family in Dublin for safe passage to Ireland were delivered.

ENDS

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September 18, 2013 · 1:47 pm

A Briefing at UNTSO Headquarters, Jerusalem

18 September 2013

Deputy Head of Mission Julian Clare and I travelled to Jerusalem on 16th September at the invitation of Major General Michael Finn, the new Head of Mission and Chief of staff of the United Nations Treaty Supervision Organization.  Michael hails from Mayo and, aside from his extensive command and staff experience back home, has a lot of overseas experience under his belt: completed three tours in Lebanon with UNIFIL, including a stint as Staff Officer at UNIFIL HQ; commanded the Irish contingent with Kosovo Force, Ireland’s first service with a NATO-led mission; served as Director in the EU Military Staff, Brussels where he headed up the planning and supervision of EU forces to Chad and the Central African Republic.  We met also with Captain Pat O’Connor, Personal Staff Officer for the Chief of Staff.  He has served a year with UNTSO and will likely complete a second (and a bit of a whizz on the internet having won awards for the best Irish Government website!)

Under Major General Finn’s command are UNTSO’s 153 Military Observers plus almost 100 international and over 160 local support staff, drawn from some twenty-five countries.  UNTSO Observers are attached to the UN Disengagement Observer Force on the Golan Heights and to UNIFIL, as well as maintaining a presence in Sinai.  No UNTSO Observers carry weapons of any kind.  They are generally senior officers who can handle tense situations as well as the more quotidian though ever-complex diplomacy required of their liaison roles with the military services of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Israel.

Commander Erik Romby from the Netherlands gave an in-depth briefing on the mandate and regular operations of UNTSO.  It was his last day of duty with UNTSO so we are very grateful for him taking the time to do this.  Like all professional soldiers fully in control of their brief, Erik dissected the task, resources and operation of UNTSO with precision and clarity.  He, Major General Finn and Captain O’Connor fleshed this out with insights and impressions from the varied locations in which UNTSO serves throughout the region.  We were particularly interested in the current situation on the Golan Heights and the immediate vicinity in which Irish troops will deploy with UNDOF at the end of September.

UNTSO is the original UN peacekeeping entity, formed in 1948 to supervise the various armistices that brought an end to the Arab-Israeli War of that year.  It is funded directly by the General Assembly in a biannual vote, reflecting the fact that it was established a mere three years after the UN’s inaugural meeting in San Francisco and one year after the historic General Assembly vote on the partition of Palestine which preceded the Arab-Israeli war.

Given its original mandate and its evolution since then, UNTSO has Liaison Offices in Jerusalem (its HQ), Damascus, Beirut and Ismailia, Egypt.  It has a unique regional role, experience and perspective.  UNTSO’s core task has remained essentially the same since its foundation though how and where it does it has changed in response to the wars and turmoil in the region over the decades.  This has given a tremendous depth of experience to UNTSO as an organization and informed its strong esprit de corps.  That they carry no weapons in this most volatile and armed areas is remarkable.  But combined with their experience it has also helped ensure safe passage through difficult situations including when taken captive on occasion.  Its longevity of service in the region means that it is a known and respected entity by locals and military alike.  The turmoil in so many areas of UNTSO’s operations in recent years has seen again an evolution in UNTSO’s thinking and approach, though its core function remains unchanged.

UNTSO headquarters is the former Government House from British Mandate times.  Built of Jerusalem limestone, its oaty hues turn pale gold in the evening sun.  It has an elegant solidity, its barrack-like construction softened by the arched gateway, sunken gardens and tower which combined with its elevated location gives a 360 degree view of Jerusalem and environs. The function hall has a tall and gorgeously designed Armenian fireplace, a thing of real beauty and a product of the long association between Jerusalem and Armenia: indeed the family of its artisans still lives in the Old City.  Photo portraits of former UNTSO Chiefs of Staff grace one wall of the hall, with two of Lieutenant General William Callaghan, one of our great Irish soldiers and peacekeepers, awarded the Legion d’Honour for his leadership of UNIFIL in the 1980s.

Julian and I were escorted to the top of the building, above the water tank and upwards to the roof of the tower for what is recognized as the best view of Jerusalem.  Major Mark Weiner (USAF), clearly an aficionado of the area and its history, pointed out highlights in a guided finger pointing arc – the King David Hotel, the Dome of the Rock, Gethsemane, Mount Scopus, the Mount of Olives, the clustered housing of East Jerusalem, the grey concrete Lego of the Barrier and behind it the West Bank, beyond a thin glimpse of the Dead Sea and beyond again that of the craggy dusty orange shores of Jordan, then the impressive man-made stump of the Herodion (ruined palace of Herod the Great) and finally toward the noticeably more modern West Jerusalem.

From our vantage point, it was easy to marvel that before us lay the intersection of the world’s three great monotheistic religions, that on this ground walked, talked, thought and socialized the Patriarchs, prophets and holy men that shaped the religious beliefs and imaginations of the Judean, Christian and Islamic worlds.  For believers, depending on their faith, this is the hallowed ground of God’s prophets, his son and minions.  We gazed at the slopes, crowded by history and now by habitation, guided by a company of men trained and uniformed as soldiers yet who are disarmed and tasked with the delicate diplomacy of peace keeping along the fault lines of regional conflict.  In this paradox lies the very heart and ethic of the United Nations and its peacekeeping duties.

We concluded in Major General Finn’s office, sunny in the late afternoon but cooled by the thick limestone walls of the Government Mansion.  General Finn gave a final overview of the strategic landscape in which UNTSO operates and the role of UNDOF on the Golan Heights where Irish soldiers would soon deploy.  We discussed the longevity and range of peacekeeping tasks carried out by the Irish Defence Forces in the region, notably with UNIFIL but also in many other UN operations such as UNTSO and UNDOF.

Irish success in peacekeeping roles is a product of the quality and ethos of our officers and enlisted men.  Without the backup of heavy air or naval support, our troops are conditioned to operate lightly but with state of the art personal equipment, to improvise, to get to know the landscape, people and local culture intimately, to use emotional intelligence and avoid if at all possible recourse to or escalation in the use of force.  There is in our Irish military DNA something of the guerrilla force that fought for Ireland’s independence and then formed the core of the new State’s Defence Forces.  Nor can one discount our colonial heritage and the empathy that engenders in understanding conflict and its wellsprings. (For more information on the Irish Defence Forces overseas missions please see their website http://www.military.ie/overseas/)

Reflecting on UNTSO, Major General Finn wondered rhetorically; how to measure the cost of conflict avoided? Impossible of course but it is certain that UNTSO has played a key role in keeping the peace and easing tensions through liaison and observation.  Particularly in these tense times UNTSO brings an assurance to all the militaries of the region that armistices and treaties are faithfully honoured.

Certainly there is a price to be paid with some 33 fatalities among serving UNTSO members, amongst them two Irish officers, including fatalities in combat, accident and natural causes.  As we left the Government Mansion, we paused at the Memorial where General Finn spoke about some of the stories behind the names inscribed there, such as the four UNTSO members killed by an Israeli airstrike in the 2006 Lebanon War.  He recalled too the dreadful murder of Commandant Tommy Wickham by a Syrian soldier in Golan in 1967 (see related tweet).  There too is inscribed the name of Count Bernadotte of Sweden, the UN Mediator in the Arab-Israeli War who brokered an early truce and thereby helped create the conditions leading to the establishment of UNTSO.  Coincidentally, Major General Finn was due to speak the following evening (17th September) at a Swedish Commemoration of the 65th anniversary of the Count’s assassination in 1948.

On behalf of Julian and myself, I would like to warmly thank Major General Finn and his team for such a valuable and fascinating visit and to wish them every success in their tours of duty.

UNDOF are hosting Ambassadors to a briefing and site visit shortly which will be a very useful occasion bearing in the mind the upcoming deployment of our Irish contingent.  I’ll let you know how that goes.

ENDS

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August 6, 2013 · 12:33 pm

Yeats, Eliot and the Shock of the New, 1913

2013 International Conference on W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Modern and Contemporary Poets and Writers

 Opening Remarks, Hanyang University

25 May 2013

 HE Dr Eamonn McKee, Ambassador of Ireland

 Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished academics and visitors, fellow lovers of literature, it is my honour to offer welcoming remarks to the 2013 International Conference on W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Modern and Contemporary Poets and Writers.

I want to thank Hanyang University for facilitating this Conference and The Yeats Society of Korea, The T. S. Eliot Society of Korea, and The Modern British and American Poetry Society of Korea for hosting it. 

This Conference is also made possible by the sponsorship of the National Research Foundation of Korea; the Embassy of Ireland to Korea; the Department of English and College of Humanities, Hanyang University; and Dankook University.

I am delighted that we at the Embassy have been able to provide the newly translated travelling exhibition on Yeats which is on display now in the corridor. While much of this information is not new to the scholars of Yeats attending here today, we hope that it will be of interest to the passing student and bring some more information about Yeats into Korean. We hope that it will be able to travel to many universities around Korea and it is available for this purpose.

The topic of this Conference is an ambitious one, set out in its sweeping title. The title embraces two of the titans of modern literature, both Nobel laureates.  One is an Irishman of Anglo-Irish background and sensibility and the other an American born naturalized English citizen.

They and the influence of their work are placed in both the modernist movement and in the contemporary literature of both poets and writers. In focusing on Yeats and Eliot, this Conference explores an ongoing concern of literature: how to make sense of the modern world. 

In literature, Yeats and Eliot were part of an artistic vanguard grappling with the accelerated pace of change that defined the modern age.  The art critic Robert Hughes summed this up as “the shock of the new”.  Culture, knowledge, social structures and mores, ways of life and traditions, all accumulated over centuries, were all affected by the maelstrom of the new. 

In short order, modernity would dramatically close the gap between humans and monkeys, men and women, rich and poor, the urban and the rural, the citizen and the monarch, the imperial and colonized, the sacred and the secular, the divine and the scientific, man and the machine. 

Amidst all this chaos, where lay truth?  Indeed beyond subjective experience, was there any such thing as truth, a definable reality amenable to perception and the pen?  If writers, poets and artists generally have a common purpose, it is to make sense of the world. 

Modernity would provide a rich if profoundly challenging environment for this purpose.

A hundred years ago, in the time of Yeats and Eliot, the shock of the new was changing daily life, reinterpreting our understanding of the world, shaping new ideologies and altering the course of human history.

In 1913, New York’s Grand Central Station opened.  The zipper is patented.  Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring is premiered in Paris.  Suffragette Emily Davison dies under the King’s horse at Epsom.  Henry Ford opens his ground-breaking assembly line, producing a new car every three minutes.  A pilot manages the first loop-the-loop.  Einstein edges closer to his general theory of relativity.  Vienna is home simultaneously to Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky and Freud.  It is also the home of Archduke Franz Ferdinand who death a year later would pit the newly modernized armies of Europe into a new kind of mechanized warfare.

In Ireland in 1913, the many strands of Irishness – Catholic and Protestant, Gaelic and Ascendency, nationalist and unionists, home rulers and republicans, British-Irish and Irish-Irish are all held in balance, the future yet to be defined.  Expectations are high and arguments heated when the House of Commons passes the Home Rule Bill. 

T.S. Eliot is at Harvard studying philosophy and Sanskrit.  Yeats is working on his collection, Responsibilities.  As its title suggests, Yeats is beginning to explore the harsh even grubby life around him, lamenting that Romantic Ireland is dead and gone.  Three years later, he would be shocked into a new appraisal of his “motley” surroundings by the Easter Rising and the men and women who “utterly transformed” Ireland through insurrection.

One hundred years later, we are still living with the shock of the new.  Contemporary life is a continuation, even an acceleration of the shock of the new.  Writers and artists are challenged to absorb, adapt and make sense of a world shaped and reshaped by the inventions of the digital age and the internet.

Texts, Tumblr, Twitter; Facebook, Yahoo Google; Wikipedia and Wikileaks;  iphones, ipads and  itunes; drones and remote control warfare;  twenty-four hour news; new mass media, new mass surveillance, new mass transports; genetics and what it tells us of our past and future; globalization and its discontents: writers and poets have been handed enormous new tools but also an enormously complicated and fast-changing world. 

If the shock of the new is over a hundred years old, then what is new is what is now for us traditional.  It is what we expect, the recurrence of pattern, the pattern of change itself.  We expect the new just as in the pre-modern age they expected the same, season by season, year by year.

But this we have in common with all ages since the invention of language: we still rely on our writers and poets to make sense of our world. I commend your discussions and your search for what Yeats and Eliot, and all they have influenced, have to tell us.

Thank you.

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August 6, 2013 · 12:26 pm

Century Ireland and the Recovery of Complexity

Ambassador’s Message – Century Ireland 1913-1923

10 May 2013

As you will have seen from previous messages recently concerning the Irish Korean War Memorial and veterans’ revisit, the overarching theme was the recovery of hitherto lost or ignored strands of Ireland’s national narrative, in this instance the tradition of Irish service in the British Army and the armies of other nations. 

This is part of a process: this week, for example, a Bill was passed by Dáil Éireann (the Irish parliament) pardoning soldiers in the Irish Army who deserted to enlist with the Allied armies and fight in World War II.  As the Minister for Defence, Alan Shatter T.D., said, “It is estimated that over 60,000 citizens of the then Free State and in the region of 100,000 who resided on this Island fought against Nazi tyranny during the Second World War. For too long in this State we failed to acknowledge their courage and their sacrifice….”

Up to the Easter Rebellion in 1916, that narrative was a very complicated one.  It embraced many versions of Irish identity spanning the range from unionism and its identification with Britain, the British monarchy and the Empire to militant republicanism devoted to using armed force to gain Irish independence and establish a uniquely Irish state.  In between, individuals and organisations grappled with where they stood on the national question.  The main nationalist party, the Irish Parliamentary Party under John Redmond, supported Home Rule as did most nationalist opinion. The Rebellion led to the eclipse of Redmond and his Party and the emergence of Sinn Féin.

You can catch a flavour of these times, their complications and the stories making the headlines in May 1913, in a great new project called “Century Ireland”.  It is a collaborative effort by Boston College, RTÉ and a host of partners, including many of Ireland’s cultural institutes.  You can find Century Ireland here: http://www.rte.ie/centuryireland

The website is wonderful: visual, informative and fascinating.  Stories include haunting cases of infanticide, the struggles of the suffragettes, and the passage of the Home Rule Bill. 

One story reports on the announcement of a new telephone cable to be laid under the Irish Sea “to give Dublin a direct connection with the English telephone system for the first time.”  The report goes on “Up to now, anyone in Dublin who wishes to talk on the phone to someone in London, has to have the call passed through a series of connections from Dublin to Belfast, from there under the Irish Sea to either Glasgow or Carlisle, and then down through the length of Britain to London.”  Times have certainly changed.

The portal was inspired by the decade of centenaries of formative Irish historical events that we celebrate and commemorate between now and 2023.

As to why the Easter Rebellion replaced complexity with simplicity, that is a long story.  In summing it up, Yeats brought all of his powers to bear on the event.  “Easter 1916” is one of his finest works, visual and lapidary, penetrating and awestruck; “all changed, changed utterly: a terrible beauty is born.”

Have a great weekend,

Eamonn

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August 6, 2013 · 9:18 am

Irish Dimension to the Korean War

2013 marks a number of anniversaries; 80 years since the Columban Order arrived in Korea, 60 years since the Armistice that brought the Korean War to an end and 30 years of diplomatic relations between Ireland and Korea.  We marked this with a Photo Exhibition at the Korea Foundation called History and Vitality, Stories of Ireland and Korea which tried to capture visually past and present relations.  The history of our relations is primarily that of people, whether in the service of Empire, faith, nation, business or war.  One project that became immensely rewarding and one of the highlights of my posting to Korea was the recovery and commemoration of the Irish contribution to the Korean War. The following short account sets out the role, largely unknown, played centrally by the Royal Ulster Rifles, a key unit of UN Command, with special thanks to writer and historian Andrew Salmon for his major contribution to this project.

Ambassador’s Message – The Fighting Irish of the Korean War

22 March 2013

Yesterday evening I attended Andrew Salmon’s lecture on the “The Fighting Irish of the Korean War” at the Korea Foundation.  The term “lecture” does not do it justice.  His delivery, engagement with the audience, his knowledge of the people and engagements, his use of audio-visual materials and personal engagement with the characters involved made it an immersive and compelling experience.  The scheduled hour turned into two as Q and A turned into a collective discussion.  It was really history as theatre and I, like the rest of the audience, left with a vivid account of experience of the 1st Battalion Royal Ulster Rifles (RUR) and 8th Kings Royal Irish Hussars in the Korean War. 

The RUR were the spearhead battalion of the British 29th Brigade, Britain’s strategic reserve which was committed to the Korean campaign.  Composed 50/50 of Catholics and Protestant, its soldiers were tough and experienced fighters, proud and quick with their fists.  Many, both enlisted and officers, were veterans of WWII.  The RUR lost most men in the ironically named Battle of Happy Valley in January 1951 when they were pulling back along a frozen river after resisting a Chinese “human wave” attack on their position north of Seoul.  Inadvertently illuminated by flares from a passing UN aircraft, they were raked with gun fire from the hills and charged by the bayonet wielding Chinese.  Hand-to-hand fighting ensued, extremely rare in modern battle as Andrew noted.  The ten tanks of the Irish Hussars were immobilised by stick bombs, their engines petering out as the morning broke when their fuel ran out.   Seoul would fall for a second time.

The following April, the RUR found themselves in a central salient along the UN line which was dug in at the Imjin River, again just north of Seoul, with the main body of US forces to their right.  The Chinese Army seemed to have melted away and routine patrols could not find them.  In fact, Chinese genius with camouflage concealed the fact that some 300,000 troops were massed for an assault.  The attack, launched on 22nd April, was designed to overwhelm the UN forces, surround and destroy the main US force, and take Seoul for a third and final time.  Stretched supply lines and limited motorised transport meant the Chinese 63rd and 64th Armies had about six days to do this. 

The Chinese attack when it came was a complete surprise to UN forces and the RUR found themselves in a vicious fight, along with the 5th Northumberland Fusiliers, the Gloucestershire Regiment (the Glosters) and a Belgium battalion, all bearing the weight of the main Chinese thrust South.  As the 29th pulled back in a fighting retreat on 25th April to a blocking position which they then held, the Glosters were isolated on a hill top and annihilated by wave after wave of Chinese troops (some 622 of 650 were lost, either dead, wounded or missing; 34 would die in captivity). 

The stout resistance of the 29th Brigade, along with the Belgium troops, allowed the main US force to extricate itself and move south, avoiding the pincher movement that would have sealed victory for the Chinese and disaster for the UN forces.  US General Ridgeway, as UN Commander, responded with all the enormous firepower at this disposal, including naval artillery, inflicting serious losses on the 63rd Chinese Army (perhaps 10,000 or one third of its fighting force) which, its supplies exhausted, was stopped five miles short of Seoul. 

The UN had withstood the largest massed attacked by a communist army since the Soviet capture of Berlin in 1945.  It was the last decisive action of the Korean War.  Though the War would drag on in often heavy skirmishing along the 38th parallel until 1953, Seoul and the Republic of Korea were saved at the battle of Imjin River.  If the Chinese had failed in their objective of seizing Seoul and dealing a crippling blow to US prestige, Andrew noted, they had nonetheless taken the field against the US, driven the UN forces from North Korea, preserved the DPRK and announced their arrival as a major world power.

British military causalities in the Korean War exceeded those later suffered in the Falklands, Iraq and Afghanistan combined.  That said, as Andrew pointed out, for every non-US soldier fallen, the US lost 30 soldiers in the Korean War (many Irish American, as the names in the UN Cemetery in Busan attest). 

Andrew is an expert on the British Army’s role in the Korean War about which he has written two books; To the Last Round, The Epic British Stand on the Imjin River, Korea 1951 and Scorched Earth, Black Snow, Britain and Australia in the Korean War, 1950.  Though he has interviewed many Irish veterans and clearly loves the men, ethos and memory of the RUR and Irish Hussars, he eschews the notion that he is an expert on Irish involvement.  Still, I am deeply grateful for all that he has done to shed some light on this little known dimension of Irish Korean relations.  You can check out his website here http://tothelastround.wordpress.com/

Today, the RUR lives on as the Royal Irish Regiment.

(Please note that any inaccuracies in the above account are solely mine and not Andrew’s!)

Best wishes,

 

Eamonn

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August 6, 2013 · 8:18 am

Special Winter Olympics, Korea

Sometimes the word ‘inspiring’ is over-used or misapplied but there is no more apt description of the participants and their supporters at this very special event.

Ambassador’s Message – Irish Team at the Special Olympics World Winter Games Pyongchang, South Korea

1 February 2013

 It was my pleasure and honour to attend the Host Town dinner at Seoul Women’s University for the Irish Special Olympics Team on Monday evening.  If you follow us on twitter (@IrishEmbKorea) you would have seen a photo or two.  Seoul Women’s University hosted Ireland, Jamaica and the Isle of Man, an alphabetical grouping that coincidentally grouped three teams about the same size in number and all from islands.  The University had a buddy system so that every member of the three teams was accompanied by one student who was fluent in English.  Activities included excursions, games and explorations of Korean food and culture. 

You could tell from the atmosphere at the dinner and the video diary of the orientation that all the participants had had a great time.  As our guests at the dinner the Embassy invited Father O’Neill from Gwanju who has spent 54 years in Korea doing wonderful work for those with special needs and Sister Ger Ryan who has been engaged in the same kind of amazing work in Mokpo for almost as long.  We also invited Conor O’Reilly, President of the Irish Association of Korea, and Thomas Gaughan, head of the Seoul Gaels, both of whom are leading their organisations with great energy and commitment.  The evening was a wonderful start for our athletes.  I want to thank President Rhee Kwang-ja for the generous hospitality of her University and all the ‘buddies’ who introduced our team to the Korea and generally settled them in with such kindness.

Tuesday morning the teams were bussed to Pyongchang for the opening ceremony and the start of the games.  I headed to the airport to pick up the Special Olympics delegation of CEO Matt English, Frances Kavanagh, Pat Kickham and famed sports photographer Ray McManus.  We arrived, thanks to the amazing infrastructure linking Seoul to Gangwon near the east coast, in good time to register and attend the opening ceremony.  Some 111 teams proudly carried their flags in the parade. 

President Lee officially opened the games, following welcoming speeches by the Special Olympic global messengers, Burmese democracy advocate An San Suu Kyi, world champion skater Kim Yu-na, and Special Olympics Chairman and CEO, Timothy Shriver.  As usual, our Korean hosts outdid themselves with not only with the preparations but also with the programme of videos and live entertainment that made up the Ceremony’s programme.

Wednesday morning the games proper started with the Irish floor ball team winning their games to be placed in division two and later that day beating their hosts South Korea 11-1 (also see @IrishEmbKorea).  Participating for the first time in this demonstration sport, the team went on to take Bronze: they are certainly capable of much more at future games, having been pipped at the post by one point against Austria for a place in the final. 

You can’t help yourself taking pride in such performances but its important to recall that the goal is participation.  The motto of the Games is “Let me win, but if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt.”  Overcoming all the challenges they face, the participants take joy in the hours of participation and the moments of victory, whether that victory is a medal or the achievement of completion.  It is a lesson to us all to appreciate what we have and the simple pleasures of each day.

The team, coaches, Special Olympic officials and family members are delighted that local Irish supporters are making the effort to come and support them; Deputy Head of Mission Ruth Parkin and family with lead a bus load there for the Alpine skiing this Saturday.  For regular news and updates on the Irish Team’s activities at the Special Winter Olympics go to  www.specialolympics.ie/WHATWEDO/EVENTSANDGAMES/2013WORLDWINTERGAMES.aspx .

Matt English, his team and all their army of volunteer supporters in Ireland do amazing work for those with special needs (for more information go www.specialolympics.ie/GETINVOLVED.aspx ).    Eircom has been a stalwart sponsor and, like all sponsors, it is determined to continue its support.  I know this is really appreciated by Matt and his team, particularly in these tough economic times.

So best of luck to the participants in the competitions ahead: I am sure they, their family members, supporters and Special Olympics Ireland will leave with wonderful memories.

Have a great weekend,

Best wishes,

Eamonn

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August 5, 2013 · 9:27 am

Explaining the Euro Crisis

Combining candid appraisals and assurances about Ireland’s recovery has been an predominant occupation for all my colleagues serving abroad since 2008.  For Korea, recent Irish experience resonates given their own ‘IMF crisis’ in 1997.  For a Korean audience though, even an informed one, the EU is something of a puzzle – its rationale and its functioning.  Add in an extra-dimension like the Eurozone and it can get very complicated indeed.  This speech attempted a compressed explanation of the European project, its roots in Western European geopolitics and the role of the Euro, with some insights into the impact of the crisis on Ireland; and finally what all this means for Asia.

The Euro Crisis: the EU, Ireland and Asia

 Sogang National University

Korea Society of Contemporary European Studies

 8 June 2012

I am delighted to be here today at Sogang University.  I want to thank my host Professor. Dr. Hae Jo Chung, President of the Korean Society of Contemporary European Studies for the honor of addressing you.  I wish to commend the Society here for the wonderful work they do in promoting awareness of Europe, and its rich academic and cultural life.

The European Union is a vastly ambitious European project.  The project was born of catastrophic conflict that left Europe devastated in1945.  A deep economic and political process of conflict resolution was called for if Europe was to escape from its recurrent pattern of violent and militaristic competition.

EU Origins

The European project emerged from a long and often tragic European history.  The European Community, now the European Union, was designed to deal with the implications of that history.  In dealing with that history, it has three objectives.

One is to specifically to avoid the history of European conflict repeating itself.  The second is to harness Europe to delivery for its people social and economic progress. The third is to act as a beacon of the rest of the world, promoting ideals in human rights, the rule of law, multilateral cooperation and development assistance.

In my remarks today, I wish to focus on Euro as the symbol of this ideal; the problems it has encountered as exemplified in the case of Ireland; and the likely route to recovery for Ireland, the European Union and of course for Asian economic prospects.

The European Project

For those with a view to the long hand of history, arguably the roots of the European project go back to the Treaty of Verdun, in 843 AD.  The three surviving sons of Louis the Pious, himself son of the founder of the European ideal, Charlemagne, divided the last incarnation of the Roman Empire between them. Charles the Bald becomes King of West Francia.  Louis the German becomes King of East Francia.  Lothair, becomes King of Middle Francia, also known as Lotharingia. West Francia become France.  East Francia becomes the Holy Roman Empire and one thousand years later, Germany.  Lotharingia is too disparate to survive and it becomes a plintered zone of local ambitions and conflict, eventually resolving into Holland, Switzerland and Northern Italy, with smaller parts splitting and adhering variously to France and German principalities.  The open planes of Belgium and north eastern France would become, in the classic description, the checkboard of history, including such famous engagements as Waterloo in 1815 and Verdun in 1916.

We have here the roots of the great dialectic between France and Germany that defines modern Western European history once Spanish power declines at the beginning of the modern age.  France centralizes early and becomes the dominant European power in the 18th and early 19th century.  The shock of Napoleon’s success propels Prussia under Count Bismarck to form modern Germany in 1871.  The competition between France and Germany for supremacy in Western Europe, the industrialization of military power, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires combined to produce the battlefield cataclysm of WWI and later the continental wide devastation of WWII.  Britain played the game to ensure no one great continental power emerged as a global rival, supporting Napoleon’s enemies just as it had Spain’s during its earlier rise, and later allying with France against the Kaiser.

After the catastrophe of WWII, European leaders knew they had to convert that dialectic from competition and war to cooperation and prosperity.  They achieved that by creating the European project, the outcome of which was to be a supra-national entity, part customs union, part common market, part political federation.  Between the Treaty of Rome in 1957 and the Lisbon Treaty of 2009, the EU took shape.  In the intervening decades, the European project brought not only peace but also unprecedented prosperity to its members.

Ireland shared in that success rapidly developing socially and economically.  Irish success was and is being driven by three factors: international Foreign Direct Investment; the attractions of doing business in Ireland; and access to the 500 million strong EU market.  From these ingredients, the Celtic Tiger of the 1990s was born.

Celtic Tiger

By the 1990s, the Irish economy had begun to accelerate, based on high inward investment, competitive exports and one of the top ranked business-friendly environments in the world.  In first half of the 1990s, GDP expanded by 6% per annum on average.  By 1995, it had reached double digits.  Unemployment plummeted from 16 per cent in1994 to 4 per cent in 2000 – essentially full employment for the first time in modern Irish history. Our workforce doubled to 2 million. Involuntary emigration, a fact of life for the previous 150 years, came to an end.  Our economic growth was driven by an educated workforce producing high value exports at competitive costs in a low tax business regime.  These economic fundamentals made the Celtic Tiger roar.

The Impact of the Euro

The Euro currency was created in 1999, the capstone of the European project and the most potent symbol of European unity.  Technically a monetary union, it was in essence a political commitment to the European ideal.  The impact of the Euro on Ireland was immediate and dramatic.  As a proportion of Gross National Product, private credit ballooned: in 1999 it was 110%; by 2004, 145% (€190bn); 2006, 200% (€305bn); 2008, 250% (€400bn).  Irish personal and mortgage debt doubled between 2004 and 2008.

Property Boom

The creation of the Euro facilitated the transfer of credit from within the core of the Euro zone (essentially France and Germany) to its “periphery”.  This was not only the natural outcome of classical economics whereby capital flows to higher marginal rates of return.  It was in a sense a privatization of the EU ideal of regional cohesion, the economic convergence of economic standards through the free movement of goods, capital and people.

The critical issue was whether the movement of capital represented prudent investment rather than a willfully blind and imprudent chase after higher margins of return.  The convenient and unexamined assumption that the Euro was governed by Eurozone joint-and-several liability meant that banks assumed zero risk in regard to their loans either to other banks or to other governments.  This assumption of zero risk would do great damage to the European banking sector.  Combined with financial deregulation, proprietorial and shadow banking, historically low interest rates and shareholder pressure, the Euro generated an unprecedented credit boom and expansion of banking exposure.

The Euro credit boom had a dramatic impact on property prices in Ireland.  They grew seven times faster than the consumer price index: This in a country where population density is one of the lowest in Western Europe and almost ten times less than in Korea.  As one commentator noted, “by 2007, Ireland was building half as many houses as Britain, which has 14 times its population.”  The building boom did not dampen house prices.  In 1994, the average house price was €74,000.  In 2007, it was €323,000.

Using cheap Euros pushed by aggressive lending practices on the part of banks in Ireland, France and Germany, the Irish started to buy Ireland from themselves, as one commentator pithily put it.  Average 2nd hand house price in Dublin went from 4 times to 17 times average industrial wage.  Bank loan books grew from 60% (1997) to 200% of GNP (2008).

Morgan Kelly, one of the few economists to warn of a crash, noted that “Irish banks were lending 40% more in real terms to property developers alone in 2008 than they had been lending to everyone in Ireland in 2000, and 75% more to house buyers”.  If up to the year 2000, Irish growth was export-led, thereafter cheap Euros, a flood of liquidity, property price inflation, a credit explosion, and a construction boom drove it.

Crash

We now know that neither financial markets nor the deregulated banking sector efficiently allocate capital resources.  Their purpose rather is to increase margins and profits.  They can be in fact intrinsically corrupt, as revealed by the well-documented use and abuse of collateralised debt obligations.  More to the point, in generating a credit/property boom in the US particularly, they created the inevitable crash in the financial and banking system, with global affects.

Impact on Ireland

The first question in 2008 was whether our banks faced a liquidity crisis or were insolvent.  Initially, the assumption was the former.  At any rate, a banking collapse in Ireland would have a contagious effect on their creditors, mainly banks in France and Germany that had funnelled cheap Euros to Ireland.  The Government decided in September 2008 to guarantee bank debts, converting private debt into public debt held by the Government on the basis that the problem was illiquidity.

However, the collapse in the property market – and with the value of assets held against liabilities – meant in effect that the banks were insolvent and needed recapitalisation.  A converse measure of the property boom is the fall is house prices; from the peak of 2006 to today by around 50%.  So far, Ireland has injected or committed €62bn into Irish banking, equivalent to about 40% of GDP

With the onset of the 2008 crisis, bond markets decided to disaggregate Eurozone risk.  Bond yields for Ireland, Greece and Portugal went over 7%, beyond national sustainability.  By 2010, Ireland could no longer afford the yields demanded in the sovereign bond market.  Ireland needed and received a four-year programme of support from the ECB, European Commission and IMF amounting to over €60bn.

Response

In response to this crisis, the Government took dramatic action: the establishment of the National Assets Management Agency to assume under-performing loans from the banking sector; a fundamental reform of the banking sector, reducing it to two pillars, both reduced to sizes appropriate to our GDP; reduction of between 15% and 20% in the public sector wage bill; reduction in public expenditure of €15bn; creation of an Irish Fiscal Advisory Council; aggressive action to achieve a deficit target of 3% of GDP by 2015.

Recovery

70% of the consolidation necessary to reduce the deficit to below 3% of GDP has already been implemented.  Reduction in the underlying deficit to 9.4% of GDP last year – a level well within the limit set under the terms of the EU/IMF Programme.  The Government is committed to reducing the deficit further – the deficit limit set for this year is 8.6% of GDP and the latest data shows we are on track to achieve this target.  Consolidation implemented this year amounts to €3.8 billion (circa. 2½% of GDP), with roughly 60% of this is on the expenditure side.

Stabilising the debt-to-GDP ratio is crucial: we estimate that the debt ratio will peak at 120% in 2013.  We have achieved six of the quarterly targets set by the EU/IMF Programme in a row since the Programme began in late 2010. The economy returned to growth last year. GDP increased by 0.7% in 2011 – the first year of growth since 2007, with the exporting sectors are leading the recovery.  Exports increased by 4.1% in 2011 and are now above pre-crisis levels.

The export-led recovery means the balance of payments remains in (a small) surplus. We won a record number of new inward investments in 2011.There has been a substantial improvement in relative labour costs. Our inflation rate remains low, just over 2%. In short, we are trading our way to recovery.  Domestic demand remains subdued; households are running down high debts accumulated during the boom and precautionary savings remain high in a very uncertain environment. The outlook is for a second successive year of positive growth. GDP growth of 0.7% is forecast for this year and jumping to 2.2% next year as domestic demand expands and a stabilized banking sector resumes credit.  Unemployment will stabilize at 14.3% this year and begin to fall thereafter.

Medium Term Prospects

Medium-term growth potential is strong, with a flexible, adaptable economy (e.g. wage reductions), pro-enterprise environment (e.g. ease of doing business amongst best in world), high levels of education, very favourable demographics (the highest fertility rate in the EU) and further structural reforms to boost growth potential.  Medium-term forecast is for GDP growth of 3% per annum.

We will achieve our deficit of 3% by 2015. We will retain our exceptionally low 12.5% tax on all trading profits. We have a strong RnD base, encouraged by a 25% tax rebate and strong intellectual property regime. We have grants/facilities assistance for new investors, with a highly education, low cost and flexible workforce.We are highly open, globalised and business friendly, featuring in the top ranks of global indicators.  Intel, Facebook, Google, Coca-cola, IBM, Microsoft, Pfizer, Boston Scientific, Merck all have operations in Ireland.

In Ireland we have inpharmaceuticals 8 out of top 10 global companies; in technology – 8 of top 10; software – we are the largest global exporter; services – half of top financial services companies; medical devices – 15 of top 25 companies.

Context is Key

Given Ireland’s export orientation and open highly globalised economy, the international economic and financial context is a key factor. The policy of austerity required in Ireland to get us back on track is now accepted policy in the Eurozone.  Stable public finances and restoration of the banking sector are essential conditions for sustainable economic growth. The Fiscal Compact, an agreement on national budgets by all signatories, will underpin Eurozone stability.  The Irish public gave their assent to its ratification last week.

Fiscal Compact

The Fiscal Compact is formally titled the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union. The aim of the Treaty is to ensure that euro stability and better governance and coordination. The  key elements of the Stability Treaty are: balanced budget rule in national law; 3% of GDP with 0.5% structural; national debt to 60% of GDP; any gap to be close by 1/20th per anum; stricter excessive deficit procedure for breaches of the revised Stability and Growth Pact; new elements of Eurozone governance, primarily mandated Eurozone Summits and a Eurozone President; and restricted access to the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) to those countries which have ratified the Treaty.

Impact of Austerity

All that accepted, the limitations on austerity are recognised.  Eurozone unemployment is at record levels at almost 11%, the highest it has been since the Euro’s creation.  This means some 17.4 million out of work: France – 9.3%;

Spain a whopping 24% or, if you are under 25, it is 50%; Greece – 21%; Italy and Poland – 10%. Even in Germany, unemployment rose to 2.88 million or 5.6%.

The fear is that you may have a cascade effect within the EU; unemployment suppressing growth, jeopardising private credit and mortgage viability with know-on effects on property values and banking, leading to restricted credit, further crimping of growth and more unemployment.

The global trading environment currently operates in a context of uncertainty, faltering demand and sluggish growth.  This will hamper the EU’s recovery and have a knock-on effect on the economic performance of both the US and Asia. The equation is simple; growth in excess of interest rates reduces the debt burden. Growth depends on demand that in turn depends on confidence.

So the emerging consensus in Europe is that while we need to get our fiscal books in order, we need too a strategy to promote growth, or what is termed a “growth compact”.    It needs to be targeted at what is likely to drive growth – a focus on education, research and development, the commercialisation of innovation, labour market supply, key infrastructural needs (including green growth) and adaptability and competitiveness.

Key Issue

As you are aware, the key issue facing the Eurozone today is confidence in the banking sector.  The focus has moved from Greece to Spain.  The underlying issue in Spain is the same that affected Ireland: namely bank lending practices, fuelled by the Euro, that now jeopardise bank solvency.   We in Ireland are painfully aware that there are limits to the capacity of the State to recapitalise systemic banks.  How can the Eurozone agree a solution to this problem; how, in other words, to create instruments to stabilize banks that do not jeopardize State solvency.  We have arrived at the nub of the issue.

Where to from here?

The question is where to from here for the Eurozone?  A number of features have been suggested as vital.  Continued ECB liquidity; the injection of €1trillion between December and January/February had an immediate effect in stabilizing both banks and sovereign bond markets.  That needs to be continued, including for short-term liquidity. Continued low interest rates; Eurozone inflation is 2.8%, lower than the EU at 3%.  The ECB has just announced that it will stick with 1%, with a future cut possible.  Some form of joint approach to the debt/banking issue: it will not be US-style fiscal federation but I suspect a little will go a long way in resurrecting confidence in the Euro as a shared currency that is here to stay.  A shared currency means also fiscal consolidation – the Fiscal Compact is a start in the long process of the Eurozone members converging toward fiscal probity.

What does this mean for Asia?

The EU has been good for Asia.  Last year the EU exported €330bn work of goods and services to Asia.  It imported €532bn worth from Asia.  The Asian share of EU imports is today almost 32%.  The Asian share of EU exports is almost 22%.  The EU has been good for Korea too.  The EU now ranks as Korea’s third most important trading partner, after China and Japan and ahead of the US.

The EU is Korea’s fourth most important import partner and its second most important export partner, after China. This is not just a strong trading relationship for Asia and Korea.  It is a now a vital economic one.  Indeed, we can see movements in the KOSPI directly affected by assessments about the Euro crisis and its resolution. The Korea-EU FTA has greatly strengthened that relationship.  There has been a high high utilization rate with 66% of Korean exporters 48% of EU exporters availing of the FTA provisions.  Businesses have been prompt on both sides to seize the market opportunities created by the FTA, which is very positive.

The FTA ensures that our trading relationship will continue to prosper over time.  Already we have seen it positively affect the overall EU export performance here and significantly improve the export performance of several Korean sectors. The recovery of the EU as an economy, therefore, is critically important to the prospects for growth in Asia and in Korea.

Conclusion

Since the C9th, the relationship between France and Germany has determined European destiny.  This has proven to be catastrophic when pursued solely as a contest between competing national interests.  When pursued cooperative as in the European project, it has been enormously beneficial.

The European project has been extraordinarily successful.  Under it, across a wide spectrum of issues, French and German leaders found an extraordinary degree of policy convergence – on market integration, common standards, institutional develoopment, law, the Common Agricultural Policy, Cohesion Funds and monetary union. Because of the European project, since WWII Europe has enjoyed peace, stability, prosperity, integration, regional cohesion, food security, internal capital and labour mobility, and enhanced status internationally.

The Euro itself was and remains the key manifestation of the European project and the European ideal.  As a shared currency, it has hugely facilitated the free movement of people, goods and capital that lies at the heart of the European project.  It yielded an unprecedented period in European prosperity.  And it quickly became a major global currency, heavily invested in by both private and public capital.  Whatever stresses and strains it may suffer, it is underpinned by the commitment of all EU members to ensure that it survives and prospers, that the current Euro crisis is a transitionary phase that will be superseded by enhanced coherence, mutual support and improved governance within the Eurozone. The Euro and the European ideal are as inseparable as the joint and several recoveries of the EU economies.

Thank you.

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