Is lack of meaningful indigenous job creation Ireland’s real problem?

Sophrosyne said:

While we do have some very successful large Irish businesses, we do not have enough of them

I really believe that supporting Irish businesses to grow must be a priority for political party. I think it is the only way to sustainable prosperity.
Were that the case, there would be no need for talk about “the ordinary people of Ireland, the coping classes, the squeezed middle, etc”.

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The current government is anti-business. It taxes the self employers and company directors higher than employees. That’s only part of the problem though, the left wing media create and perpetuate the image of employers as exploitative and greedy. They are seen as parasites living off the “workers”. The fact that RTE and TV3 use the term “worker” at all when describing employees of private and public bodies and companies shows just how engrained the 1920’s socialist rhetoric is within this state.
We are a nation of begrudgers; we resent the success of others. We assume that those who are richer or more successful than us are corrupt or morally less virtuous than us. We assume that employers will place material gain above doing what is right. Employers are seen as selfish and greedy, not as people providing an economic and social good.

Sophrosyne said:

I also have a problem with Irish super-rich, who cannot be bothered to live and pay taxes here, expostulating about the Irish economy.

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Agreed.

Purple,

We can look at cold statistics, such as; the majority of new Irish enterprises do not survive beyond 5 years.

We only have to look to the sheer number of our successful authors to prove that as a people, we are certainly not lacking in imagination or creativity.

Why does this not translate into other business and why do our businesses not grow?

Perhaps it is down to successive governmental policies, perhaps it is the media, or perhaps it is something else.

However, it is only when people tell their story, as Newtothis very generously did, and other posters who gave their views, that we can understand what exactly is going wrong and try to figure a solution.

Sophrosyne said:

Purple,

We can look at cold statistics, such as; the majority of new Irish enterprises do not survive beyond 5 years.

We only have to look to the sheer number of our successful authors to prove that as a people, we are certainly not lacking in imagination or creativity.

Why does this not translate into other business and why do our businesses not grow?

Perhaps it is down to successive governmental policies, perhaps it is the media, or perhaps it is something else.

However, it is only when people tell their story, as Newtothis very generously did, and other posters who gave their views, that we can understand what exactly is going wrong and try to figure a solution.

Click to expand...

Just coming back to this thread after a couple of hectic weeks of actually running the business...

It would be interesting to see the failure rate of Irish businesses against those in other countries: I suspect it's not that different.

Yes, we're certainly a creative bunch. This shows up in business in media and entertainment, but also in a lot of tech areas (which are essentially creative, in the sense of building things that didn't exist before, instead of manufacturing a new flavour of what came before).

Why don't the businesses grow? I suspect it's largely down to lack of ambition, and the goals people have. You can see it here in the questions people tend to ask. It's mainly around how to extract money from a business, how to minimise tax etc. Nothing wrong with that, but from what I've observed, accountants spend way more time on these issues, rather than advising on how to invest and grow.

I don't see the government as a brake on growth, apart from the mad stuff like rates (a tax on being in business rather than on profits). Quite the opposite: compared to other countries there are far more supports available, particularly in the manufacturing and exportable services sectors.

An obsession with property certainly doesn't help. The growth of the mid- to late 90s was genuine and export led. Then the madness set in, fuelled by cheap money and insane government policies at the time of adding fuel to a property fire.