Mission abandoned

The rich and powerful who had gathered for a weekend to find ways of repairing the crashed economy calculated that the 70m members of the Irish diaspora scattered around the world provided a lucrative market waiting to be tapped into.

They were wrong. Since its launch in 2011, only 3,000 certificates have been sold, at a price of €40 each, or €120 if framed. Americans and Canadians bought the most: 1,615 and 319 respectively. In each of 19 other countries, including Italy, Austria, Belgium, India and Switzerland, just one certificate was purchased. France took five.

This was not the only initiative arising from the 2009 forum to bite the dust. Another was the creation of the role of a cultural ambassador. With much fanfare, the government announced the appointment in March 2010 of Gabriel Byrne, a movie star from Dublin, for the inaugural three-year term. He quit 19 months later, and has not been replaced.

A more short-lived proposal was a government-backed “recovery bond” aimed at the diaspora, and inspired by a scheme successfully run by Israel for its diaspora. The idea was quietly shelved after the National Treasury Management Agency advised the government that it raised “complex legal and regulatory issues, including compliance with money-laundering provisions”.

Probably the most widely reported proposal was the foundation of an international centre for Irish performing arts and culture, to be housed “in a landmark building”. The brainchild of the businessman Dermot Desmond, it was initially described in media reports as Ireland’s School of Fame, but when it materialised it was in the form of a website allowing applicants to “design your own degree course” at existing third-level colleges.

Uversity is based at IFSC House on Dublin’s Custom House Quay, the same address as other Desmond ventures.

The inaugural forum in 2009, hosted by then foreign affairs minister Micheál Michael, had its critics. Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary called it “a three-day photo shoot, listening to the great and the good”. He added: “I’d happily go along for four hours on a Tuesday in Government Buildings, with no press, no photo calls, and come up with a list of decisions, and then let’s implement them. The problem with this government is that it’s always one forum, one high-level commission, and one photo shoot away from making a decision.”

The Farmleigh weekend was estimated to have cost the public purse between €200,000 and €300,000. Although the 200 invited delegates paid their own transport costs, they were generously entertained, with a reception hosted by the president at Aras an Uachtarain, his official residence, plus a banquet in Dublin Castle, and lunch at Croke Park followed by prime seats at the All-Ireland football final.

Now a biennial fixture, with the next forum planned for November, the question raised by the scrapping of the heritage cerificate scheme is whether it is worth running. Do these forums make a valuable contribution to Ireland and its economy? Or are they just self- regarding, elitist talking shops?

Peter Casey, the owner of Claddagh Resources recruitment company and an investor on RTE’s Dragons’ Den, believes that guests at the forum should not only pay their own accommodation expenses, but should also be charged for attending the event.

“I’d pay €10,000 to attend,” he said. “You’ve 300 people given the golden keys to the republic for the weekend and put up at the state’s expense in sumptuous surroundings. In other walks of business, I’d expect to pay dearly for that. It’s a great opportunity to collaborate with successful business people. It’s like Davos. The organisation has made a fortune out of its meetings and lots of humanitarian ideas come out of it.”

Casey attended the last forum, held at Dublin Castle in 2013, and has been invited to the next one, which will take as its theme a Vision for a New Ireland. The businessman thinks more work needs to be done on the guest list.

“I was sitting next to Michael Noonan [finance minister] at the dinner [in 2013] and I was telling him about Pallonji Mistry [an Irish-Indian construction tycoon] and his two sons,” Casey said. “Their company [the Tata Group], which owns Jaguar and British Steel, is 66% owned by a philanthropic trust, so 66% of the money it makes goes to philanthropy. Michael said the taoiseach needs to hear this and he brought me over to Enda Kenny. I said, ‘Why aren’t the three richest men alive here?’ And he said, ‘Denis is here.’ I told him about the Mistrys and the taoiseach said: ‘If you can get the chief executive of Tata here, I’ll meet him.’

“We had the meeting in the Shelbourne Hotel in November. We had the heads of most of the universities there and Ged Nash [the junior jobs minister]. Tata is now looking at collaborating with Irish universities. That wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been able to get Enda’s ear at the forum.”

Among the 167 men and 29 women invited to the first forum were Gerry Robinson, a former chairman of Granada television; Valerie Quinn, the managing director of Coca-Cola Ireland; Liam O’Mahony, the CRH chairman; Denis O’Brien, the Digicel chairman; Martin Naughton, the Glen Dimplex chairman; James Morris, the Irish Film Board chairman; Bob Geldof, the Live Aid organiser; and the film director Neil Jordan.

One of the most fruitful proposals was for a Come Home tourism initiative. This became the Gathering of 2013, a year-long promotion featuring 5,000 events. A report published by the organisers after the Gathering said it had attracted between 250,000 and 275,000 overseas visitors and raised €170m.

Other recommendations, though, have not been realised, including a strategy to teach Asian languages in secondary schools and the establishment of a solidarity fund for the diaspora to fund green-tech firms in Ireland.

Another proposal made at Farmleigh, the year before the troika bailout, was for a single water authority. Yet another was to increase the number of Ireland’s embassies abroad.

Instead, in November 2011, the government announced that it was closing embassies in the Vatican and Iran and a representative office in Timor-Leste.

“With the kind of people who are participating in the forum, you might have expected a greater outcome,” said Timmy Dooley, Fianna Fail’s transport spokesman. “Some of these people are exceedingly wealthy. I would have thought we’d have seen something more enterprising from these guys who have such access to capital markets and finance for their own companies.

“The language coming from it was how the arts could be of immense benefit to the image of the country. The people who were saying it, you’d expect, might be able to buy very expensive paintings, but that doesn’t make them experts in the arts.”

Six years ago, with the reputation of Ireland’s banking and property sectors damaged by the economic crash, “monetising the arts” emerged as a catch-cry of the forum.

Apart from Uversity, one of the few tangible results is the construction of a $60m (€52.7m) Irish Arts Center in New York, to replace an existing one.

In December 2009, the government allocated €2.3m to the project but most of the money is coming from American government bodies and private benefactors. New York city is giving $34m. Last month, the Derry-born actress Roma Downey, best known as the star of Touched by an Angel, announced that she was donating $1m to the project.

Two years ago, the erstwhile cultural ambassador Byrne condemned the Gathering as “a scam to shake down the diaspora for money”. Last year, he said that the government was “paying lip-service to the arts”.

Some fellow artists agree. “It sounds like there’s been a lot of high-minded posturing at the forum but there’s been no follow through,” said Jane Brennan, an award-winning actress. “Twenty-four independent theatre companies have lost their funding and all the major theatre companies have been cut, not just to the bone but into the bone. Our national cultural institutions have all been facing crises as well.”

Fiach MacConghail, director of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, said: “The only thing that was unscathed when the economy collapsed was the reputation of the arts. I wasn’t at the Farmleigh forum, but there was a sense of a lot of people jumping on the arts as a way of saving the country. But then the first thing the government did was to slash funding to the arts. It was a moment of irony.

“In fairness to people like Dermot Desmond, they intuitively understood a way around our problems was to make something of the arts, while the state side weren’t as convinced.”

MacConghail, a taoiseach’s nominee to the Seanad, continued: “We had turned our back on America during the good times. Speaking to the Abbey supporters and donors, I felt that the idea of engaging with the diaspora in a more profound way was new. Our attitude to the diaspora had been verging on the obnoxious. I think we’ve become more honest.

“When we meet philanthropists in America, they say, ‘What is Ireland doing to support the arts?’ The message is that they will help us, but we have to help ourselves too. There was a feeling the diaspora was hurt that we were taking them for granted.”

Gavin Duffy, another investor on RTE’s Dragons’ Den, is a supporter of the forum. “I think it’s an investment in trying to attract key people to assist and promote Ireland,” he said. “It’s part of the hospitality that they are invited as guests, but we get value out of them. The cultural aspect is important. Look at Davos: when Bono or Geldof turn up, that turns the heads of the business community as well.

“What has happened with the [heritage] certificates reminds us that we’ve a fantastic welcome for ourselves but not that many people love us. Yet the Irish are everywhere. On 9/11, 1,000 of the nearly 3,000 people who died had said on their previous census forms that their ethnic origin was Irish. Very few countries can boast that.”

This year’s forum will be the biggest to date. Charlie Flanagan, the foreign affairs minister, has sent invitations to 400 people for the three-day event starting on November 19. It will concentrate on formulating a new strategy for Dublin’s International Financial Services Centre, and national policies for entrepreneurship and the food and tourism markets.

With the economy now expected to grow as fast as it did before the 2008 crash, has the forum served its purpose? Or will it, in O’Leary’s parlance, be just a great photo opportunity for the government on the eve of a general election?

“I commend the government for doing it,” said Casey. “I think it’s a phenomenal idea that we do this. But I think that, six months after it’s over, the government should ring everyone who was there and ask, ‘What have you done for Ireland since?’”

Or as Tom Cruise said in the movie Jerry Maguire: “Show me the money.”